Best Wishes
Acrylic on canvas, 18 × 14 inches, 2010
AVAILABLE FORMATS
ESTATE EDITIONS
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
ABOUT THIS WORK
“Best wishes” is what you write when there is nothing adequate to say.
A wedding. A hospital. Someone leaving. The phrase covers all of it and commits to none of it, and Barbara Romain painted a bouquet to match — flowers arriving at speed, laid down in single unbroken sweeps, gone before they settle. She left no note saying which occasion she had in mind. The painting is the card, still blank inside.
“Physical movements of my body must replace the precision of my eyes as the vehicle for placing marks,” she wrote. By 2010 that was not a philosophy, it was a method: she could no longer place a petal, so she placed a gesture and let the gesture be the flower. You can read a whole arm in one stroke here, wrist to shoulder.
Acrylic on canvas, 2010. Shown at Passionate Focus, Second Sense's juried exhibition of blind and low-vision artists at the Zhou B Art Center, Chicago, in 2010 and again in 2011 — hung with Confronting Orange and The Five Hindrances — and at CORE, Long Beach.
COMING SOON
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Barbara Romain (1948–2024)
Barbara Romain was an American painter, writer, performer, and creative provocateur whose work explored the intersection of music, memory, language, and perception. Based in Los Angeles and trained in Philadelphia, she developed a distinctive artistic practice she called "visual music," creating paintings that translated rhythm, emotion, and lived experience into vibrant fields of color, gesture, and text.
In 1984, Romain was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive degenerative eye disease that would eventually leave her legally blind. Rather than abandoning her artistic practice, she transformed the challenge into a new way of seeing. For the next four decades, she created paintings from what she could hear, remember, imagine, and feel, building a body of work that stands as one of the most compelling explorations of creativity beyond conventional vision.
Romain's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the de Young Museum, the Holter Museum of Art, the John F. Kennedy Center, and the ART BLIND exhibition in Cologne, Germany, among others. Her life and artistic process were featured in the award-winning 2013 documentary Can You See Me?, which brought international attention to her pioneering approach to painting.
