Florey Park – Art on the Land

Visited on site: [7/17/2025]

Location & Moment

Florey Park sits quietly inside the oil grid of the Permian Basin — small, still, and overlooked. But this patch of open land carries weight. I came here to paint, to pause, and to listen to what the soil still remembers.

Layers Beneath

This area lay on the fringe of Comancheria — not a battleground, but a space where Comanche riders passed, where silence often meant survival. Long before pumpjacks and pipelines, the only pressure here was the wind and the need to move unseen.

After the Riders

In time, settlers came. Then drills. Florey became part of the invisible web of the Permian Basin — a region that powers the world, even as many drive past without ever seeing it. The park remains, surrounded by wells and dust, offering a rare pause in the pulse of extraction.

From Humble Oil to Exxon

The Permian Basin played a major role in the rise of American oil giants — none more rooted in Texas than Humble Oil & Refining Company. Founded in 1911 in Humble, Texas, the company grew rapidly and expanded westward into oil-rich lands like this one. In the 1920s and 1930s, Humble helped transform towns like Florey and surrounding fields into key extraction sites.

By the mid-20th century, Humble had merged into Standard Oil of New Jersey, eventually rebranding in 1972 as Exxon. What started as a Texas-based drilling outfit became part of one of the largest multinational oil corporations in history — powered in part by what was pulled from under this land.

Artist’s Reflection

I painted here, in Florey Park — a quiet square inside the vast machine.
The grass moved, the dust swirled, but no one came.

Beneath this ground is oil.
Above it, the memory of riders who moved without maps.

This place is about in-between moments — between silence and machinery, between what passed and what powers.