New Dawn

Over the past few years, several of my students have gifted me lovely David Austin Roses. These lovely specimens have taught me so much about subtle color and value shifts and I have found that helpful in paintings of other subjects as well. This particular rose is called New Dawn. I have two of them and in the early summer they bloom densely on the south-facing wall of my studio. Reaching more than 12 feet, it is a magnificent temptation to paint over and over again. In this piece, the greatest challenge was to provide the proper amount of depth from front-most flowers to those deeper in with out resorting to artistic tricks that could potentially cause a loss in the structured softness of the roses.