In Painting Ethiopia, art historian Raymond Silverman explores the remarkable work and career of Ethiopian artist Qes Adamu Tesfaw. As Silverman reveals through insightful analysis and in-depth conversations with the artist spanning over eleven years, Qes Adamu’s work defies easy categorization. He is at once a devotional painter, a popular painter, a traditional painter, a genre painter, a history painter, and a commercial painter. On one hand, he is an artist schooled in the philosophy and aesthetics of a fifteen-hundred-year-old tradition associated with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. His artwork, on the other hand, is often eccentric and individual.