Tweet
Acrylic on canvas, 18 × 14 inches, 2010
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GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
ABOUT THIS WORK
By 2010 she could no longer draw freehand, so she engineered a way to draw without a hand.
“I now create original stencils to form images which I can no longer draw freehand,” Barbara Romain wrote. “They become icons and symbols of natural forms.” Tweet is that invention working at full volume — the stencilled forms repeating across the whole surface with no focal point, no horizon and nowhere for the eye to rest. It is a painting with no centre because it is a painting of a sound: a hedge full of birds, all of them going at once.
She worked from tubes labelled in braille. “There might be six different kinds of reds and I can't always tell exactly what it is. 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.”
Acrylic on canvas, 2010. Shown in the Blind Artists Society Fall Show, Cooperstown Art Center, New York, 2011, and at Passionate Focus, Second Sense, at the Arts Club of Chicago and the Illinois College of Optometry, 2012. ABC7 Chicago covered the opening that May and interviewed her on camera.
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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.
