Etel Adnan, the Eternal Voyager
by
Born in 1925 in Beirut, Etel Adnan has witnessed the successive waves of hope and despair that the Mediterranean city has experienced. At the turn of the century, the forgotten capital became a central port, the center of the French-designed Levantine mandate, and a battlefield for global wars. It saw the rise of experimental, intellectual, and artistic movements, influenced by Paris but also rooted in pre-Islamic and Sufi art and thought. Adnan, the daughter of a broken, mixed-culture couple, was a keen student of poetry and philosophy who set out to learn, write, teach, and travel, amassing a rich literary and historical knowledge. Her life was marked by hardship and sadness, but she maintained a candid thirst for the sea, in which she enjoyed losing herself from early childhood, and for knowledge. She traveled to Algeria, where she connected Souffle poetry magazine with the budding Shi’r movement led by Adonis and Yusuf el-Khal in Beirut; Paris, where she studied with Gaston Bachelard; and The University of California, Berkeley, where she began a doctorate in philosophy in 1955. Then she quit and spent seven months wandering in Mexico. When her mother died in 1958, she settled in a small town north of San Francisco to teach philosophy of art at Dominican College, where Ansel Adams had studied. There, between the misty mountain chains and the vastness of the ocean, she found the uneasy serenity that only exiles know. That is when she began to paint, at the age of 34, encouraged by artist Ann O’Hanlon, who founded the college’s art department. She picked up some crayons, oil paint, and a palette knife, and created elemental compositions where squares in primary hues stretched onto mysterious liquid planes, like the open landscapes of California.
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