A doctor’s advice for a future Texas Tech University president to find a way to relax led him to take up gardening and eventually to collect 154 paintings of exotic flowers going on display today at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa.

Collected by Dr. Grover Murray and provided by his widow Sally, the works by New Zealand artist Zoe Carter will be seen together for the first time at an exhibit in the school’s Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery.

Titled “Inside a Garden,” the opening is from 7-9 p.m. and is free to the public. The paintings will hang until March 11, but plans are to move them to the university’s new science and technology complex after it is built.

The UTPB graduate recently donated the art to the school. Half the collection was shown at the West Texas Museum in Lubbock the mid-1990s, but even she has never seen them all together.

The proteaceae family is a diverse group of plants native to the Southern Hemisphere.

After her husband’s death in 2003, Murray had the paintings appraised by a woman in Odessa. The woman asked what she was would do with them and suggested she talk to UTPB.

“It never occurred to me they would be interested,” said Murray. “It reflects something about UTPB. It shows they appreciate out-of-the-ordinary things. After we decided I would give them away, the president of school (David Watts) and foundation (Kay Bivens) asked me down. I told them about Dr. Murray and the protea.

“They drove me all over campus and I shocked because I went to UTPB.”

Sally Murray earned a degree in broadfield science from Texas Tech University in 1965, a master’s in geology education from Texas A&M University in 1971 and a geology degree in the early 1980s from UTPB.

She taught junior high and at Central Texas College in Killeen. After she got her UTPB degree, she taught two adjunct courses in introductory geology.

Grover Murray was also an author, a Louisiana State University geology professor, director of research for the State Geological Survey and geology department chair from 1950-’55. He died at age 86 and is buried in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.

He also worked for Magnolia Petroleum Company as an exploration geologist in Jackson, Miss., from 1942-’48.
The Murrays met on a field trip to Van Horn, sponsored by the West Texas Geological Society. He was a widower and she was working as a geologist in Midland.

“Dr. Murray and I married on Oct. 26, 1986, in Van Horn. It was his 70th birthday,” she said in e-mail correspondence with the Reporter-Telegram.

She said it wasn’t unusual for her husband to become interested in the protea paintings. “Plants interested him very much. When he was in his 30s, a checkup with his doctor showed he had high blood pressure. The doctor told him he needed to find some way to relax and forget the stress of his job. At that time, he was chairman of the geology department at LSU. So he took up gardening,” she said.
He chose azaleas and soon his yard was full of blooms. When he became president of Texas Technological College, as Texas Tech was known in 1966, he decided to grow orchids in his home. Later, he got interested in cacti and succulents like aloe plants.

When Murray left Tech in 1976, he donated most of his plants to the university greenhouse but kept a large number of them at home. “I of course inherited them upon his death and have continued to care for them and watch them grow,” Sally Murray said.

In 1994, her husband got congestive heart failure. While he was in the hospital, he got a catalog with a listing of books and one was on the proteas of the world. The cover featured a “beautiful flower … almost like a big, red mum.”
The desire to use the flower on Christmas cards got Murray into contact with Carter. Eventually, he wound up ordering every painting featured in “Proteas of the World” (1993) and “South African Proteaceae” in New Zealand (1983), both by Lewis Mathews.

Along with the paintings, an arrangement of live proteas will be on display.

“We have this cold weather and to walk into the gallery it will be as if you were transported to Zoe Carter’s home – and she does grow them. Suddenly you say, ‘Look at these stunning flowers.’ You walk in there and you’ll be surrounded. I really think they picked the perfect title, ‘Inside a Garden.’

“Anybody who goes will see this is a beautiful garden. It’s going to allow us a peek of these stunning flowers and we don’t have to buy a ticket and fly down there (to New Zealand). This collection will be shared with people who have never seen a protea. They’ll be surrounded by them.”

Zoe Carter
Artist Zoe Carter was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England, July 21,1941 and now lives in New Zealand.
She received a diploma in fine arts, sculpture, from Canterbury School of Fine Arts (1960-1963) and earned a teaching diploma in art, English and poetry from Post Primary Teacher’s College in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1964.
She has been an art teacher at Upper Hutt College, Wellington, New Zealand and a substitute art teacher. Carter is a potter, pottery decorator and botanical illustrator working in watercolor and gouache.

Carter has had her work displayed at group exhibitions at Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, New Zealand; the National Exhibition of Pottery, Wanganui, New Zealand; South Street Gallery, Nelson, New Zealand; Houston Museum of Natural Science.

One-woman exhibitions include “Proteas Flowering Plants of the Southern Hemisphere” from the collection of the Grover E. and Sally M. Murray Trust, West Texas Museum, Lubbock; Protea Festival, Santa Cruz (Calif.) Arboretum.

She has also won many awards, had her work reproduced in numerous publications and had her work collected by the Murrays and privately.

Source: UTPB via : www.mywesttexas.com