BARBARA ROMAIN

She wrote eight poems about colour, then painted each one onto the colour it was about.
She called them studies rather than poems or paintings — “COLOR HAIKUS are color studies with the following texts,” she wrote, and then set down eight haikus. Each panel is a single field with its poem written into the wet paint in her own hand, and the name of the colour lettered large enough to read across a room.
One of the eight is about hands. She painted handprints into it and wrote about feeling her way through grey to find out what she was touching. It is the most direct thing she ever said about her own sight, and she put it in a colour study.
A juror at the University of Nebraska picked the set out of roughly three hundred international entries and called it terrific. It entered a private collection in Chicago the following spring, to buyers she recorded by name in her own list.
Acrylic on eight wood panels, 2008. Special Recognition Merit Award, 7th Annual Color: Bold/Subtle, Upstream People Gallery, Omaha, 2009. Shown at Passionate Focus, Second Sense, Gallery 233, Chicago, 2010.