Untitled 2015

This untitled painting is by Etel Adnan, we’re not sure when she made it but I imagine it was during one of her times in Beirut or Paris. The composition is made of blocks of color, stacked like geologic forms or maybe a landscape remembered in dreams. It looks like she has spread the paint thickly with a palette knife, layering color on color, building a kind of surface topography. I wonder if she mixed the colours directly on the canvas. There’s a yellow circle floating high up in the purple sky—a sun? A moon? These juxtapositions are so strange and kind of delicious. I can imagine Adnan quietly working away at this painting, responding to the emerging composition with subtle adjustments. This feels like a kind of conversation between the artist and the painting, each influencing the other in a slow dance of colour and form. Painters like Adnan remind us of the possibilities of thinking through color.