Mountains across Oceans
Dear art seekers,
I hope you are doing well wherever you are! I, in the meantime have been surrounding myself with the cuddles of my roommate’s cats to get through all my thesis work. As my time in Jordan comes to an end very soon, I have decided to turn this newsletter into a bimonthly one. The ultimate fate of it is yet to be known, but I will keep you posted.
In light of this week’s most prominent headlines, I will be highlighting the work of the late Lebanese-American writer and visual artist Etel Adnan who passed away this week on November 14th.
Etel Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon. She is renowned for being a poet, writer, tapestry designer, painter and much more. Adnan left Beirut in the late 1940’s to pursue her studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1955, she moved to the United States, where she continued to study philosophy at Berkeley and Harvard before accepting a job teaching aesthetics and philosophy at the Dominican College of California in San Rafael.
At the age of 34, she began painting, inspired by the view out her window of Mount Tamalpais, northwest of San Francisco. That view became her repeated source of inspiration and was rendered into abstract oil paintings and etched prints with the use of very luminous Californian colors (fig.1), (fig.2).
“When I do a painting it may be like a landscape, but there is more to it. You don’t recognize what landscape it is, as it is not a particular landscape—it is maybe a memory of a particular landscape. Art has a political function in the sense that it brings something life-enhancing, a desire for life” she says in her bio on Artnet (fig.3).
Her visual art didn’t gain international recognition until she was in her 80’s (this doesn’t reassure me one bit). While her paintings reflected personal meditations on the will of the human spirit, her writing had a different course. Her writings dealt with memory, loss, and social injustice. She extensively wrote about political conflict and violence, inspired by her life in Lebanon.
Adnan returned to Lebanon in 1972, where she met her lifelong partner: the artist Simone Fattal. Adnan was working as a cultural editor for two of Beirut’s daily newspapers when the civil war broke out in 1975. She and Fattal fled to Paris, and there, Adnan wrote the novel Sitt Marie Rose, (1978). The novel is based on a true story which centers on a kidnapping during Lebanon’s civil war and is told from the perspective of the civilians enduring brutal political conflict. This novel put her in the spotlight. She subsequently was awarded France’s highest cultural honor, Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
Adnan’s approach in painting merges the chaotic and the simplistic.
The art critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie wrote that a “fraught dualism between tranquillity and turbulence” permeated all of Ms. Adnan’s work, whether written or painted (fig.4).
Just like most artists, she translated the conflicts that she endured - identity, strife, migration, exile - into art. For some artists, conflict manifests into a dull form; for others it's expressive. However, Adnan’s work embodies a mix of both: playfulness. It feels like a land devoid of conflict, one straight out of her imagination.
For more about Adnan, check out this monograph, as well as her website!
Yours truly,
Rebecca