The album that epitomises magic and loss for me is ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (2001) by Sparklehorse. It magically conjures up images of apples, horses and golden sunshine that exist alongside a wistful probing into the ephemerality of life. Apples and horse also hold that twofold meaning for me. I associate apples with my paternal grandmother as she had so many apple trees in her garden and spent autumns trying to take care of their bounty, climbing up rickety ladders into her old age. Despite being a carpenter by trade, my Dad’s true passion was horses. He passed away during apple season. In ‘Ivan’s Chidhood’ by Tarkovsky there is a scene I always remember of horses eating apples on a beach. Somehow that image has imprinted itself on my mind more so than the plot of the film itself. Perhaps it also inspired Mark Linkous to write some of those songs. My painting is called ‘Apple Bed’, named after one
of the track titles. These apples didn’t slide off a truck onto a beach to be eaten by horses, but were placed at a roadside by local hunters to lure moose and deer. There is something slightly random about walking along a small byroad in the woods and
coming across heaps of apples, a small scene within a larger landscape.