BARBARA ROMAIN
BARBARA ROMAIN
Born Under a Bad Sign
Acrylic on canvas, 24 × 36 inches
ABOUT THIS WORK
Born Under a Bad Sign opens with a blues lyric and never quite lets you go. The title is pulled from the Albert King standard that Cream made a cornerstone of the blues canon — and the painting carries that song's swagger directly into Barbara Romain's text-based body of work, where language drawn from music, protest and poetry is woven into abstraction that's both confrontational and exact. You don't read it; you hear it. The bad sign isn't fate. It's a backbeat.
AVAILABLE FORMATS
ESTATE EDITIONS
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Barbara Romain (1949–2024)
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.
