Born Under a Bad Sign
Acrylic on canvas, 36 × 24 inches, 2005
Edition of 25, archival pigment on museum cotton rag · embossed, hand-numbered, estate-initialed · native size · signed COA.
ABOUT THIS WORK
Barbara Romain painting bad luck as a vocabulary — the whole superstition alphabet, laid down layer over layer.
Her own artist statement gives it four words: Born Under a Bad Sign “reflects the blues.” The title is the Albert King standard, the one Cream carried into the rock canon.
She described how these were built: “I would put up a big canvas and I would listen to a song over and over again … I would make a layer with the drum and then I would make a layer with the guitar and on top would be the lyrics usually. I call these paintings my visual music.”
Acrylic on canvas, 2005. One of the most travelled paintings she made: her solo exhibition, Bad Eye on the Good Foot, Art Around Gallery, Philadelphia, 2005; CORE 3: Defining Ourselves, Long Beach, 2007, a show she curated herself; International Acquisitions, Viewpoint Gallery, Sunnyview Rehabilitation Center, Schenectady, New York, 2011; ART BLIND, Kunst im Stapelhaus, Cologne, 2013, where she was the sole United States representative among sixteen artists from nine countries; and Passionate Focus, Chicago, 2019.
OTHER AVAILABLE FORMATS
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GIFTS & MERCHANDISE
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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.
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