Best Wishes

Best Wishes

Acrylic on canvas, 14 × 18 inches

Edition of 25, archival pigment on museum cotton rag · embossed, hand-numbered, estate-initialed · native size · signed COA.

ABOUT THIS WORK

Not one square inch of this painting is resting.

Best Wishes is built from diagonal sweeps — orange, violet, blue, lime, red — laid on thick and fast, with white blossoms sitting on top of the weather and long white ribbons curling through it. It looks like a bouquet that arrived at speed. The title turns the painting into a message: the kind of thing you send to a wedding, a hospital, a departure. She left no note saying which.

She painted it small and she painted it loud. "Physical movements of my body must replace the precision of my eyes as the vehicle for placing marks," she wrote. At this size you can read a whole gesture — wrist to shoulder — in a single sweep.

Exhibited in Passionate Focus, Second Sense's juried exhibition of blind and low-vision artists, Zhou B Art Center, Chicago, 2011, alongside Confronting Orange and The Five Hindrances.

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.