Works of art

On citrus peels as the artist's muse told in the form of prose poetry

Hello! I’m Apoorva Sripathi, a writer, editor, and artist. If you think my work is valuable and would like to support me, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram, share this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.

Still life with oranges by Paul Gaugin

I love the way my nails look but they are also my undoing. I approach an orange with the gentlest of intentions – to peel it in one long endless strip with no ruptures to the fruit but I fail immediately at this task. My claws have breached the perimeter of the flesh and now possess within them the flaming pulp. The peels are short and rugged like the outlines of mountains or unpaved dirt roads ridged at the edges. I’ve longed to be like Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, peeling an entire Granny Smith using a knife, a curl of itself reaching further and further below. In the same movie, Jonah asks his father about his late mother: “I’m starting to forget her.” “She could peel an apple in one long curly strip,” the father replies. “The whole apple.” What a way to be remembered, as adept and loving. I’m yet to be this person.

But the person I am currently is fine too – peeling clementines and oranges in short bursts, nails poking the flesh at intervals so juice drips down my fingers while the mottled citrus skin firmly sticks to itself. As I write this, the sun is setting and the sky is candy floss pink and a ripened peach split in fragments, floating in a sea of azure; the streaks of orange reminding me of both a blazing fire and the stubby peels that my fingers have accustomed me to. I’m seeing poetry everywhere, except perhaps in the ‘orange peel theory’ that was floating online last year this time. I would like to peel my own oranges.

There is a new ritual surrounding this: after I peel tear my morning orange apart in a pattern of my quirks, after the oils have perfumed and purified me, I drop everything in a small ceramic plate that I’m very fond of and study this for quite some time before I roughly sketch it. Each day the peels are different, the patterns are different and the vantage points are different. The peeling, I’ve come to regard, is an act of service towards myself. A nourishment replenishing abundance for the senses. It is a ‘form of prayer’ as Claire Cameron notes in her poem: But the peel keeps disintegrating in my hands / And the ink has already been smeared / Because time comes and goes and changes all things. I’ve been (unsuccessfully) maintaining illustration journals where I fill it with portraits of people, daily still lifes, and lately, sketches of orange peels. I find this to be mundane and ritualistic – a rite of passage to replace the rising sun of the day in the depths of winter.

A citrus peeled and curling into itself as an artist’s muse isn’t new because unsurprisingly enough the Dutch still life painters got there first depicting lemons, often on gleaming silver plates, bereft of skins with their twisted rinds hanging like delicate ribbons. Willem Claesz Heda, a Dutch Golden Age artist, who is said to have devoted himself exclusively to still life, included half-peeled lemons peeking out in works such as ‘Still Life with Pie, Silver Ewer and Crab’ and the simply titled ‘Breakfast’ where the lemon sits directly on the crinkled silk tablecloth. Peeled lemons convey fragility and vulnerability – it is odd to see the fruit flayed unless we’re going to consume it soon. Lemons and oranges were not native to Europe even when they were so painstakingly included in many still life paintings; it was only during the 15th century that they gained prominence, when Portuguese traders brought sweet orange trees from Asia to Europe. So having them on the table was a sign of luxury, an allusion to wealth. Studying a peeled citrus fruit, then drawing and painting it also showed skill, mastery, and sophistication. They were exotic, yes, but they were also a vibe so to speak.

I set out to write a newsletter on fruit peels in general but here I am distracted and mesmerised by the peels of citrus; maybe the rest is for later. Sometime last week, while scrolling on Instagram, I saw a reel about Japanese orange peel tea, where the orange is presumably cut into half, its flesh scooped up neatly and the cup used as a vessel to both brew and flavour the tea. So delicate, so brilliant, so inspiring I thought. The same thoughts have occurred to everyone else before me (I’m not arrogant), from the Song Dynasty still life paintings of oranges and tangerines and their bumpy crater-like skins painted with such reverence, to Jan Van Eyck’s detail of them in The Arnolfini Portrait, where they are hidden behind the merchant Arnolfini on a windowsill and a table on the left. If the merchant and his wife’s garments, jewellery, and the brass chandelier all signify opulence and ‘quiet luxury’, then so do the oranges – they must’ve been expensive to import but also an homage to that which is increasingly considered disposable.

Last year, I wrote about butter and vulnerability, about the ephemerality of food in still life, but also life itself – there is an expiration date. This is true for peeled lemons and oranges as well. There is both pleasure and perishability. There is time, hanging about so precariously like long peels of lemons. The longer you leave them on a plate, they turn from a redolent orange to a pallid brown, from ritualistic joy to memento mori. Maria Margaretha reminds us of that in her work ‘Still Life with Lemon and Cut Glass’, where a solitary fly is sucking on the tart juices of an exposed lemon before it rots. While Pieter Claesz’s magnificent banquet piece ‘Still Life with Peacock Pie’ conveys us of the ravishment that has just occurred via crumpled napkins, partially eaten bread, and a peeled lemon. Both reverberance and evaporation are present here.

The artist Yoshihiro Okada uses whole unbroken peels of citrus, long tangles out of which he creates sheep, prawns, swallows, horses: creating life out of what is usually discarded. Zoe Leonard did this too in 1992, stitching together rinds of oranges that she had eaten, imposing this materiality onto decay and birthing the project ‘Strange Fruit’ as meditation on time and impermanence. I think all of us who work with fruit skins see in it (and us) a metaphor for care even as we know the futility of existence. Peeling an orange is like hope interred into our hands: we await the ceremony in our mouths and mourn the passage of time that accompanies it.

The citrus is an elegy for life.