0.23 Herb mears, 1923-1999

Transplanted texan

I came to Houston in May of 1951. I’d been living in Europe for about three years and David Adickes and I had met in Paris and decided to open an art school in Houston. He came back maybe six months earlier than I, and we corresponded some and then I came down in May. He picked me up at the old Union Station and we drove to Main Street and went to a barbeque that night. There were a lot of people interested in the arts then that we met very soon because we started building on this place on Truxillo Street—an old building, an old wooden structure. David lived downstairs and we tried to make the upstairs into a studio.

Eventually we opened the studio—it was called the Studio of Contemporary Arts. We had half a dozen students and they’d come and we’d work, talk to them and so on, but it was pretty beastly because of the summer. In the summer of ’51 we had a terrifically hot summer—really awful. There was absolutely no air conditioning in this place, and no insulation in it, so it was horrible, just horrible. We determined to get the hell out of there and move to another place on the corner of Main and McGowan—a huge old building, a wonderful old building—and that’s where we theoretically were going to have classes. I don’t think we ever did. I think we gave up. By that time we were both broke and needed jobs.

Part-time artist

Dave answered an ad for some kind of job in the oil patch and I went along with him, and the woman at the agency said, “Are you interested in a job?” I said yes, and she said, “What can you do?” I said I was a draftsman; somebody had told me to say draftsman, but I didn’t even know what “draftsman” meant. I filled out the application, and they sent me right away to the Houston Lighting&Power Company, and I got a job doing map drafting in the engineering department and loved it. I was good at it. I could always print very well—very small—the way they needed.

So I worked there, and David worked at a place called something like “Exploding Guns” Atlas—they’d send down bullets through the casings to let the oil flow—so he was involved in that, and I had met Ava Jean and then she left for the whole summer in Oslo. Ava Jean was born in California, but she lived here after she was seven years old, and we met right away—she was the second employee at the Contemporary Arts Museum. Dave and I went down right after I came and gave a demonstration of silk-screen printing. I met Ava Jean, then she left, then came back, and we were married in December of 1951. We married in the chapel at St. John’s on Westheimer.

We didn’t have any shows around that time, but we were painting and talking to people about it and so on—so I was terrifically occupied with this eight-hour job and learning about the city. Believe it or not, I didn’t know how to drive. I had never driven. When you live in New York or Paris, you don’t need a car. So, it wasn’t until I got married that my mother-in-law started teaching me how to drive and then Ava Jean, we bought a car, and my mother-in-law had to drive it home! Ava Jean taught me how to drive going around and around on the Rice parking field. So after that, I had to learn about the city, you know. I had to learn streets…everything.