BARBARA ROMAIN

What can be said that is more important than the beauty of the sky?
She wrote that sentence across the top of the canvas, where you can still read it. Then she wrote it again. And again, pass after pass, each one heavier and less legible than the last, until the question stopped being a question and turned into weather.
She was seventy-two, in the last full year of her working life, and she had been losing her sight since 1984. A woman going blind, asking what matters more than looking, and answering by making the words impossible to see. “Text becomes a gesture,” she wrote. Here the gesture is repetition, and repetition is what erosion sounds like.
“The viewer is invited to traverse the canvas and create his or her own poetry.” On this one, traversing it means losing the sentence — and finding out you already know it.
Acrylic on canvas, 2020. Shown at Neutra Gallery, Los Angeles, 2020–21.