By age 8, the time Travis was beginning his career as an actor, he was also painting himself and, by age 13 and with his mother’s blessing, became the youngest person ever accepted to study life drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago. Through his early years, he won numerous scholastic art awards and subsequently two extremely successful showings of his work were mounted while still in his teen years, first at a well-known gallery on Chicago’s Rush Street at age 16 and another in the Old Town area at age 18. By that time, some of his canvases were already gracing the walls of, among others, Katharine Hepburn and Phyllis Wilbourn, Ginger Rogers, Jerome Robbins, and Tennessee Williams, who also in turn painted Travis at the ripe age of 14.
Travis’ early works, surely inspired by his mother, were watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings, many mentored by abstract artist Eleanor King Hookum until noted Chicago artist, the late Barbara Lewis, guided his hand into the world of oil painting. His first oil was a portrait of Rudolf Nureyev, a canvas the dancer quite vocally made clear he totally despised.
Over the years, Travis’ passion for art dwindled in the shadow of his careers in acting and the music business, something not only due to having no time to paint but running out of space to display his work in his collection-obsessed home and also running out of friends with empty walls to gift with his artwork.
One of the things that led him back to the studio was the encouragement of the late legendary playwright/scholar Dr. Leon Katz, who fell in love with his work and, when mounting his play Beds in 2000, asked Travis to create a portrait of Oscar Wilde to adorn the program for the play’s debut, a production in which Travis appeared as the dying literary genius.
Between that new beginning and other factors, including a newly discovered passion for photographing and painting the colorful scenes and equally colorful denizens of New Orleans’ French Quarter, as well as the lack of roles being offered him in his later years unless a script calls for an erring priest or mentally-challenged adult, Travis again took up his brushes and started to express himself with the passion he had fostered in his youth.
Thanks to the advent of social media, his work became available to a whole new audience not only incredibly complimentary and encouraging towards Travis’ ever-fluctuating confidence in himself as an artist, but willing to shell out a few ducats to help finance his sorrowful lack of retirement savings.
Since the 2017 season, eight of his paintings of N'awlins street scenes have been featured on Queen Sugar, creator/director Ava DuVernay's NAACP Award-winning TV series co-produced by Oprah Winfrey for her OWN Network. Also in 2017, his canvases began gracing the walls of the historic Charlie's Steak House in uptown New Orleans. In 2018, an exhibit of his work accompanied the run of Michael Michetti's updated production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, coincidentally starring his friends Maya Lynne Robinson and Desean Terry as Stella and Stanley.
In late 2018, Travis' painting of world-famous art patron and journalist Joan Agajanian Quinn and her late husband Jack joined the celebrated Joan Quinn Portraits collection, a touring exhibit which has been seen at museums and galleries across the nation and the world, featuring more than 200 uniquely personal portraits of Quinn created by such artists as David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, Robert Graham, Ed Moses, Don Bachardy, Ed Ruscha, Robert Mapplethorpe, Billy Al Bengston, Jean Michel Basquiat, Laddie John Dill, and Zandra Rhodes, among many others.
In March, 2019, a collection of his Tennessee Williams portraits and paintings of Tenn’s beloved French Quarter haunts were installed at Off the Beaten Way Gallery on Royal Street in New Orleans, the opening of the exhibition coinciding with the 33rd annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. In the midst of the highly successful run, the gallery was forced to close down as a victim of COVID-19 but his 24 canvases featured there were transferred and remain on display at New Orleans' wildly eclectic Esplanade Jungle.
A collection of Travis’ canvases were recently featured at the annual Chocolate and Art Show at the Vortex in the downtown Los Angeles Art District and in 2020 he completed eight commissioned portraits of acclaimed solo artist/pianist extraordinaire Hershey Felder, depicting him in each of his celebrated “Composer Sonata” characterizations: Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, Irving Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein.
Interestingly enough, today, when Travis creates a new canvas, his paint-splattered hands bring him a great sense of contentment and a long-missed sense of being in the right place, as his own hands so remind him of his mother’s as he sat quietly all those years ago at her side watching her create magic right before his very eyes.