Untitled, c. 1985

The immense peaks and sublime setting of the Northern California mountain range are rendered in an abstract and intimately scaled composition. Mount Adnan’s painting of Mount Tamalpais, the highest mountain in California’s Marin County, is composed of thick swaths and splotches of green, blue, and white paint that make it difficult to distinguish between ground, peak, and sky. Tamalpais has been the subject of Adnan’s work—which spans painting and poetry—for over 30 years. Completed in single sittings and during all seasons from her former home at the base of Mount Tamalpais, Adnan’s numerous paintings of the mountain can be seen as a pictorial diary that serially documents a specific place over time, and as such the paintings reflect on the impermanence and perpetual flux of nature. For Adnan, an exiled Lebanese American artist who first settled in the Bay Area in the 1950s, the repeated depiction of the provincial mountain in her adopted home also comments on how the formation of self and identity can be tied to the mediation of geography and landscape.