Member - Nancy Adler

NANCY J. ADLER is a Professor of International Management at the Faculty of Management, McGill University in Montreal, Canada . She received her B.A. in economics, M.B.A. and Ph.D. in management from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

Artist's Statement

Allowing a painting to be born is to stand in awe of one of life's most beautiful mysteries. Invited by the blank paper, the best of my intentions and experience enter into a dance with uncontrollable coincidence. Neither the process nor the resulting art are ever completely defined. Which way will the colors run? What surprises will the ink reveal as it, ever so gently, touches the paint. I purposely use water-based media that don't stay put where I place them on the paper. There's never any illusion that I control the process. I only enter the dance; paintings emerge out of the dance. For me, being an artist is about giving birth to the possibilities inherent in mystery. Creation-whether on a canvas of words or visual images-is, in fact, about relearning to dance with god.

I have had many mentors: some known personally to me, many of whom I've studied with. They include visual artists (Jeanne Carbonetti, Elizabeth Galante, Frances Grafton, John Leonard, Lew Yung-Chien, Tony Onley, and Heather Yamada), poets (David Whyte), musicians (Tim Wheater and Ben Zander), and spiritual leaders (Andre DeBecq, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and Lise Sparrow). I draw inspiration from such artists as Chagall, Jamali, and Kandinski. During his lifetime, many of Marc Chagall's contemporaries wrote him off for having refused the avant-garde's invitation to create art strictly for art's sake. They dismissed Chagall as a colorful, friendly painter whose art simply conveyed his joie de vivre . Today, in a major retrospective of Chagall's work that opened recently in Paris, critics no longer write him off, but rather acclaim the striking humanity of his paintings, and offer him their highest praise, "Marc Chagall gave this nihilist century a worthy concept: hope."

In the midst of chaos, how do we see beauty? Surrounded by turbulence, how do we discover simplicity? Living together on one planet, how do we simultaneously celebrate our collective humanity and the unique resonance of our individual voices? Given the power of analytic understanding-driven as it is to claim life as knowable -how do we re-recognize the unknown and unknowable ? How do we surrender to the humility it takes to stand in awe of life's mysteries? Where do we stand when we stand in awe?

"Chagall: Known and Unknown" an exhibition of 180 works of Marc Chagall at the Grand Palais in Paris through June 23, 2003 . After Paris , the exhibition moves to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

From Alan Riding's "Anxiety and Hope in a Mystical Fusion: Paris Show Offers Chagall's Intense Humanism Beyond the Joie de Vivre " ( New York Times, April 22, 2003 : p. B5).