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EXHIBITION HISTORY
Carnaby Street
Oil on canvas · 23.5x19.5 in · 1976
“For a painter the world is a feast to be devoured by the eyes.” — Barbara Romain
Carnaby Street is where London dressed itself. One narrow lane off Soho that the sixties turned into the centre of the fashion world — and Alan Romain, a teenager with a weekly wage, spent all of it there on clothes.
The year after they married he took her to London to show her the street that had made him. She photographed it and painted it from her own photograph. That is what the painting records: somebody else's youth, claimed by looking at it hard enough. Nothing is heightened. Everything is looked at.
Oil on canvas, 1976. Oil is rare in the Romain archive and it places this in her early representational years, before the diagnosis, when she still painted what she could see. “I used to work more in oil,” she said later. This is the painter of that sentence at full appetite, in the one street on earth built to be looked at.
IN POSSESSION OF
Estate of Barbara Romain.
