Frost Flowers
Estate-Authorized
Acrylic in Frameless Face-Mounted Gallery-Style Mounting
Frost Flowers 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 what she could hear and remember.
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 so much as sound: 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."
Frost Flowers — Gallery 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.
