Rose of Sharon

Oil painting - Rose of Sharon, August 2001

This is the painting I mentioned in my journal entry for August 29, 2001. It was almost entirely painted in my second-floor bathroom, looking down into my back yard at a Rose of Sharon bush before 9 AM.
This is a small painting, less than 12 inches wide. It's painted on a piece of prepared foam-core board. (Very nicely lightweight, but the stuff warps when coated with gesso, the "ground" on which the oil paint is applied. Why does it buckle? Because the gesso shrinks slightly when it dries, warping the board because the board is so light. This doesn't happen with masonite, but masonite is a lot harder to cut. Catch-22.) I photographed it around 7:00 am on an overcast day, then imported the image into Photoshop and manipulated the levels to warm it up (the original image file is relatively cool), resize and crop it. All of this -- photographing the painting, importing the image, manipulating it -- was done quite quickly: I had only had the camera for a week, and hadn't even installed the software required to transfer images from the camera (an Olympus D-60L, by the way, though I now own a Fujifilm FinePix) to my computer until the day I captured the image.