BARBARA ROMAIN

TICK TOCK, written across the whole canvas, hundreds of times.
Quarantine is Barbara Romain's pandemic painting, and it is built out of the one sound that filled that year: a clock. TICK TOCK runs edge to edge in loose hand-lettering, layer on layer, until the words stop reading as words and start reading as time passing. Painted virus particles — the shape everyone learned by heart that year — sit on top of the writing, and the paint bleeds down from them in long drips.
Between the tick-tocks the year surfaces in her own phrases: QUARANTINE · TIME IS ELASTIC · ZOOM · MASK · CABIN FEVER · WORK FROM HOME · TOO MUCH TV · WHY AM I SO BUSY · ALL BARS AND CLUBS CLOSED · PASSOVER · EASTER · STARTED SLEEPWALKING.
She had spent thirty years turning what she heard into what she painted. In 2020 what she heard was a house with nobody in it.
She was still working on it when she died. It hangs unfinished in her studio, on unstretched canvas, and it is the last large painting she started.
Acrylic on unstretched canvas, 2020–2022. Unfinished.