By Gene Mobly

I’ve known Gene Mobly 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, including ending up with a 1964 red Porsche Cabriolet.

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 every week or two, 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. I had seen this pen and ink drawing at his house, and thought it was my favorite of all his work I had seen, and pestered him to sell it to me. He would not sell because it reminded him of how he thought of his wife, Jean.

Not long after Jean passed away he let me have it because he said seeing it always made him sad. However, he would let me have it only under the condition that it was on permant loan to me, and not for sale. I accepted the condition, and still have hanging on a wall in my house. It reminds me of both Gene and Ann.

That’s the story of the image above.

The End.
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