BARBARA ROMAIN
BARBARA ROMAIN
Madonna of the Freeway
Oil on canvas, 16 × 20 inches
ABOUT THIS WORK
Madonna of the Freeway is Barbara Romain's Los Angeles in one painting: sacred, mechanical, and arguing with itself. 16 × 20 inches, oil on canvas. The piece was painted over an earlier Madonna and Child — and later refined with new details, including helicopters — which makes it doubly Barbara: a painter who never stopped editing the world she put down. From her surrealist seam, where figurative elements dissolve into dreamlike compositions and devotional imagery shares the frame with traffic. A halo and a helicopter, on the same freeway.
AVAILABLE FORMATS
ESTATE EDITIONS
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
ALSO AVAILABLE
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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.
