y Daddy was an Oil Man.

I remember the Oil Fields. I wish I had pictures of them the way they were. It isn't politically correct to say so nowadays, but it was a beautiful sight driving across West Texas at night with the landscape lit up from one horizon to the other by huge gas flares. There was no place to put it, so they just burned it off. It was oil they were after, not gas. In winter, herds of cattle would stand under the giant flames to keep warm. We didn't think of it as pollution. We didn't think of it as waste. There was such an abundance nobody thought it could ever be used up. It was romance. It was Art. O tempora, o mores.

Daddy nearly discovered the East Texas Oil Field, which in its day was the largest in the whole world. But the Chief Geologist at Shell told him there wasn't any oil around Conroe, and he figured an educated man like that ought to know. His friend Hugh Roy was not daunted by superior education. He got somebody else to partner with him. There was oil at Conroe after all. Everybody had a well in the back yard. This is true. You can find pictures of it in history books. They couldn't grow grass because everything was coated with black goo. They called it "Black Gold".

He finally struck oil at Raccoon Bend on the Brazos. By the early fifties he had ten wells, but they dried up. Hugh Roy got rich, built a large university, and named all the buildings on the campus after members of his family. That's the way the Oil Business was ... great wealth or great disappointments. The playing of the game was the important thing.

My Daddy was an Oil Man and I'm an artist. It's not as different as you might believe.

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