Spring Flowers
Acrylic on wood panel, 48 × 36 inches
AVAILABLE FORMATS
ESTATE EDITIONS
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
ABOUT THIS WORK
A botanist's page, painted by a woman who could not see a petal.
Nearly every bloom in Spring Flowers is a different species and every one of them is individuated — the count of the petals, the cut of the leaf, the particular way one flower frays at the edge where its neighbour stays smooth. That is the kind of precision that comes from long looking. Barbara Romain had been legally blind for two decades when she made it, and she built it instead out of memory and method: stems crossing like a trellis, each specimen held apart from the next so nothing could be mistaken for anything else.
Her paint tubes carried braille labels. “There might be six different kinds of reds and I can't always tell exactly what it is,” she said. “And often I do make a mistake … But I let it happen, and I think it makes it interesting; it kind of makes it alive.”
There is no sky here, no soil, no horizon to help you. Only the specimens, and the astonishing fact of them.
Acrylic on wood panel, 2006.
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.
