Confronting Orange

Confronting Orange

Acrylic on canvas, 24 × 30 inches, 1997/1998

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

ABOUT THIS WORK

"My color palette grows more vivid as my sight diminishes." — Barbara Romain

Confronting Orange is what that looks like — painted thirteen years after her diagnosis. A vase of purple daisies, a dish of four oranges, a tabletop tipped up toward you. The subject is ordinary. The color is not.

By this point she had begun, in her own words, "to abstract the forms." The petals are gestures now, not botany. She painted big and bright because bright was what remained — and here she goes straight at the one color that still came all the way through.

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.