JOE MCNAIR ON TYRONE GETER

JOSEPH MCNAIR·TUESDAY, MAY 3, 2016

Joe McNair, I will always remember the great and turbulent time during which I was lucky to have met you at Ahmadu Bello University and we called each other friends. Our time as creatives in Nigeria was historic. I will always be grateful for that brief period that you convinced me to sing.

Maurice Dennis in his definition of Nontraditionism has told us "We should remember that a picture -- before being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story -- is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a particular pattern."

My friend Tyrone Geter has infused on a stretched canvas, a joy measured by the quality of something rather than its quantity from that experienced in listening to natural sounds, such as the murmur of a stream... Similarly modern painters provide ... artistic sensations due exclusively to the harmony of lights and shades and independent of the subject depicted in the picture. I grew up with Geter during that eternity when he and I spent our formative years in Nigeria sucking up the culture. I remember Tyrone and his wonderful wife Hauwa caring for me when I got sick with Typhoid. They literally moved me into their house and nursed me back to health. I was feverishly hallucinating a lot then.

We fought and argued often on how to represent something, he in his painting, me in my writing. I was a hot headed know it all back then. With my own ideas of how something might be. We argued over the way I was poetically describing one of his creations. I saw a young woman stripped of all her innocence and wanted to portray that as so. He thought I should have more care in how I described Nigerian women. Even then he was advising that I tend to the scripted lights and shades, independent of the figurative rather than sexualizing subjects. I don’t think we ever had that conversation again.

 He has grown into his own work, into his own harmony of lights and shades. He is able to feel the beauty.