Prison Bars and Roses (Scarlet Letter project), painting as of Mar 20, 2025

Here is my painting as of Mar 20, 2025.  This is for an upcoming special event at the Salem Athenaeum to mark the  175th anniversary of Nathanial Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter."  I based my painting on a quotation from the novel, seen below.* In my painting, I used prison bars as the background for the  text of the quotation.  The wild rose bush mentioned in the text is seen through the prison window.  I know that each year the wild rose bush in my yard makes long branches (called runners), hence the long branches on the rose bush in my painting, positioned to suggest the letter A, so important in the novel. Ane though the wild roses I have seen are usually white, and rarely even pale pink, I decided to make this roses red so that the branches form a scarlet letter.  

On Mar 20, I worked on the window frame (and edge of canvas), adding a layer of brown over the purple.  My idea was to follow this with a layer of dark gray to achieve a color close to black. But as you will soon see,  I eventually changed my mind about that. Meanwhile, I worked a bit on the blue background and started cleaning up some of the lines. To be continued. . . .

*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."