The world of artist Adnan Charara is one of whimsy and color, intricately populated with doodle-like objects and humorous figures imbued with very serious and universal meanings.
A self-described “visual poet and philosopher,” Adnan spent two weeks with us in May, working alongside Master Printer Frank Janzen to experiment and create a series of miscellaneous fine-art prints.
Born in 1962 to Lebanese parents, Adnan grew up in Sierra Leone, attended boarding school in Lebanon and immigrated to the United States at age 19 to study architecture, for which he eventually received a B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art. Now with a studio in Detroit, Mich., Adnan devotes the bulk of his time to the task of creating in several media, including sculpture, drawing and painting.
“I never had doubt in my mind that I wanted to be an artist,” Adnan said, describing art as his mode of communication. “When I was little I used to hide under the bed to draw … I didn’t want to do my homework.”
Adnan said his mission as an artist is to speak about culture, and much of his work is a commentary on the experience of the immigrant, and the assimilating process of living in America.
Adnan also maintains a fascination with found objects, often random or discarded items that Adnan infuses with new life as imaginative sculpture pieces, sometimes serving as a starting point for new ideas in his two-dimensional work as well.
One of the first pieces Adnan created at Crow’s Shadow, titled “Falling in Love,” is a multicolored lithograph featuring a caricatured figure with wheels for feet, raised arm transformed into a long, flowering bough. It was based on an earlier drawing he created for his wife.
“My feet were wheels, because love just takes you, and your heart becomes like these beautiful flowers,” Adnan said. “It’s not by choice or anything.”
The illustration uses the same caricatured face he uses throughout the rest of his work, with a long, protruding nose and metropolitan buildings sprouting from the top of the head.
“I want people to view the face that I draw like a mirror. It could be adapted to any person — any race, any gender, any color,” Adnan said. “Because we all fall in love, we all feel pain. We’re all the same.”
Adnan said he was particularly inspired by the landscape of the local reservation — not to mention the fluttering magpies — and hoped to capture those impressions in his work at Crow’s Shadow.
“As soon as we got to Crow’s Shadow it was a beautiful night; the stars were so beautiful and it brought back my childhood,” Adnan said. “I came here with a different idea of what I wanted to do … but definitely the terrain and the area just overshadowed all the ideas that I wanted to work with.”
Adnan was a delight to work with and we feel indescribably fortunate to now consider him a friend of Crow’s Shadow.
For more information about Adnan and his work, you can visit his Web site at www.adnanchararastudio.com. Also, keep checking our own Web site as more information on his work becomes available.