Two firsts

This picture represents two firsts: my first painting on a canvas with acrylics, and my first attempt to post a picture to my blog. The painting is of a rosebush in my backyard in the waning days of winter, during a brief thaw that melted the snow for the first time since the beginning of the year. I painted this at night, without using the actual rosebush as a model, instead working from memory. The rosebush is a Royal Highness, which I bought years ago for about $7.98 from a chain hardware/houseware store (I think it was a Triangle, but I'm not sure.) It was a scraggly thing that spent two years in a giant pot, but eventually it became strong enough that I was willing to plant it directly in the soil. A few years later it is a gigantic bush, well over six feet tall and very wide. Every year it is covered with hundreds of pink roses, and in the fall the tips of the branches become swollen and develop the pods called rose hips, which sometimes turn bright red and have a delicious tart flavor (and are rich in Vitamin C.) Last summer was very wet, and for some reason the hips turned dark very quickly. I left them on the bush all winter. They are the knobs you see at the end of the branches.

I must confess that I used craft paint for some of the color in the sky - sky-blue craft paint blended with titanium white as the sky nears the horizon. But, hey, why not? Ain't no art police gonna come knocking down my door, right? Well, maybe...

I got the grass exactly wrong. The next morning, as I compared my picture drawn from memory to the actual scene, I noticed that the grass was greenest near the circle of stones around the bush, and yellowish everywhere else. Oh, well.


Royal Highness with Hips, March 7, 2004