In Review
EXHIBIT: 'DERIVATE COMPOSITION' CATALOGUE
Terrace Gallery. John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts, Washington D.C. June 2008
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Barbara Romain
Los Angeles, California
www.barbararomain.com
“My ‘visual music’ paintings are derived from listening to a particular song and transforming the experience into a field of moving shapes and colors.”
When Barbara Romain was diagnosed with a retinal degenerative disease in 1984, she had been painting in a realistic, figurative style for several years. As she became legally blind, she questioned her ability to continue painting.
“I slowly transformed my thinking and techniques to incorporate my physical limitations as an integral part of my work,” she says. “As a result, my color palette grew more vivid as my sight diminished. My work is now inspired less by what I see and more by what I hear, remember, and imagine.”
Within Romain’s textural, large-scale canvases—her “visual music” paintings—she responds to songs played during the creative process. HARD RAIN is a response to the Bob Dylan song of the same name. Romain incorporates icons and symbols generated from original stencils that she also creates. Text becomes a gesture in these paintings, creating patterns, weaving, and layers of information. The resulting work invites the viewer to “create his or her own poetry,” she says.
Barbara Romain's HARD RAIN painting from her Incantations series.
Romain, a VSA arts Teaching Artist Fellow who has exhibited work nationally, has created many public-art installations and performances in the Los Angeles area. She is cofounder and director of Art Options, an arts program for at-risk students, and also teaches at Columbia College Hollywood in California. She received a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts, and an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.