0.22 Leila mcconnell, b. 1927

Always an artist

When I was a senior in high school I went to the Museum of Fine Arts and took Robert Joy’s class. I was 16 years old and very silly—going to teas and coffees every Saturday—so I don’t really remember my experience with him, but I did take his class. Anything I wanted to do—sewing, whatever—my mother would see that I had the supplies to do it. People ask, “When did you start [painting]?” and I say, “I never did start. I just always took it.” I guess I’ve never thought of myself as anything else [but an artist]. There’s a point when you’re in school and studying and everything—you know, sometimes people are perpetual students—and they’ve never decided that they are an artist or a painter and somehow or another it has to click in your head that you’re through with school and you know what you’re doing—that you’re not dependent on anybody else for what you do. I think I always had it!

We came to Houston when I was six, and I was at Montrose Elementary School in the first grade. We had done some watercolor paintings on old yellow paper—all sort of pink and blue—and the teacher put them up on the blackboard. Then one day she was pointing out something and she pointed to one of them, which was mine, and said it was somebody else’s. And I said, “No—it’s mine.” She said no. It was the first time that I had ever encountered injustice. And I am still painting what I call sky paintings, so I don’t know if that’s related or not, but I think it may be.

I never really liked anybody who painted on my paintings or touched them, and Frances Skinner (at the Museum school) would work on people’s paintings, just to show them what the painting needed or something; a few strokes or something like that. But I never wanted anybody to do that to my painting. It was mine. I certainly wondered what I would do if she tried it with me, and she never did.

Student days

I studied architecture at Rice. I would have studied art if they had had an art department, but I studied architecture and never regretted it because I thought it was a really good background for art also. And Mr. [James] Chillman was my greatest influence. He taught freehand drawing where you draw with charcoal and you’re looking at plaster casts—what you’re doing is you’re learning to see realistically. And I remember one day crying because it was so hard, and you know, he could be very kind but he was the professor. He was a friend in a way, but he was [also]the teacher. Then I had art history, architecture history, watercolors, design and freehand drawing, all from Mr. Chillman. I consider him the greatest influence on me as far as taste and design sense—things like that. He was half the time at Rice and half the time as head of the Museum.

I graduated in ’48-’49, a B.A. then a B.S. in architecture. And I had taken a year off in 1946, just because it was so intense, you know. My background at Rice was very realistic and I could paint anything I could see, so that’s the way I started out. In 1949 I visited the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco for the summer term. I had planned to go to Stanford, and when I got out there I thought, “This looks just like what I’ve been doing at the Museum—the work I saw there.” So then I visited the California School of Fine Arts and boy—it was built around a courtyard—and they were having a student show and the paintings that I saw there were abstract, and I thought, “This is where I need to be.” All the famous California painters and teachers were there. Mark Rothko came out for the summer term and I painted some apples—a white background and green and red apples—and he said, “Why don’t you do another painting and abstract that?” I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, do flat patterns of color.” So that’s what I did. I did another painting, and I’ve still got those two paintings. That experience of just those couple of months was what I wanted and needed to shake me up a little bit.