Mother Earth
Estate-Authorized
Archival pigment on museum-quality cotton rag paper
Mother Earth 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."
Mother Earth — Collector's Estate Edition
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.
