Art professor encourages individuality through art

Tara Geer, CC ’93, MFA ’97, and adjunct assistant professor of visual arts at Columbia, provides sanctuary for the unexplainable image. 

Perched on the third floor of Riverside Beer Distributors on 133rd Street across from Fairway her studio looks like a three-dimensional notebook margin, where the texture and line-quality of Geer’s thoughts are voiced in charcoal, pencil, and chalk. Four of her works are currently on view at the gallery at The LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. 

Having graduated from Columbia for both her bachelor’s and then her master’s, she noted that her MFA work at Columbia only gave her enough time to understand the problem she had been seeking to solve in her work. A highly skilled drawer, she felt that much of what she wanted to represent was getting edited out and that her concrete drawings did not tackle what interested her more: the things that did not make sense.

When asked whether a formal education in art history benefited her, she acknowledged the comfort that an intellectual degree provided her, yet she denounced art history’s tendency to dissect artist’s ideas.

Greer’s large-scale forms obliquely represent the titles with which they are paired, such as “Horseman, Frayed Sock, and Whale.”  This ambiguity acknowledges the artist’s struggle with representing unexplainable visual information.  In fact, Geer stated that in drawing she searches for something that she doesn’t “know how to put into words.” 
 
While studying both art and art history as an undergraduate, she intended to stray from artistic practice towards a stable career. Yet ultimately, she did not conform at the expense of her inner artistic voice. Even when working at other occupations, she would find herself following right-brained impulses like gluing buttons on a coffee mug at two o’clock in the morning.    

Since those days, Geer has enjoyed success as an artist by spending the last 10 years working in her studio.  As one who both practices and teaches art, Geer advocates individuality at all levels. She has taught kindergarteners, advanced students, and even the celebrity director André Gregory. 

Currently, she teaches basic drawing at Columbia.  According to Geer, the challenge for the beginner drawer is to have confidence and to train the mind to translate visual information into a drawing. In order to quiet anxieties of ability, she will ask her students to create left-handed “blind contour” drawings in which the student draws an object without being allowed to look at the page.  When aiding more experienced students, she strives to encourage the success of their individual goals. According to Geer, for the many different types of people in the world, there are equally as many kinds of art. Just as bad public accountants can exist, so, too, can bad artists.  Yet, she advocates any artistic practice that brings pleasure to the creator. 

Remarking that even the greatest artists fail as they experiment and learn, she said, “The definition of anyone’s particularity is that it is not necessarily going to be visible to the outside world.”  Therefore, she encourages young artists not to back off from their creative drives, and “to honor what they are drawn to.” 

Practicing her teaching, Geer acts on her visceral reaction to return to drawing, a medium that some might consider the drafting tools for the greater art of painting. For her, however, paper provides that boundless stage upon which she explores her truest artistic representations.