The Most Important Thing
Acrylic on canvas, 24 × 18 inches, 2020
AVAILABLE FORMATS
ESTATE EDITIONS
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
ABOUT THIS WORK
What can be said that is more important than the beauty of the sky?
She wrote that sentence across the top of the canvas, where you can still read it. Then she wrote it again. And again, pass after pass, each one heavier and less legible than the last, until the question stopped being a question and turned into weather.
She was seventy-two, in the last full year of her working life, and she had been losing her sight since 1984. A woman going blind, asking what matters more than looking, and answering by making the words impossible to see. “Text becomes a gesture,” she wrote. Here the gesture is repetition, and repetition is what erosion sounds like.
“The viewer is invited to traverse the canvas and create his or her own poetry.” On this one, traversing it means losing the sentence — and finding out you already know it.
Acrylic on canvas, 2020. Shown at Neutra Gallery, Los Angeles, 2020–21.
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.
