Untitled Colour Study, 1990

Etel Adnan was a playwright, journalist, academic, and painter who was renowned not only for her intensely energetic and bold paintings, but her poetry, plays, and philosophical meditations on aesthetics. Born in Beirut, she became an important figure within the Arab-American community.

Adnan took a unique approach to her landscape oil paintings, characteristically limiting herself to only a few colors and laying thick swaths of paint on her canvasses using a palette knife, rather than a brush. Although she tended to work on a small scale, her highly abstract landscapes were nevertheless composed of bold, sometimes monolithic shapes. This approach was informed by her philosophical and spiritualized conception of colors, which she described as “entities in themselves,” having almost divine qualities. As an artist, she thus sought to give physical expression to these metaphysical beings.

In her 1986 book, Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Etel Adnan argued that nature constitutes an important dimension of thinking. Her broader oeuvre stand as a testament to the way in which she sought to attend to the “spirit” of the landscapes and places that were her subjects, as well as the colors through which such a spirit can be expressed.(Artist Website).