Etel Adnan, artist, Photo by P. K. via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
Etel Adnan did not make a splash in the art world until she was 87 years old, and that’s just fine with her. She has been busy.
The Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist is recognized in academic circles to be the most important Arab-American writer today, having written over a dozen books on love, war, and poetry. Born to a Greek mother and a Turkish father, Adnan was educated in French convent schools. She earned a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne before becoming a leading journalist for Al-Safa, a French newspaper published in Beirut. Rejecting all things French in 1955 because of their treatment of colonized people in the Mahgreb, she pursued graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. During this time, Adnan began to dabble in painting.
Most of her paintings are small and depict abstractions of the sun and mountains. As she explains it, her painting is “…the equivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words, but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.”
