Milly's Writings on Art

MILLY'S WRITINGS ON ART

Seeing

I see life's design a spotlit collage:

dried rosebuds lost of scent, a bi-colored fresh azalea in a plastic bowl, the pink azalea with a red magenta spotted center radiating leopard light, new green leaves pleading "plant me in the earth". I will grow and heal you by your glance, will connect you to everything accidental which talks to you of life: the little sea-shell nestling in the coiled pink weather-worn fossil rescued from the shore of Lago di Garda. I am collecting evidence of this long chain which has been my life, forging now my last links of a life of art, a nanosecond in the living book of time encapsulated in a flake of paint which has peeled and sprung from a hard surface.

- Myril Adler

Celebrating the Creative Process

I believe every human being is endowed with a creative potential. Since 1941 I have taught the visual arts in the most varied circumstances to people of every age - from pre-school to the eighties - to those who come with the natural talent of future Picassos or Da Vinvis, and to those whose first self-introduction is, "I can't draw a straight line."

I have been art teacher to the poor and to the rich, to the healthy and to the physically, mentally and emotionally handicapped. Since we moved to Briarcliff in 1955 I have been able to provide in my studios an environment, facilities and techniques to nurture and promote this belief in human creativity. Each technique is a discipline to be mastered, but always and foremost leaving room for the individual's personality, perception, fantasy and beliefs.

To engage in the creative process, to submit to the arduous, inspiring and sometimes frustrating pursuit of making an idea or perception or experience visible to others, is an act of sharing which provides its own unique rewards.

- Myril Adler, 1989

Fifty Years - Fifty Faces

Plowing through fifty years of images to cull fifty faces has been a daunting time travel: a voyage around the many worlds I have explored and inhabited.

Faces were the beginning, often the face as seen by a child, looming, blotting out the horizon, mysterious landscape of dreams, thoughts, feelings. Capturing a "likeness" was comparatively easy, but in my earliest paintings and drawings I strove to reach beyond likeness: to essence.

Challanged by a changing milieu, as well as new media techniques, I have spent long years practicing and teaching new approaches to a variety of concepts and subjects. Faces, however, have continued to fascinate me, and in 1983, with a growing awareness of the homeless, began a series of monotypes, already numbering 250, of "Faces of New York". Scrutinizing (sometimes furtively, sometimes openly,) these strangers to whom I was drawn, I would later try to evoke these people in my studio by choreographing lines that probe, through constellations of movement. I have had to reach into the many facets of our human condition: rage and outrage, dignity, frustration, despair, surprise, joy, hope, empathy and love.

For the past year I moved from discipline of defining a multitude, to that of concentrating on the many-sideness of one face, a friend, Ken Heyman, the internationally known photographer, who has joined the large group of family, friends and strangers who have patiently undergone my close and caring observation, while I probe, describe, transcribe and recreate.

I keep returning to faces as a never completely solved nor understood mystery of who we are.

- Myril Adler - Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. 9/10/91 - Exhibition October 10 -November 2, 1991 - Fine Arts Gallery Westchester Community College, SUNY

I was smitten by the alchemy of intaglio printmaking when at Pratt Graphic Center in 1960. I first witnessed billows of acrid yellow erupting from a 3 to 1 solution of nitric acid biting a zinc plate. The making of prints almost became a by-product of the excitement generated by the stressing and erosion of various metals by acids. I felt that I was colaborating with nature itself: the pocking and wearing down of accretions, the power of water and wind, the bubbles and patterns created by immiscible liquids. The prints become almost shadows echoing the plates, a vast vocabulary that is the underlying drumbeat for images that range from surreal photo-realism to computer generated images in which I was able to use the pixel base to produce an electronic line completely different from that produced by traditional methods.

- Myril Adler, October 1995