This is my painting as of March 15. This is for a special event in Salem to mark the 175th anniversary of Nathanial Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." My painting is based on a quotation from the novel, shown below.* I am using the imagery of prison bars as the background for the text. The wild rose bush, also mentioned in the passage, can be seen through the barred window. The branches of the wild rose bush are positioned to form the letter A, which plays an important role in the novel, as a public humiliation and punishment for adultery that the protagonist Hester Prynne is forced to wear.
On March 15, my multi-day effort to improve the lettering continued. using dark paine's grey to outline the letters, and paine's grey mixed with white as a background color to add definition. I adjusted the lettering of the third line from the bottom to make the line more symmetrical. I made other small changes in spacing, If all this sounds tedious, it is. But it is important because the text is part of the painting. A belated thanks to my high school art teacher Robert Corty who always included a six-week unit on lettering each year.
*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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