BARBARA ROMAIN

One sentence, written across the whole painting, then written again, and again, until it stops being a sentence.

At the top you can still read it: What can be said that is more important than the beauty of the sky? By the middle of the canvas it has been overwritten in blue, in yellow, in white, in black — each pass less legible than the last, until the writing turns into weather. Four palms stand in front of it, painted plainly, the only things in the picture holding still.

This is her method at full stretch. "Text becomes a gesture," she wrote, and here the gesture is repetition. She was legally blind, and writing a question about looking.

"The viewer is invited to traverse the canvas and create his or her own poetry," she wrote. On this one, traversing it means losing the sentence.