"Born Under a Bad Sign" — Museum Framed Print
Estate-Authorized Framed Archival Fine Art Print
Archival-grade Materials
Fade-resistant Inks
Professionally Printed from the Estate's Authorized Digital Master
Born Under a Bad Sign opens with a blues lyric and never quite lets you go. The title is pulled from the Albert King standard that Cream made a cornerstone of the blues canon — and the painting carries that song's swagger directly into Barbara Romain's text-based body of work, where language drawn from music, protest and poetry is woven into abstraction that's both confrontational and exact.
Born Under a Bad Sign belongs to the body of work Barbara Romain called her "visual music"—paintings built not from what she could see, but from what she could hear and remember. As a retinal degenerative disease progressively took her sight, Romain reinvented her practice around sound and what she remembered layer by layer.
In Barbara's own words: "I call these paintings my visual music. I would put up a big canvas and listen to a song over and over again, and follow with a color—a layer with the drum, a layer with the guitar, and on top, usually, the lyrics. Music and color have a lot in common. Tone, harmony, scale… but they're also very emotional. It's not just about thinking. It's more about feeling."
