BARBARA ROMAIN

Mother Earth is not about the planet.
“Mother Earth actually was an homage to my mother who had just recently passed,” Barbara Romain said. The title is a pun laid over a grave. In her own hand, written and rewritten down the whole canvas: in this earth's season we buried my mother in the earth · I regret that her life wasn't easier or happier · but it was out of my control.
She built it the way she built all the text paintings. “I use language as a gestural element,” she wrote, “to create patterns, weavings, and layers of information.” Some words shout. Others sink back into the ground until you lose them. In a painting about burial, she buried half the words.
“My work, even when confronting sad or serious themes, I hope reflects a sense of life and joy in the face of sorrow.”
Acrylic on canvas, 2011. Shown at Passionate Focus, Second Sense, Chicago, 2014, and in Sacred Memories, Pico House Gallery, El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument, 2015.