Spring Flowers

Spring Flowers

Acrylic on wood panel, 48 × 36 inches

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

ABOUT THIS WORK

Count them. Iris, dahlia, stargazer lily, hibiscus, tulip, dandelion, garden rose, baby’s breath — nearly every bloom on this panel is a different species, and each one is individuated: petal count, leaf shape, the particular way a dandelion goes ragged at the edge.

That is the fact worth sitting with. Spring Flowers is the largest work in the launch catalog at 48 × 36 inches, and it is a botanical inventory made by a painter who had been legally blind for decades. The black ground does the rest — no sky, no soil, no horizon. Just stems crossing like a trellis, and every specimen lit against the dark.

Her paint tubes carried braille labels. “There might be six different kinds of reds and I can’t always tell exactly what it is,” she said. “And often I do make a mistake … But I let it happen, and I think it makes it interesting; it kind of makes it alive.”

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.