River Reverie
Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 24 inches, 2016
AVAILABLE FORMATS
ESTATE EDITIONS
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
ABOUT THIS WORK
Gallery 825 handed two painters the same photograph of a river and hung the answers side by side.
That is the gallery's VS format, and in 2016 the pairing was Barbara Romain against Karen Clark. Clark answered in black and white. Romain — legally blind for thirty-two years by then, working from tubes labelled in braille — answered in full colour, and the colour is the argument. “The thrill of color upon color, which I can see in varying degrees, drives layer upon layer,” she wrote. Here it drives a river.
It is an observed landscape, and the estate is specific about that against the easy assumption that everything late is abstract. The depth is built out of colour rather than detail: planes stacked forward and back until the space opens and you are looking down a valley.
Acrylic on canvas, 2016. Painted for Barbara Romain vs. Karen Clark, Gallery 825 / Los Angeles Art Association, West Hollywood, May 21 – June 3, 2016; shown again at Passionate Focus, Second Sense, Chicago, 2017.
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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.
