0.35 Richard stout, b. 1934  (Page 3/4)

On teaching and travel

I continued teaching at the Museum school and met Anne Winkler in the spring of 1964. Meredith Long by that time was in his new building on San Felipe, and I was painting. I was making lots of trips to Mexico at this time; a lot of my paintings for this period responded to the mystical, mythical quality of the Mexican landscape as I saw it because landscape has always been a factor in my work to a certain degree.

I had three or four dates with Anne and then I went away to Europe for four months. I borrowed money to go to Europe and I had some contacts there, so I was able to stay with people lots of places. And I took James Chillman’s advice to his students that if you go to Europe [you should] spend half your time in Italy. And if you go to Europe for one day, spend your morning in Rome. So I spent two months out of that four months in Italy, three weeks in Florence and three weeks in Rome, and it was great. I came back and Anne in the meantime had moved nearby and we started seeing each other and within the year we were married.

When I realized I was going to get married I went to the University of Houston and asked Dr. Peter Guenther if there might be a position out there and he said, “Well, I could take you part-time now and when you get your masters we will hire you full-time.” This was sort of a gentleman’s agreement: I like you; we’ll do this; it’s fine. It doesn’t work that way anymore. Anyway, I taught freshman drawing and painting and I had interesting students, right from the very beginning—many of whom I still see. That first year I was still at the Museum school because Lowell Collins had quit so I was running it for a year or two years. Ruth Uhler asked me to do it, and of course I did.

Then I had to start working on my masters to get my job nailed down with University of Houston, and so teaching 18 hours at U of H and taking 18 hours at University of Texas I commuted two and sometimes three times a week to Austin. On a few occasions I would take Guenther with me, because he was working on his doctorate at the same time, and on a few occasions would stop by and visit Kathleen Blackshear and Ethel Spears in Navasota; Kathleen had been my art history teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago—a brilliant painter and then a wonderful teacher who was the principal person in these areas at the Art Institute of Chicago from the late 20s until her retirement in the mid-60s. I was hired full-time by the University in 1968.

I became aware but not absolutely involved with lots of things that were happening in the art world in Houston by virtue of the fact that I was busy and I couldn’t get away to the normal watering holes that other people could get to. Louisiana Gallery was continuing—it was moved to Kipling Street, I believe. Out west, Kathryn had re-opened the New Arts in an old house on Audubon and there she showed various people. The David Gallery was brilliant—it was run by someone who was very interested in a new way of thinking about visual arts and who opened her arms to possible wonderful things—and wonderful things did happen at the David Gallery. And a building designed by Charles Tapley on San Felipe just a few blocks east of Meredith Long, it was probably the most important scene in Houston at that time.