3/6/2023 0 Comments Pink pearl appleIn his gallery, Mullan, who is wearing pearl earrings, gestures to a photograph of the Pink Pearl, which, with its translucent white skin and shell-pink interior, is almost painfully beautiful. After moving to Southern California, Mullan entered a period of what he dryly calls “apple famine.” Only when a nearby store started carrying Pink Pearl apples from Oregon was Mullan’s obsession rekindled. When health issues forced Mullan to change his diet, he satisfied his sweet tooth on apples, using the internet to research different varieties. Deep red, almost black, the Black Oxford hails from Maine. But many of the apples he’s photographed were born in North America, including such romantic cultivars as the Black Oxford and Hidden Rose. Its spicy, persimmon-like flavor “just blew my mind,” he says. Mullan was born in the United States, but grew up in the United Kingdom, where a teenage encounter with an Egremont Russet led to his love of apples. Mullan gazes at the interior of a red-fleshed apple. Growers have abandoned many delicious or beautiful varieties that have delicate skin, lower-yield trees, or greater susceptibility to disease. “It’s a shame because they’re really cute, they’re really delicious.” Due to the demands of industrial farming, only a handful of apple varieties make it to stores, and even of those, only the most uniform specimens sit on the shelves. Courtesy of William Mullanīut he quickly sobers. The glorious api etoile is named for its resemblance to a star. “You’re really lucky if you catch it,” he says with a laugh. He notes that the api etoile, an apple of Swiss or French origin that grows into a rounded star shape, is hard to find, with the trees he’s seen bearing fruit little and lately. Mullan, whose day job is as a brand manager for Raaka Chocolate, can rhapsodize about apples at length. The Knobbed Russet has a rough exterior, with creamy insides. The entire lineup consists of apples assembled by Mullan, who, by publishing his fruit photographs in a book and on Instagram, is putting the glorious diversity of apples in the limelight. Another, the small Roberts Crab, when sliced by Mullan through the middle to show its vermillion flesh, looks less like an apple than a Bing cherry. Despite their brown, wrinkly folds, they’re ripe, with clean white interiors. A handful of Knobbed Russets slumping on the table resemble rotting masses. An employee of a fruit-delivery company, who covetously eyes the round table on which Mullan has artfully arranged apples, asks where to buy his artwork.īut these aren’t your Granny Smith’s apples. Inside a bright Brooklyn gallery that is plastered in photographs of apples, William Mullan is being besieged with questions.Ī writer is researching apples for his novel set in post-World War II New York.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |