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
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. 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.
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. Others sink back into the ground until you lose them. In a painting about burial, she buried half the words.
“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, 2011. Shown at Passionate Focus, Second Sense, Chicago, 2014, and in Sacred Memories, Pico House Gallery, El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument, 2015.
OTHER AVAILABLE FORMATS
GALLERY-MOUNTED ACRYLIC
GALLERY-WRAPPED CANVAS
MUSEUM FRAMED
GIFTS & MERCHANDISE
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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.
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