This is the first book to present a full account of Adnan's fascinating life and work. Tackling the complexities of her subject with skill and insight, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie unpacks Adnan's multi-layered career to capture the full scope of her artistic endeavours and impressive achievements.

Etel Adnan (b.1925) is a Lebanese-American poet, essayist and visual artist. This will be the first book to present a full account of Adnan?s fascinating life and work, using the drama of her biography, the complexity of her identity, and the cosmopolitan nature of her experience to illuminate the many layers and dimensions of her paintings and their progress over several crucial decades. Adnan came relatively late to painting - her first images were created in the mid-1960s in response to the Californian landscape. Her vocabulary of lines, shapes and colours has changed little since then, and yet there are huge variations in mood, texture, composition and material. Similarly, there is a balance between understanding her paintings as pure abstractions, emulating the shape of thought, and seeing them for the actual landscapes of the many places Adnan has loved, embraced and responded to. Tackling the complexities of her subject with skill and insight, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie unpacks Adnan''s multi-layered career to capture the full scope of her artistic endeavours and impressive achievements.

'Etel Adnan's vivid and stark paintings explore elemental landscapes. Her oeuvre is born of a unique sense of place and displacement, and both infuse her paintings. Her art will appear to be both concrete and abstract, and might represent presence, or the presence of lost objects. As both a poet and a painter, Etel Adnan seeks to establish languages that entail the visual, say, fusing "son" and "sun". Her imagination is phenomenal.'