Confronting Orange
Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 24 inches, 1998
AVAILABLE FORMATS
ESTATE EDITIONS
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
ABOUT THIS WORK
“My color palette grows more vivid as my sight diminishes.” — Barbara Romain
Confronting Orange is what that looks like, painted thirteen years after her diagnosis. A still life — the most ordinary subject in painting. Nothing else about it is ordinary.
By this point she had begun, in her own words, “to abstract the forms.” The petals are gestures now, not botany. She went straight at the one colour that still came all the way through, and named the painting after the confrontation.
Acrylic on canvas, 1998. It took First Prize in the Walter Knott Annual Art Award, Goodwill Industries, 2003. Shown in her solo exhibition, Bad Eye on the Good Foot, Art Around Gallery, Philadelphia, 2005; at CORE, Long Beach; and at Passionate Focus, Second Sense's juried exhibition of blind and low-vision artists, Zhou B Art Center, Chicago, 2011.
COMING SOON
Apparel and gifts featuring this work — cards, tees, totes, and more
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.
