Prison Bars and Roses (Scarlet Letter project), Acrylic Painting

Here is my finished painting, Prison Bars and Roses.  I gave it the subtitle "Scarlet letter project" because I painted it for a special event at the Salem Athenaeum held to celebrate 175th anniversary of Nathanial Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter."  I based this painting on a quotation from the novel, shown below.*  I made the prison bars into the background for the lines of text. And I painted the branches of the wild rose bush in the shape of the letter A, with the scarlet roses on its long branches. I am glad I had a chance to do this, and I think I understand the novel because of this project.

On Mar. 28,  having brightened some of the roses to make them more  intensely scarlet, and having obsessed over the shading on the prison bars, I finally decided to just check that I hadn't obliterated any commas while I was moving text around to refine the spacing.  So I opened the novel, found the quotation, and sure enough, a couple of commas were now missing.  That was easy enough to fix.  But I also noticed that "would" in the last line should have been "could."  I am also a proofreader, so I am doubly glad I caught the error, even at the last minute. This is not exactly a spelling error, but I must written the wrong word when I originally transcribed the quotation, because the mistake is in my initial sketch. have made the mistake when I first transcribed it.  It was easy enough to add the missing commas, change 'would' to 'could", and while I was at it, I modified the 'm' in the last word (him), to make it easier to read. Once everything was dry, I wrapped the painting up for delivery to the Salem Athenaem. 

*Here is the (correct) 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 could pity and be kind to him."