Book review: This Bad Apple by Hanlyn Davies

Tony Curtis

This book follows an exhibition held in the summer of 2024, This Bad Apple, at the Ely Centre of Contemporary Art in New Haven, Connecticut. The work has its genesis in Hanlyn Davies’s interest in growing apples in his New Haven backyard.

It was observing the natural decay of these apples, while musing about the representation of ‘the apple’ in art, mythology, and folklore, that led to the work.

But there is an even earlier reference which is key; his father, Wil-yr-Allt, was a keen and successful gardener in Gorseinon who exhibited vegetables and fruit, especially prize specimen apples. At one competition he was cheated out of the first prize by a jealous judge, who spiked an apple and triggered its rot. That injustice was never forgotten by father or son.

Associations

Hanlyn Davies is a Welsh-American painter and printmaker whose work has been widely exhibited and is included in public and private collections both in the United States and abroad.

He was born in Gorseinon in 1943, but has lived in the USA since 1965. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended Swansea College of Art, and later earned his MFA from the Yale School of Art.

He has had great success both as printmaker and in academic life. He chaired the Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts for ten years and was in the vanguard of exploring off-set lithography and the new technologies.

Apples have many associations, from the Fall in Eden – a bite brings the sensation of taste followed by the weight of eternal sin – to the legend of “Johnny Appleseed” (1774-1845), who, literally, spread apple trees across the American frontier as it moved west.

“This Bad Apple”, 2019-2023, is a cautionary, allegorical tale which connects events over seven decades. The rotting apples are an actual sign and an obvious metaphor for the current state of American democracy. It is visualized in four works of archival pigment prints: one work is comprised of a set of thirteen prints; the other two works are individual prints. Each work uses an apple on its entropic journey to tell the tale and prompt our associative responses.

The dates of these works would suggest that their political, satirical intentions are in response to Trump’s first term. The strength of the images and their message, unfortunately, has not lessened in 2025. Indeed, some of the apples start to take on aspects of Trump’s features, not to say his personality.

The series of images tracking the transformation of fruit through decomposition, in all its fascination and revulsion, ​“is a cautionary, allegorical tale for our current times” about, in the end, the inability to escape entropy. The first work ‘This Bad Apple’ includes a desiccated apple and “its leaked fluid stains”.

The work has a gilded frame and has the following text across the bottom of the image: “This bad apple assisted by its chaotic gilded spectre promotes distrust and discord through the land…it sows the seeds this bad apple has golden dreams and big ambitions for wealth influence power it has diabolical plans and a vengeful nature. This Bad Apple is damaged to its core, it also has a thin skin”. Remind you of anyone?

Deterioration

The second part of the exhibition, ‘This Damaged Apple’, is a series of thirteen framed prints which record the deterioration of the Golden Delicious apple as it rots and collapses into itself, the golden glow becoming red and brown and black. Rotten fruits stand in line like accused and convicted Bad Guys.

In his endnotes Davies explains that his inspiration was “a group of major frescoes in Siena, painted between 1338 and 1339 by the artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti.

“As a teenager in Wales studying Art History, I was struck by the secular nature and civic narrative of these works…its overarching title The Allegory of God and Bad Government has stuck with me throughout my life and is here reflected in the story I tell….”

The third part, ‘This Beady-eyed Bad Apple’ references that fiddling of the judges in the 1961 horticultural show in Wales. It seems that one has never been able to trust authorities. Indeed, some of the apples seem to be degrading into versions of the Trump visage in all its garish manifestations of orange – the crinkled eyes, the pursed lips sneering.

The fourth and final part is ‘Choose Me, Choose Me…For I Am The Apple Of The Barrel’. These two large archival pigment prints have texts running along the bottom: firstly “Are you truly the apple of my eye?” and then, “Or a worm’s eyes of this damaged apple?” Hanlyn Davies says that this is his “response to the intersection of politics and religion, which often seems to me to be a relationship of convenience for one or both. I thought this was boldly exemplified with the March 2024 publication of the new God Bless the USA Holy Bible.”

That “Bible” with edited versions of the American constitution. The Bill of Rights and the Pledge of Allegiance, was sold for $60 as part of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, with a Trump endorsement. It was printed in China for $3 a copy and promoted with the Lee Greenwood song “God Bless the USA”. It has a swirling Stars and Stripes flag on its cover: religion blessed with the unholy water of Trump’s appropriation of Christian fundamentalism. (Platinum Edition to commemorate the 2025 inauguration of Trump and Vance, $99.99)

The artist also references the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt’s painting “I Am The Light Of The World” in which Christ is depicted at the closed door of a cottage with fallen apples from the nearby orchard at his feet. Hunt painted three versions of this work which became one of the most viewed and lauded of Victorian paintings.

Disturbing

Davies’s two final apples have pulled themselves into a bruised red, crumpled oval. It is an eye or a nipple, whose colour and decomposition will eventually take over the whole apple. A red tumour in the centre of a deliciously golden sun. It is a disturbing image: is this now the light of the world?

In 2000 Hanlyn Davies received an honorary fellowship from Swansea University, the year after his “Return Journey” exhibition was shown at the Taliesin gallery on campus. He has maintained strong links with Wales, throughout his time in America.

Hanlyn went to school with Professor M. Wynn Thomas and stays in touch with him. Seren used one of Hanlyn’s “Calennig” painting on the cover of my 2024 poetry collection “Leaving the Hills”. Wynn and I continue to get American updates from him.

Of course, things are not good in the USA at the moment, nor are they likely to improve until Trump’s reign has passed. Still, after the shock and horror of the first two months, now we are beginning to see on television and through social media the widespread protest and acts of resistance to the crude and heavy-handed tactics of Trump’s officials and supporters.

Satire now has problems being distinguished from actual events. In this context, Hanlyn Davies’s This Bad Apple adds its weight to the cause: it is a witty and well-judged work which weaves cleverly personal and public issues. The book is very well produced and is worth chasing up on the web.

That said, This Bad Apple surely needs to be seen in a gallery: the effect of the original framed works is progressive/regressive; its strength is linear and cumulative. It is obvious from the power and originality of his current work that an exhibition in Swansea and elsewhere in Wales is long overdue.

Ironically, This Bad Apple would travel well and provoke a strong reaction. At any point in the next four years, this art will powerfully resonate. Curators, take note.