This is the second library text written by New York based About Art Guest Contributor Gracie Newman.
Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was a celebrated Lebanese-American poet, novelist, and painter. Her vibrant body of work illustrates how an artist’s spirit can be manifested across genres; both her paintings and prose are intimate, emotive, and transcendent. Her visual work often consists of abstracted landscapes, evocative marriages of simple geometry and pure pigment. Her texts have a similarly lyrical aesthetic and metaphysical bent, though they are often darker and denser than her paintings. It is interesting to read Adnan’s work and study her paintings together, as the pictorial language and ekphrastic text illuminate and complicate one another.
My favorite work of Adnan’s is Sea and Fog, a small book of prose and poetry published in 2012. In elegant, devastating language, the natural landscape becomes a locus for profound meditations on memory and the human spirit. Each line is vividly visual and emits the same cosmic reverberations as Adnan’s paintings. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite sections below:
“The Sea is not having nightmares about the Milky Way. Coppery clouds descend through a passage down to the coast. The hills loom in a steely blue color that can slay the heart by its beauty.”
(p. Sea and Fog, 8)
