River Reverie

River Reverie

Acrylic on canvas, 24 × 30 inches, 2016

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

ABOUT THIS WORK

A red truss bridge, a purple mountain, and a river heading somewhere out of frame.

River Reverie was painted for a head-to-head. In 2016 Gallery 825 in West Hollywood handed Barbara Romain and Karen Clark the same photograph of a river and hung their two answers together — the gallery's "VS" format. Clark worked in black and white. Romain answered in full color.

River Reverie is an observed landscape, and the estate is specific about that, against the easy assumption that everything late is abstract. The greens stack forward, the mountain drops back, the bridge holds the middle — depth built out of color rather than detail.

"The thrill of color upon color, which I can see in varying degrees, drives layer upon layer," she wrote. Here it drives a river.

Exhibited in Barbara Romain vs. Karen Clark, Gallery 825 / Los Angeles Art Association, West Hollywood, May 21 – June 3, 2016; and in Passionate Focus, Second Sense, Chicago, 2017.

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.