Children of the Revolution

Acrylic & mixed media on canvas, 24 × 36 inches, 2003

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

ABOUT THIS WORK

"'Children of the Revolution' is one of my paintings which was inspired by music — in this case, a song by Marc Bolan (T. Rex). Usually my 'visual music' paintings are much larger, and are done as performances, with each layer of the music represented by a large gesture (i.e. piano track, guitar, lyrics on top). In this painting, the gestures are more condensed and clashing reflecting the struggle the song celebrates." — Barbara Romain

The estate hears echoes of Basquiat's textual energy and Twombly's mark-making here. The vocabulary is entirely her own: hand-cut stencils, layered overpainting, and language used as a gesture rather than a caption.

"Text becomes a gesture," she wrote, "creating patterns, weavings and layers of information" — work that invites the viewer to "create his or her own poetry."

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.