Tweet

Acrylic on canvas, 18 × 14 inches, 2010

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

ABOUT THIS WORK

A violet field, and nearly everything in it is a bird or about to be one.

Barbara Romain had been legally blind for close to thirty years when she painted this, and Tweet is the clearest demonstration in the catalog of the workaround she engineered. "I now create original stencils to form images which I can no longer draw freehand," she wrote. "They become icons and symbols of natural forms." Here are the natural forms — beaked heads, wings, leaf blades, berries, small blossoms — repeated across the surface at the same scale, with no focal point and no horizon. The whole canvas chatters at once.

The color is the other half of the method. "My color palette grows more vivid as my sight diminishes," she wrote — and she worked from tubes labelled in braille. "There might be six different kinds of reds and I can't always tell exactly what it is. 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."

Shown at Passionate Focus, Second Sense's juried exhibition of blind and low-vision artists, Chicago, 2012 — with Geometry and Color Haikus #2, in the year Romain received the Outstanding Artist Judi Jasek Award. ABC7 Chicago covered the exhibition that May and interviewed her on camera.

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.