BARBARA ROMAIN

A botanist's page, painted by a woman who could not see a petal.
Nearly every bloom in Spring Flowers is a different species and every one of them is individuated — the count of the petals, the cut of the leaf, the particular way one flower frays at the edge where its neighbour stays smooth. That is the kind of precision that comes from long looking. Barbara Romain had been legally blind for two decades when she made it, and she built it instead out of memory and method: stems crossing like a trellis, each specimen held apart from the next so nothing could be mistaken for anything else.
Her paint tubes carried braille labels. “There might be six different kinds of reds and I can't always tell exactly what it is,” she said. “And often I do make a mistake … But I let it happen, and I think it makes it interesting; it kind of makes it alive.”
There is no sky here, no soil, no horizon to help you. Only the specimens, and the astonishing fact of them.
Acrylic on wood panel, 2006.