Mother Earth

Mother Earth

Acrylic on canvas, 36 × 24 inches, 2011

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

ABOUT THIS WORK

The painting says it out loud. In her own hand, written and rewritten down the whole canvas: in this earth's season we buried my mother in the earth · I regret that her life wasn't easier or happier · but it was out of my control.

Mother Earth is not about the planet. "Mother Earth actually was an homage to my mother who had just recently passed," Barbara Romain said. The title is a pun laid over a grave.

She built it the way she built all the text paintings. "I use language as a gestural element," she wrote, "to create patterns, weavings, and layers of information." Some words shout in acid green. Others sink back into the ochre until you lose them. In a painting about burial, she buried half the words.

She counted "reflections of personal experience" among the texts she worked from, and she was clear about what she wanted a painting like this to do: "My work, even when confronting sad or serious themes, I hope reflects a sense of life and joy in the face of sorrow."

Acrylic on canvas, 36 × 24 in. Exhibited in Passionate Focus, Second Sense, Chicago, 2014.

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.