Children of the Revolution | 2014
Barbara Romain
Estate-Authorized
Acrylic in Frameless Face-Mounted Gallery-Style Mounting
Painted in 2014 — three decades after her diagnosis with retinitis pigmentosa, and well into her career as a legally blind painter — Children of the Revolution 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. As a retinal degenerative disease progressively took her sight, Romain reinvented her practice around sound: she would mount a large canvas, play a single song on repeat, and translate it into color, layer by layer—a stratum for the drums, another for the guitar, the lyrics surfacing last, scrawled and stenciled across the top.
Here, the song is T. Rex's 1972 anthem of the same name. The canvas pulses with its defiance—REVOLUTION rising in molten orange through a thicket of red, black, and electric blue, fragments of the refrain breaking across the surface like a crowd's chant. Working with braille-labeled paints, hand-cut stencils, and a magnifying monitor, Romain embraced the unpredictable—a blue line where she'd reached for another color, a word half-buried in pigment—and let those "mistakes" live, insisting they made the work breathe.
The result is a painting that doesn't depict revolution so much as sound it: urgent, layered, gloriously unruly. A portrait of perseverance from an artist who refused to stop making—and a reminder that color, like music, is felt before it is understood.
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."
Children of the Revolution — Acrylic Print
Barbara Romain (1949–2024) was a Philadelphia-trained, Los Angeles–based painter whose work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the de Young Museum, and the John F. Kennedy Center, among others. Diagnosed with a degenerative retinal disease in 1984, she spent four decades pioneering a celebrated body of work she called "visual music"—building paintings from what she could hear, remember, and imagine rather than what she could see. Working with braille-labeled paints, hand-cut stencils, and brilliant color, she turned the loss of sight into a new way of seeing. These prints are released under authorization of the Estate of Barbara Romain.
