Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists

The works on display are many and almost become dizzying after a while. Romano's paintings all acrylic, take cues from both the psychedelic and abstract schools of art. This color palette reminds of Peter Max or John von Hamersveld, bright colors often falling on the same side of the color spectrum but complementing each other, nonetheless. His form however is a pure abstraction, Abby Koenig, Thursday August 8, 2013, Houston Press*

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Listening to Romano describe these paintings is revealing. "There are not very many people in my paintings," he explains. "There's dwellings and houses and buildings. You see signs of civilization." 

The paintings are not abstractions detached from reality. They are realities layered on top of one another. One image becomes several images. One memory becomes many memories. One painting becomes multiple paintings simultaneously.

 

For many viewers, the connection to music seems obvious, but that is only part of the story. Romano himself occasionally embraces the comparison. "I paint swirls and dots, circles and images that overlap and grow out of each other, contrasting colors that repeat and harmonize like flowers growing wild or cool improvised notes in a piece of music."

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Yet over years of conversations with Rock, I have come to believe that explanation only gets us part of the way there. The assumption is that the paintings grew out of the music. In reality, painting never stopped, but music occupied the public stage.

 

While attending the University of St. Thomas during the Dominique de Menil years, Romano found himself in one of the most remarkable artistic environments imaginable. The way he tells it, conversations that would seem impossible today were simply part of everyday life. He recalls talking with René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and other artists who passed through Dominique's orbit, sometimes as casually as sharing lunch on the quadrangle between classes. Rock was easy to talk to. He has always had great empathy.

Rock was already drawing, painting, sketching, and making watercolors while simultaneously building a life in music.

"I was a musician, and I was a visual artist. I did sketches and watercolors all the time," Romano told me. "But what are you going to do? We signed a record deal with MCA, so I went for the rock and roll and the girls."

The music career simply became visible first. Yet the more Romano speaks about painting, the less music seems to be the subject. Again and again, he returns to another word. Harmony.

"Every painting I do is about harmony," he says. "It's about balancing colors, about finding that little spot in the blue field where if I put a red dot, it's gonna go ping and you're gonna go, 'Wow.'" Standing in front of the newer works, it becomes clear that harmony, not music, is the deeper thread connecting five decades of painting.

Without formal allegiance to any particular movement, Romano has gradually arrived in territory art historians would recognize as Lyrical Abstraction. Like Kandinsky before him, he trusts color, rhythm, gesture, and composition to carry emotional meaning. Like Miró, he populates his canvases with circles, symbols, and invented forms that drift between dream and memory. The comparison is useful, but only to a point.

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Unlike many abstract painters, Romano never completely abandons the visible world. Roads become pathways. Buildings become symbols. Landscapes dissolve into patterns before re-emerging elsewhere in the composition. The paintings hover between observation and invention, memory and imagination.

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Self-taught after his years at St. Thomas, Romano appears to have followed this path largely through practice rather than theory. There is little evidence that he set out to become an abstract painter. Instead, abstraction seems to have emerged naturally from decades of looking, painting, revising, and simplifying.

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Looking across the decades, one does not see abrupt stylistic changes or fashionable reinventions. One sees a painter slowly removing unnecessary information until harmony itself becomes the subject.

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Viewed in that light, works such as Babylon Jam and Black Holes and Rolling Stones are not departures from the earlier paintings. They are their own logical destination.

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In January 2026 the Five Points Museum of Contemporary Art in Victoria mounted a retrospective exhibition featuring approximately seventy works spanning nearly fifty years of production. For Romano, the experience was both humbling and surprising. 

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"Getting to see my work in a gallery is really cool," he said during the exhibition. "But this is mind-blowing to me to see my stuff on the walls of a museum."

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Standing among paintings created over half a century, Romano appeared less interested in looking backward than continuing the next painting.

"I don't consider myself a real thoughtful artist as my art goes," he says. "I just paint. I make marks and I try to connect them somehow."

That statement sounds deceptively simple until one walks through the exhibition. The paintings reveal an artist who has spent decades connecting things. Color to color. Memory to memory. Observation to imagination. Order to chaos. One painting to the next.

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Perhaps no statement better summarizes his approach than the one he offers visitors encountering the work for the first time. "I invite you to create anything you want out of what you see. You will always be right." It is a generous statement, but it is also one that takes a lifetime to earn.  We’ll come back to that shortly.

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Earlier in life, Romano was the young artist sitting in classrooms and on quadrangles, absorbing ideas from painters, musicians, architects, and thinkers whose names would eventually become part of art history. Later he became the musician on stage, performing before audiences throughout Texas and beyond. The public knew him as Rock Romano the entertainer.