BARBARA ROMAIN

The 'Bad Eye on the Good Foot' collection is one of Barbara Romain’s most rhythmically charged and emotionally resonant series—a body of work that translates sound into shape, rhythm into color, and lyric into visual poetry.

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Created during a time when Barbara’s vision was rapidly declining, the collection is both an artistic feat and a spiritual release. In these works, Barbara let music become her guide: jazz, funk, blues, rock, and spoken word pulsed through her studio, influencing every brushstroke and compositional layer. Each painting became a kind of synesthetic experience—where sound is felt as much as seen.

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"Inspiration often comes from music, where the imagery reflects the movement of various lines and texts in a particular song...I would listen to a song over and over again… With the color, I would follow a layer with the drum, then a layer with the guitar, and on top would be the lyrics. music and color have a lot of things in common… tone, harmony, and scale.”

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No longer relying on visual observation, Barbara approached the canvas like a dancer responding to music or a poet channeling rhythm. She painted in large formats, favoring bold gestures, vivid pigments, and oversized symbols. Stencils she cut herself allowed her to “draw” even when freehand work became too difficult. Text—both invented and borrowed—often appears layered across the surface, echoing her belief that

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Bad Eye on the Good Foot is Barbara at her most improvisational, unfiltered, and alive. It is a celebration of motion and memory—a visual improvisation that captures the soul of a song as seen through an altered lens. It’s a dance between limitation and liberation, between the loss of one sense and the full awakening of another.

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These paintings don’t merely accompany music—they are music. They hum, they shout, they swing. With every canvas, Barbara invites the viewer to not only see, but to feel, to move, and to listen with their whole being.

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