ABOUT THE ARTIST
My mother once told me, sometimes she felt like she “didn’t have no life.” That statement, made with so much honesty, conviction, and passion, yet free of even a hint of self-pity has throughout my career been one of the guiding principles of not only how I live my life, and relate to other people, but has also profoundly influenced the philosophy of my art.
In the early 1900s when she grew up, life was a struggle. Survival was day-to-day and filled with the perils of discrimination, poverty, illiteracy and a host of other dangers inherited from a lifetime of being poor, black and undereducated. Yet she survived and passed her legacy of love, compassion, hope and a sense of “doing the right thing” on to her children.
Years later, on a break from my first year at Ohio University where I was only the second black student in the school’s history to receive an MFA in painting from Ohio University, I showed her a still life paintings of bottles that I was very proud of. My mother looked at it and said, “Who it going to help and if it ain’t going to help nobody, why you doing it?” My mother was more concerned with what my life would contribute than the medium I would use to live it. I took her question to heart and returned to college understanding my art and myself differently.
After college, I relocated to my wife’s home of Nigeria. For seven years I lived, drew and painted among the Hausa and Fulani people and other local groups of Northern Nigeria. During this period, I created numerous paintings that captured the richness and depth of the cultures of the region. The experience taught me to understand the nature of life in a society where life and nature are sometimes both hard and cruel, but always in conversation. Further, I experienced “a lesson in the creative process that no art school could ever teach me.”
Those years in Nigeria proved to be a turning point in my development and the most important influence in my life and art. Like my mother’s teachings, Nigeria was one of life’s great lessons for me. Ever since, my work has prioritized showing what it means “to be human” a global environment.
My mother taught me that the only way to salve a personal pain was to heal the collective. During my entire career, I’ve focused on the struggles of people of color, women and children particular and everyone else in general . Along with our struggles, my work aims to embody our dreams, love, compassion, hope, justice, and perseverance—concepts I learned from my mother.
The past few years, my work has grown more concerned with climate change the environment, and what we will leave behind for future generations. My use of different materials, from charcoal, to torn paper, found objects, and natural elements like tree limbs, serve to depict people as complex on the canvas as we exist in the world. My use of materials and how I blur the lines between figurative and my own spiritual reality, is one way to remind the viewer that it's our collectivity that places the impossible within our reach.
Tyrone Geter
