Born 1925 - Passed Away 14 November 2021

It seems to me that painting goes further than poetry, reaches more abstract levels of being, is like a continuation of one's nervous system. I never know what it means."

Time: 1958. Place: The art department of Dominican College in San Rafael, California. Ann O'Hanlon, head of the department, had been noticing for several weeks the young woman who would quietly appear in one or another of the studios, for a while silently observe the students at work, and then as quietly disappear. Finally, one day and without introduction, O'Hanlon asked: "Why are you always here? " Etel Adnan, with a shy smile, replied: "Because I like it."

In the conservation that followed, O'Hanlon learned that Etel was a professor of aesthetics at the College, that she had never before watched artists at work, and that not since childhood had she herself explored the actual mechanics of the creative process.
"But how can you teach aesthetics if you've never tried it yourself?" the art professor asked.

"My mother always said I was clumsy with my hands," shrugged Etel.

"And you believed her?"

Had Etel's mother been another kind of person and had not so sweepingly discouraged her daughter's early attempts to create something with her hands, perhaps it would not have taken Etel so many years to find herself as an artist. She remarks now that she had "to fight a great deal just simply to get to point zero." Had she been a boy, she says, it would have been different and she would have been permitted the freedom to develop her creative potential she would have, in fact, been encouraged.

"Being a woman has taken a lot of energy out of me and, for a long while, kept my aspirations very much unrealized. I loved reading, but even that my mother opposed. With the impassioned weight of Greek drama, she would declare: 'People who read too much go mad! Girls were not supposed to bury themselves in books and the like - boys, yes, but not girls. 'It was strange; you would think she would have been pleased with a child who showed some talent. Her father had been a wood carver, and she often talked with pride about how beautifully he used to carve roses on furniture. I was her only child, and she probably wanted a boy. Maybe she harbored a certain guilt about that… maybe that's why she insisted on treating me so rigidly as a girl. And maybe that's what I resented and fought against most of all."

It was not until Etel was 33 that she had her introduction, through Ann O'Hanlon, to the experience of painting. She was given colored chalks and odd scraps of drawing paper and told, "Why don't you make your own Christmas cards this year?" From this casual beginning, Etel proceeded slowly. Until that point, all her training had followed another direction, that of literature and poetry. She had a degree from the Sorbonne, had pursued graduate studies at Berkeley and Harvard, and had taken her M.A. in poetry with a thesis on "The Value of the Poetic Experience." Her interest in painting through those years was confined to a general cultural approach, of comparing and relating the works of writers to those of artists. When she visited the Louvre to look at a Delacroix, for instance, it would only be to examine his aesthetic relevance to Baudelaire. She was 19 before she saw her first art book, an edition of Gauguin reproductions, and her first "live" painting in an exhibition. At Dominican, however, Etel began to concentrate on the artists, for and by themselves. She read their journals, studied their works - Da Vinci, Delacroix, Klee, Kandinsky, Pollock - separated literature from painting, and then put this new knowledge into her teaching courses at the college. Slowly, intellectually, she immersed herself in the history, philosophy, and techniques of art. And slowly, hesitantly, she took up the materials and began to explore these techniques herself.

One wonders if Etel would have widened her creative horizons to include the arts of painting, tapestry, and ceramics had she remained in France or in Lebanon. Perhaps partial credit for the eventual flowering of her talents as an artist should be given to her residence in America (and her absence from the land of her birth). True, she could have met up with an Ann O'Hanlon anywhere - such meetings are not dependent on locale. But there was more to her U.S. residence than that. In post-war America, art was at its most energetic, inventive period. Abstract expressionism had burst upon the scene, and New York had replaced Paris as the art capital of the world. Artists and critics alike were engaged in a lively and vocal research into new concepts of art; philosophical definitions of creative intention were volleyed back and forth. In this climate of intellectual and artistic revolution, Etel found stimulation and encouragement to venture into unexplored fields. The mood in that young and dynamic country was: "If you want to do something, do it," and it was infectious.

She had gone to America after completing her studies in France, intending only a brief visit. She stayed 17 years, struck by the immense space and physical grandeur of the country, and excited by the explosive energy she found in its arts, in its youth, in its jazz music. But she would never become an expatriate. Out of a need to nourish her roots, she would return every two years to spend her summers in Lebanon.

It was during a time of nostalgia and homesickness that Etel was moved to begin her experience in tapestry design. Remembering the Persian and Kurdish klims of her childhood - their brilliant colors, rough textures, geometric forms - and wanting to create similar coverings for her California floors, she conceived designs and took them to an artist-weaver to realize for her. She had begun painting, but avoided an exclusive commitment to that medium and continued to experiment in other materials. There was a season spent on enamel work; then another period on the raw, naked shapes of Japanese Raku pottery. And in 1967, shattered by the events of the disastrous June war in her homeland, and out of an immediate need to express her feelings, she produced a series of what she refers to as "drawings in time." In a linear, private dialogue, using extended-page Japanese notebooks, she combined selections from Arabic poetry (such as Badr Shaker El-Sayab's "The Drowned Sanctuary") with her own drawings.

When she returned to Lebanon permanently in 1972, Etel was best known as a poet and writer; until then, her literary production had overshadowed her artistic output. To earn her livelihood, she became a cultural editor for the French newspaper, L'Orient-Le Jour. In this work of reviewing art exhibitions and literary publications, however, words began to lose their creative magic and became a daily, imposed responsibility. Gradually, she turned more and more to painting for self-expression.

Now finding herself equally caught by both, art and literature, Etel questions which to give precedence to. She remarks: "I speak five languages - Greek, Turkish, French, Arabic, and English; and I write in two - French and English. And yet there remains in words a barrier to communication. Painting is something else, a language without a language problem - an unknown, abstract world with endless possibilities. There is in it a logic, a truth, a directness guided by intuition that remains elusive in words. If I want to express the spirit of a place, an emotion, an idea, I paint; if I want to describe or to comment on it, I write." by Helen Khal

Etel Adnan is a painter and a writer. Ask her which art form takes precedence in her life and she will respond with a careful thought: "I don't know; each provides its own avenue of expression. I need them both."

In painting Adnan for the past several years has been concentrating on a series of "books" - Japanese accordion fold-out books that stretch open for two meters or more and which she fills with watercolor, gouache and ink drawings. The style is a light, airy graphism - as though she were writing spontaneous notes to herself in a transparent color. Her previous work in oils was much more painterly, much more textural, dense and opaque in quality, much more formal in composition.

When I suggested that in these "books" she may be searching for a synthesis between writing and painting, Adnan smiled a quiet "no." As she once remarked some years ago: "Painting is something else, a language without a language problem - an unknown, abstract world with endless possibilities. There is in it logic, a truth, a directness guided by intuition that remains elusive in words. If I want to express the spirit of a place, an emotion, an idea, I paint; if I want to describe or comment on it, I write…"

The Daily Star, April 17, 1999