Here is my painting as it looked on March 10.. (I am painting this for a special event in Salem to honor Nathanial Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter.") The text, shown below,* is a quotation from the novel. The imagery in my painting comes from that passsage: the wild rose branches seen through the prison window, with Hawthorne's words written on the bars. On March 10, my focus was to designate the main lines for the rose bush, with the "runner" branches bending to suggest the letter A, which Hester Prynne was forced to wear as punishment in The Scarlet Letter. I had already traced the lines for the branches using pencil on canvas, but now I was ready to paint in the branches with transparent brown paint.
*Here is the quotation from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter::
"But on one side of the portal and rooted almost at the threshold was a wild rose bush covered, this month of June, with its delicate gems which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom in token that the deep heart of Nature would pity and be kind to him."
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