BARBARA ROMAIN

A violet field, and nearly everything in it is a bird or about to be one.

Barbara Romain had been legally blind for close to thirty years when she painted this, and Tweet is the clearest demonstration in the catalog of the workaround she engineered. "I now create original stencils to form images which I can no longer draw freehand," she wrote. "They become icons and symbols of natural forms." Here are the natural forms — beaked heads, wings, leaf blades, berries, small blossoms — repeated across the surface at the same scale, with no focal point and no horizon. The whole canvas chatters at once.

The color is the other half of the method. "My color palette grows more vivid as my sight diminishes," she wrote — and she worked from tubes labelled in braille. "There might be six different kinds of reds and I can't always tell exactly what it is. 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."

Shown at Passionate Focus, Second Sense's juried exhibition of blind and low-vision artists, Chicago, 2012 — with Geometry and Color Haikus #2, in the year Romain received the Outstanding Artist Judi Jasek Award. ABC7 Chicago covered the exhibition that May and interviewed her on camera.