BARBARA ROMAIN

Get On the Good Foot was the song. The bad eye was hers. She made the painting standing up, while the record played.
It is the title work of her solo exhibition, and her statement for that show says exactly how it was made: created as a performance, while listening to the music of James Brown. That is the whole method in one sentence — the canvas as a stage, the song running, each layer of sound answered by a gesture. She called these her visual music paintings.
The title is a double joke she could afford to make and almost nobody else could. James Brown's “Get On the Good Foot” is the source; the bad eye is hers. She had been legally blind for eighteen years when she painted it, and she put the fact in the title of the painting, then in the title of the exhibition, then in the title of the film she made about her own life four years later.
Her own index of painting texts records this canvas as carrying no text at all — which, in a body of work built on painted language, is the point. This is the one where the music had to carry it alone.
Acrylic on canvas, 2002. Shown in her solo exhibition at Art Around Gallery, Philadelphia, 2005; awarded a Special Recognition Merit Award at the 7th Annual Color: Bold/Subtle international juried exhibition, Upstream People Gallery, 2009, picked out of roughly three hundred entries; in ART BLIND, Kunst im Stapelhaus, Cologne, 2013, where she was the sole United States representative; and at Passionate Focus, Second Sense, Chicago, 2019.