Carnaby Street

Carnaby Street

Oil on canvas, 19.5 × 23.5 inches, 1977

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

ABOUT THIS WORK

"For a painter the world is a feast to be devoured by the eyes." — Barbara Romain

Carnaby Street is that sentence, painted. Oil is rare in the Romain archive, and it places this work in her early, representational years, when she was still painting from what she could see.

Carnaby Street had been the center of Swinging London, and it came to Barbara through her marriage to a Londoner rather than through a guidebook. She painted it the way you paint a place you have a claim on: honeycomb lamps over the doorway, a striped awning, strangers pulled up to yellow tables on an ordinary bright afternoon. Nothing is heightened. Everything is looked at.

She later described that early work as "a lot more figurative and representational," and noted those paintings were oils — "I used to work more in oil." This is that painter, at the window, still looking.

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.