BARBARA ROMAIN

Barbara Romain’s body of work is a celebration of resilience, reinvention, and radical imagination. Trained in realism and deeply rooted in visual storytelling, Barbara’s early paintings reflected a mastery of light, form, and the vivid atmosphere of Los Angeles. But after being diagnosed with a degenerative retinal disease in 1984, her vision began to fade—and her creative vision only deepened. In her own words, 

 

“[For a painter], the world is a feast to be devoured by the eyes. I began to abstract the forms in my paintings... I was becoming less interested in what I could see and more in what I could hear and remember and imagine.”

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Faced with the slow erosion of her sight, Barbara made the bold decision not to step away from art—but to transform it. She shifted her focus from what she could see to what she could hear, remember, and imagine. Her brush became a translator of sound, poetry, and intuition. Layer by layer, she began building paintings that pulsed with music, memory, and emotion.​

 

​No longer able to draw freehand, Barbara adapted by crafting her own stencils—symbols, icons, and natural forms she could lay down through touch and rhythm. As her vision narrowed, her palette grew more vivid. Her work began to incorporate layered sound structures, poetic fragments, and cultural references, transforming into what she called 'visual music'. 

 

“With the color, I would follow with a layer from the drum... another with the guitar... and on top would be the lyrics. That’s how I build the paintings... Music and color have a lot in common—tone, harmony, scale. Both grab you emotionally.”

 

Many of her pieces are large in scale, filled with vibrant color, bold gestures, and poetic text in multiple languages—spaces where viewers are invited to create their own interpretations.​ 

 

“I like to kind of put my body into the work. It’s hard for me to see small details... but I can more easily do larger gestures. Bright color is something I can still see.”

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Her visual language grew alongside her lived experience—political, personal, deeply rooted in her identity as a mother, a woman, a performer, and an artist navigating disability in a world not built to accommodate it.​ 

 

“I didn’t want people to know I was losing my sight... but when I finally came out as a blind person, it was a relief. I was with people who were going through similar experiences.”

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Through it all, Barbara never let the diagnosis define her. Her work speaks for itself: vivid, urgent, alive. Whether reflecting on Hollywood’s glitz and grit, channeling the sounds of Coltrane or The Doors, or reclaiming slurs and preconceptions through layered collage and language, her portfolio invites viewers into a world reimagined by intuition and spirit.​ 

 

“Art is not about money. It’s not about fame. It’s not about success—although we all want those things. But that can’t be your reason to make it. You make it because you love to make it.”

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Barbara Romain’s portfolio is not just a collection of paintings—it’s a lifelong dialogue between limitation and liberation, a living archive of courage, improvisation, and joy.​

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