MALLARME’S APPLES
My home near Fontainebleau in France is close to the Stephane Mallarme museum, the one-time country home of the famous French Symbolist poet, close friend of Manet and Morisot and many of the other impressionist painters as well as important literary figures of his day. The museum has restored and retained a traditional nineteenth century garden, complete with a variety of old apple trees that bear the sort of apples that Stephane Mallarme would have encountered in his garden in his time. These include old fashioned varieties such as the Belle de Boskoop, Calville Blanc, Queen of Pippin, Reneitte Blanche du Canada, and Canada Piglet or the Transparente Blanche
In autumn my husband visited the museum and was encouraged by the museum staff to pick up some of the windfall apples – they had more than they knew what to do with. He arrived home with a bulging backpack and tumbled the apples onto the kitchen table. I was enraptured by them, struck by seeing apples that encompassed such variety. Some were regular and some irregular, some perfect and some blemished, some small and some large. The range of colours and markings was fabulous, too. These apples were so different to today’s supermarket version of an apple – standardized into sameness.
I started to paint the apples – all ninety of them! By the time I got to the last dozen or so they were already becoming shriveled and some of them browning, but I continued with the project of faithfully depicting, life-size, this collection of apples in all their perfections and imperfections. They came to represent for me a changing philosophy of food. Whereas once apples could be found and consumed with an enormous variety of shape, colour, size and difference, our contemporary world has standardized the fruit market so that the apples that arrive on the shelves are almost clones of one another, the natural assault of weather conditions and blemishes minimized and sanitized.
This piece of work represents a lost world, one that in some ways was infinitely richer in experience and more human than our own. Nature was not quite as tamed and subdued. The piece is a requiem for that past world, and a prod to rethink our attitudes towards food. It addresses the general closing down of biodiversity in the natural world and the lack of biological diversity in the foods we eat.
The paintings are in watercolor, the paint deliberately liquid and lush, so that each apple elicits a magical little world of formation and creation. They are little apple poems, a tribute to Stephane Mallarme’s world and the manner in which he captured its natural marvel in his own Symbolist poetry.
They are small reminders of the enchanted world of nature.
