Born Under a Bad Sign

Acrylic on canvas, 24 × 36 inches, 2005

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

ABOUT THIS WORK

Black cats. Eyes. Lightning bolts. On a periwinkle ground under a hand-lettered field of text — Barbara Romain painting bad luck as a vocabulary.

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 paintings 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." The words themselves came from wherever she found them — "songs, news headlines, junk mail, fortune cookies and works of literature."

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.