0.32 Mildred dixon sherwood, b. 1914

Learning how

I actually started studying at the Museum when I was a child, and then when I was grown up and I became serious I studied also at the Museum after I studied at Newcomb [Art School].

I continued painting and then my husband and I spent a year in Europe. We spent half the time in Greece and I painted a lot of pictures of Greece…then we spent the next six months in London and I had a show in London of the paintings I did in Greece. I was mainly influenced by not the light so much, but the sun. I was always amused that they’d say so much in England about the light in Greece—and I think it’s because it’s so cloudy in England. So I was never impressed with the light because the light to me was not a lot different from Houston. The sun was what affected me most. I painted quite a few pictures with the sun in them, but I sold most of them in my [London] show. And then when I came home I had a show at Meredith Long’s.

Taking it seriously

We lived in London in the 60s and I did a lot of drawings, but I’ve never shown [them]. They’re sort of fantasy drawings. I always thought in a way, I wish I had been painting later because there’s more interest in art now than there was then. There was just Bute Gallery and the Cushmans had a gallery, and it wasn’t taken as seriously. Often I think back and feel like I wasn’t taken as seriously as an artist because of the times as I would have been later. It was sort of like it was [thought of as]a hobby—it wasn’t a hobby to me, but to people I knew, friends, they considered it, “Isn’t it nice, you paint.”

I had quite a bit of success. I won a lot of prizes and I sold paintings, but still it was just like, “Oh, how nice you can do that.” Looking back I rather resent that. Of course, this was before the de Menils came and the Contemporary Arts Museum hadn’t been started. I remember when it (CAM) was started and that was nice and helped a lot. They had sort of like a lending library. You’d put your paintings in it and people could rent them by the month or week, or whatever.