Visual poetry - The Standard
Etel Adnan’s landscapes are from a different place in time. The Lebanese- American paints scenes from her life in Beirut, Paris and California.
“Adnan drew inspiration from her cultural roots in Lebanon for both her writings and paintings,” said Susan May, artistic director at White Cube.Her artworks depict the natural world in the eyes of the 90-year-old painter.
Starting with simple sceneries, Adnan then creates abstract works with overlapping shapes and horizontal color blocks that separate the sky, sea and earth through colors.
The multitalented artist, also a writer and educator, is currently exhibiting 19 artworks in Hong Kong that she produced in 2014 and 2015. The exhibition is her first in the city.
May said Adnan’s written and visual works are independent of each other.
“When Adnan was teaching at a small college in California in the 1950s, she was encouraged to paint by the arts department head,” said the London- based art director.
Adnan wrote about Lebanon’s civil war in Sitt Marie Rose, a novel that won the France-Pays Arabes Award in 1977, followed by a poem The Arab Apocalypse in 1989.
Adnan started out in her art with small pieces of linen. As she gained more confidence, she proceeded to large canvases and developed her visual vocabulary with bold abstractions and a vibrant palette. “Colors exist for me as entities in themselves, as metaphysical beings, like the attributes of god exist as metaphysical entities,” Adnan said.
She
boasts of a multicultural background, her mother being a Greek Christian and her father a Syrian Muslim.
Adnan was born in Beirut and her linguistic proficiency takes in Turkish, Greek, Arabic, French and English.
From Beirut, she moved to California, living there for about 50 years. She is now based in Paris.
Adnan sees herself as an Arab- American artist, not as an American- Arab. Despite her diverse cultural background, the painter has a clear position relating to her national identity.
“Your identity is a mixture of things,” Adnan said in an interview in 2012. “It is your memory of your background, your family and your own life. Yet in the end, you choose how you want to live.”
Adnan’s depiction of Mount Tamalpais in California is among her most significant works of art.
Aside from her paintings, she has also created several pieces of geometric blocks as a form of self-expression. All her artworks are untitled.
“Painting is close to poetry. It is a kind of poetry expressed visually,” Adnan said, “It has to be spontaneous and rapid, at least in my case.”
May said Adnan engages in landscapes of the immediate environment, especially Mount Tamalpais in California.
“For nearly half a century, she had a profound engagement with this mountain,” May added.
While her paintings are deemed similar to the landscapes of two late masters, French-Russian artist Nicolas de Stael and Swiss-German painter Paul Klee, Adnan actually chooses how she wants to paint.
“I write what I see, I paint what I am,” she once said. She taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael in California from 1958 to 1972, and began painting abstract art pieces in the early 1960s.
Adnan first hugged the limelight when her artworks were exhibited at Documenta 13 in 2012 in Germany. The following year, she won the California Book Award for her collection Sea and Fog.
Eighteen of her latest paintings are currently on display until August 29 at the White Cube in Central.
Source: www.thestandard.com.hk