'FATHER KNOWS BEST': Award-winning New Braunfels painter saw her art blossom thanks to advice from dad
By Tyler Johnson | The Herald-Zeitung
New Braunfels-based artist and San Saba native Jane Felts Mauldin was recently given the Mary Jo Laughlin and Eula Whitehouse Memorial Award at the Native Plant Society Fall Symposium last month for her paintings that 'illustrate, interpret or promote' Texas native plants.
Mauldin painted a series of wildflowers in different vases or glasses, expressing the beautiful colors seen throughout the state.
Although she made a career out of painting flowers, she never really considered it for most of her life.
She began painting when she was a little girl. Her mother painted in her free time after she stepped away from teaching to raise children. Mauldin said her mother would copy paintings of others and incorporate different colors.
“That’s not what we do now. We invent our own paintings,” Mauldin said.
She graduated from Baylor University with an art degree, but she also majored in English and education because that’s what her father wanted.
“My dad said, ‘Well, you need to major in something so you can get a job later.’ Father knows best, so I majored in art but also English and education,” Mauldin said.
After teaching for 15 years and walking away from her first marriage, she decided to go back to school to get her master’s degree in art at Texas A&I in Kingsville, which is now Texas A&M University–Kingsville. She then moved to LaMarque, where she taught art and met her current husband, Larry.
“We’ve been married 48 years and every bit of it has been good,” she said.
When Mauldin’s father was recovering from hip surgery, he stayed in a hospital bed in their living room. She said he had grown tired of doing needlepoint and reading books, so he asked her to entertain him by painting something.
“‘Would you paint a flower?’ he asked me,” Mauldin said. “A flower? That’s what non-artist painters paint on the weekend. ‘You want me to paint that?’ He talked me into it and wanted me to paint him a native flower of some kind.”
She said she got on the living room floor and began to paint a flower she had gotten from the yard — all while giving her father direction of what she was doing so he could be entertained.
When Larry came home, Mauldin said he jokingly looked at her flower painting and said, “Something I recognized?” He liked it so much that he wanted to get it framed and hang it up in his office at work, she said.
Shortly later, she got a call from a publisher who had seen her flower painting in her husband’s office and wanted to buy it. The publisher wanted to make copies of the painting to sell all over the world and give her 5% of the profits, Mauldin said.
“The next week after that, he called and said that he needed some more flower paintings because those were selling out. I painted 51 more flower paintings for him. I’m thinking, ‘What is this market that I didn’t even know about?’ Well, I went to visit my aunt in Louisville, Kentucky, who was in the hospital. I looked down the hall in the hospital and there were my paintings all over on every wall. I was in shock. Then, I saw them in several shops,” Mauldin said.
She went to her father and explained to him the pleasant success of her flower paintings.
“I told my daddy, ‘I can’t believe you had me do a flower. That’s the first time I’ve done a flower.’ He said, ‘No, you’ve done flowers before.’ I said, ‘Really?’” Mauldin said.
She said her father then pulled out a framed painting of a flower Mauldin had painted when she was 13 years old in February of 1954.
A flower painting she created when she was a teenager had an impact on her father’s life, which blossomed into a successful career.
“Father knows best,” she said.
Tyler Johnson is the assistant managing editor of the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung who is also the county and crime reporter.
Originally published November 19, 2024. Reprinted by permission.