The Most Important Thing
Acrylic on canvas, 18 × 24 inches
AVAILABLE FORMATS
ESTATE EDITIONS
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
ABOUT THIS WORK
One sentence, written across the whole painting, then written again, and again, until it stops being a sentence.
At the top you can still read it: What can be said that is more important than the beauty of the sky? By the middle of the canvas it has been overwritten in blue, in yellow, in white, in black — each pass less legible than the last, until the writing turns into weather. Four palms stand in front of it, painted plainly, the only things in the picture holding still.
This is her method at full stretch. "Text becomes a gesture," she wrote, and here the gesture is repetition. She was legally blind, and writing a question about looking.
"The viewer is invited to traverse the canvas and create his or her own poetry," she wrote. On this one, traversing it means losing the sentence.
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.
