I post on Instagram here: 

 

 

 

I started out drawing details that got overlooked-- backpack folds, small shapes of space. Things that don't exactly make sense. Things I would edit out if I were trying to make a recognizable object. I was drawing by observation –I still draw by observation– I just don’t seem to be looking where other people look.

 

I am interested in this kind of seeing --not of a world of known, knowable, sure things-- but a world brimming with raw sensation. I am interested in the kind of seeing we do before we recognize something. A groping. I try to draw what I see but cannot explain.

 

 

Now, decades of drawing in, I stand in my darkening studio in West Harlem, in a sort of doomed world, and still want to look at those things outside of the assurances of language.  There are too many details, though, to even begin to get, that unseal from their  objects, and ride into the drawings as if on horseback, or on bikes with pedals spinning. The more I draw, the more the drawing opens up, as if under a magnifying lens-- webs of barely visible lines, thick, tangling blackness, boomimg. I have to draw towards the bits I can make out. The drawings clamour at me. The world is so full of life.  I am not sure what I am drawing anymore. I have the feeling I can't draw fast enough to get it all down.

 

 

The drawing takes over, pulls, with wide hands, me in, like a commanding dance partner.  I just follow.  I don't seem to be drawing the outside world then, but nor do I feel like I'm making it up-- it's as if I'm drawing something just beyond the surface of the page.  I'm drawing something I feel there, insistent, impatient, almost bullying.  There is a wilderness at knee height i can feel.

I find drawing beautiful because I can erase, but never entirely.  Drawings show their own history, all their mistakes, all hesitation, or anger, or grief, or quietness, or joy-- all the precise moments that it took are registered.  Drawings can never quite cover up. The are not still, or exactly finished. They say, we are never done with this life --while still here, doing what we can-- are we?
 

I can only explain what I see by drawing it.

 

Tara Geer is a drawer-- she makes, teaches, and studies drawing. It is her primary medium, and passion. Her drawings are in numerous international private collections, and in the public collections of the Morgan Museum & Library, the Parrish Museum, and The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation Museum. Her work with the 5-woman activist group, Victory Garden, is collected by, and exhibited byThe Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the past few years, that work has also been shown at the NY Historical Society, The Canadian Museum in Toronto, and the Beinecke Library at Yale University among others. Shes had solo drawing shows in LA and in NY. Most recently, at Planthouse Gallery in ‘22 in Chelsea, at Guild Gallery in ‘23 on Canal Street, and at the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton this past summer. She has exhibited drawings at Hesse Flatow, Jason McCoy, Tibor de Nagy, Glenn Horowitz, The National Arts Club, Steven Harvey, Aran Cravey, Flowers, the Four Seasons, and The Drawing Center registry --among others. There are 2 books about her drawings; Carrying Silence: The Drawings of Tara Geer; and New York Studio Conversations. She teaches drawing, and talk about drawings in 2 documentaries: Before and After Dinner, and Generosity of Eye. For 2023 press, check out ArtNet, “Artist Tara Geer Goes Through Hundreds of Pencils a Day Creating Charcoal Drawings in Her Harlem Studio, Dog by Her Side” by  Eileen Kinsella; and BOMB, Interview with Rachel Cohen. She has been teaching for 3 decades –to children with visual processing challenges, museum educators, blocked artists, doctors at Yale, poets at the Homeschool, and –since 2012– in the Art and Art Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She was funded by The National Science Foundation, in collaboration with a team of neuroscientists, to study Harnessing the Power of Drawing for the Enhancement of Learning, and is now researching visual learning in the Boston Public schools. She has a BA and MFA from Columbia University where she had a full teaching fellowship and graduated Magna Cum Laude, and Phi Beta Kappa. She has received the Louis Sudler Prize, the Joan Sovern prize, BlogHer Voice of the Year, and multiple residencies including at The MacDowell Colony. She founded and directs the grassroots groups, Action Potluck, & Sanctuary Neighborhoods. She posts on Instagram @tarawgeer