Woman and Roses

Park produced several paintings of the head and shoulders of a single female surrounded by flowers. They seem to have had wide commercial appeal and many of them remain in private collections today. In this example, the girl's head and shoulders are done very simply and appear quite flat. In the 1890s Park had begun to move away from realist representation in his work. He was more interested in exploring decorative effects in painting and he developed a technique of creating a petal with just one brush stroke. He seems to have applied this minimal technique to his rendering of the curls of the girls hair and facial features in this painting.