By Gene Mobley

I’ve known Gene Mobley since 1959, when my wife and I moved to Austin to continue our studies at the University of Texas, and we attended our frist Texas Spokes Sports Car Club meeting. Gene was driving a Porsche coupe. Both he and his wife Ann were architects. I was driving a MGA at the time, my first of several sports cars.

We became friends. After a few years, Gene stopped being an architect and became a full-time artist, who was a contract artist for Raymond Brown and the Country Store Gallery, a well know gallery in Austin: Which meant that they would pay him a specific amount of money for each painting he would bring them. He produced about one per week and would usually bring the new painting by for me to look at before delivering them to the gallery. Over the years I bought several for hanging in my house.

One day he brought over three pen & ink drawings he had done for a series of three paintings, a “triptych,” he was thinking about doing. The series’ was about a hermit, living in a cave, getting enlightenment when he came out of his cave and went down into the town below his cave and comes in contact with reality. I really liked the idea and bought one of the sketches. It’s is hanging in my upstairs master bedroom, which takes up the entire second story.

Looking at the drawing a couple of days ago it occurred to me that the series, and this sketch, had implications for the current situation with COV-19, and with the isolation many of us are dealing with. It’s a reminder that in isolation we can come up with conclusions that need to tested against reality.

Note, in the image, the crescent moon seems to be backwards; the moon and stars are black; he’s writing with his left hand ("wrong handed");the mysterious symbols he’s drawing, and the town below where our hermit can get a reality check, and perhaps, enlightenment. And notice the white horse. He rides it down, into town in one of the three images.

That’s the story of the image above.

The End.