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About Albert

Albert Lee Tauch (1904 - 1998) was a popular and prolific artist from Baytown, Texas. During his 94 years, he created many drawings, paintings, and inventions. The Baytown Historical Museum is home to a nice size collection of his art and displays some of Albert's best work. His paintings also appear in many businesses and public and private places in and around Baytown and the greater Houston area.

Albert’s Baytown roots supported his love of the region, which he brought to his art with an expressionistic flair, bold brushwork and continual experimentation.

Although Albert’s formal schooling ended after the ninth grade, he received attention and praise for the art he produced from an early age, which spurred his further artistic endeavors. He worked at a Galveston amusement park on the Strand in his teens and early 20s. Although he had no formal art education, he took lessons from artists who came to town and gave demonstrations.

He also worked for a sign painter named M. Cardouie, a Frenchman, who was a tough teacher with precise expectations. Albert could not seem to please him. After a while, Cardouie left, and Albert took up the trade on his own. He learned lettering skills, gold leaf and paint use, application and pounce patterns.

Albert joined the Navy at the start of World War II as a sign painter in the Sea Bees (construction battalion). He went to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska where, in his spare time, he painted a number of quite nice mountain scenes with the industrial paints available to him. Unfortunately, these paintings were stored on a screen porch in Baytown and were destroyed by exposure to the elements.

After the war, Albert came home and married Becky Fischer, a sweet, beautiful woman who was Albert's loyal wife, companion, friend, and fishing mate. They had one stepchild, Alvin Lee. Albert worked at the Exxon refinery in Baytown painting oil tanks and then lettering them. Eventually he worked his way into the Exxon paint shop. When Albert retired from Exxon he continued to paint signs in his garage shop and to paint easel pictures inside his home.

After his wife passed away in the late 1950s, Albert moved his studio into his living room. Becky’s death was a tragic part of his life, and her passing affected him deeply. He turned to his painting for solace.

In 1958 he made a paint medium out of lead carbonate and bee's wax. The recipe came from a Ralph Mayer art book. Albert cooked this recipe in his backyard and then poured it into cans — about a two-year supply. He had used this process before, mixing this medium with his oil paints with no white added. He then used this in his paintings with a technique involving mostly glazes of gunky paint medium and oil paint. With this "special" formula he produced his interesting and inventive paintings.

All his life, Albert was very active in the Baytown Art League, attending many of the League's shows and giving demonstrations. He also taught art classes at Lee College, as a demonstrator rather than a fulltime instructor. Many articles were written about him in the Baytown Sun newspaper. His many commissions included paintings of homes, trains, boats, historical places, animals and whatever else the patron desired. He also sold works of subject matter he selected for his own pleasure.

While Albert traveled to the Hill Country many times to take photos of scenery for his files, later using them as subjects for paintings, his favorite spot was Red Hill in Baytown. This little cove off Hwy 146 near the Fred Hartman Bridge included oil tanks and shrimp boats. Many times he set up his easel there, painting the scene hundreds of times.

He also liked to paint "Hell fighter” pictures (oil wells on fire). The John Wayne movie, “HellFighters” was shot on location at Red Hill. Another favorite were paintings featuring religious themes for local churches.

For a time he rented a building on Hwy 146 where he both showed and painted his works. He stayed there for a few years; later moving back to his home to paint. Albert liked the Munsell color system and it influenced his work — painting with nature's grays. Albert was interested in color and how to make it sing. He talk about painting for hours on end. He also talked about the "mother color system" from the Walter Foster Book number 63 — "Color with the Palette Knife and Brush." He was an accomplished sign painter, easel painter, inventor and philosopher. He invented the idea for the heat seeking missiles during World War II and sent it to the government but heard nothing from them.

In the last six-to-eight years of his life he needed care from nursing homes, and was in at least five different ones. At each one he painted and was the resident artist. He spent his last days in a wheelchair, but was as lucid as he had been at age 50. He talked about art and painted daily in the nursing homes where many of his paintings remain today.

The day Albert died he was still talking about his next painting. He lived a full life doing what he loved: Painting.