BARBARA ROMAIN

The park at the end of her street, with the older city showing through it.
Elysian Park is the oldest park in Los Angeles and it begins a few blocks from the house where Barbara Romain lived and worked for the last decades of her life. She painted it in the register she used for the places she knew best — loosely handled, built out of colour rather than detail, the hills folding back behind it.
Then, across the whole lower third, something else: a scatter of pictograph figures — sun discs, water signs, stick limbs — drawn the way marks are drawn on rock. They sit under the park rather than in it.
That is the argument of the painting, and it is made without a word of text, which is unusual for her. The park is a hundred and fifty years old. The ground it is painted on is not.
Acrylic on canvas.