(Self) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Walthall, TASIMJAE 2017 winner, offers Surreal introspection

Travis Walthall is tall and languid, with an easy demeanor that’s a cross between a lonesome cowboy and “The Dude,” as he waxes lyrical about his art — occasionally tweaking his waxed, Dali-esque mustache.

A large self-portrait leans against the wall of the Lamar University art studio as he talks — actually, almost all of his paintings are self-portraits in one form or another.

The 25-year-old is not married. He said he really doesn’t have the time, but that doesn’t mean he is not in a happy relationship.

“(I’m) single and enjoying it, man — just trying to take care of myself, and trying to figure it all out,” he said. “Luckily, I am fortunate to have a relationship with art. I’m using it as a tool to help figure myself out, help figure life out.

“That’s a big reason I do a lot of self-portraiture. It gives you time to reflect upon yourself and critique yourself. Over the long duration of spending time in the studio, it’s an open dialogue and helps you figure a lot of things out — not only your situation in the painting you’re working on, but the situation you’re at in life.”

Since he graduated from Lamar University in December 2017, with an emphasis in drawing, Walthall says he has been working on a lot of small-scale drawings, which he grew up doing — pencil drawings, ball point pen drawings, which will be featured in his solo show, “Capricious Sustainability: Perusal of My Condition,” which opens May 5, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., at The Art Studio, Inc.

“We’re going have this nice variety of large-scale oil paintings with some small and medium-size pen drawings, and maybe a couple of acrylic pieces as well,” he said.

The beauty about artwork, Walthall said, is it gives him an outlet, a way to vent. The paintings tell a story.

“If you are going through a particular mood at one point, due to life circumstances, you may have a painting that is more or less dark or light or brilliant,” he said. “That’s one of the focuses of this series, hence the title, to have this universal collection where it’s me as the subject matter in each piece (but it) may change due to the lighting, the surface texture, the environment going on. You may be having a conversation with me in every piece, but the conversation is going to be totally different on one side of the wall than on the other.

“(I’m) playing with this role of the artist as a multi-faceted identity. You may meet me on the street, and it’s going to be a totally different experience than if you meet me at my workplace in my uniform. It’s almost like the several faces of Travis.”

In Walthall’s recent work, there us one constant.

“I’m hoping the bonding moment is the mustache,” he said. “I’m hoping that will pinpoint most of the pieces.”

Walthall decided to grow his distinctive facial feature about 18 months ago.

“I started it as a joke,” he said. “I wanted to see where it went. It kind of grew on me. (It’s) referencing Salvador Dali and the different ways he would wear it — one side up, one side down, one side twisted and then bushy. It kind of comments on the role, the two different sides of an artist.”

Despite the mustache, Walthall said that he doesn’t consider himself to be an extrovert.

“Generally, I’m a very introverted person who spent the majority of the time at Lamar in the studio,” he said. “I don’t know that I’m not very, I don’t want to say socially inclined because that makes me sound like a hermit crab, but there are a lot of surreal events and relationships going on in life that, I don’t want to say scare me, that make you think heavily and think deeply.

“I guess I have more of a relationship with an art piece than with people who pop in and out of my life. But yeah, the mustache is something that is distinguishable. It’s a combination of bending the rules and rolling with the rules, but trying to keep it as classy as possible.”

It is more than a Dali mustache that connects Walthall with the ideals of surrealism.

“There are a lot of my pieces where the ground is melting, the form or figure is melting, blurring into the environment or exploding against the environment,” he said. “I am caught up with the idea that nothing is real; it is all what we perceive with our visual optics. It breaks you out of these ties to the physical laws where if you are doing a realistic painting of a cup or a realistic portrait, I feel like there’s a little more leeway if you introduce surrealism.”

Walthall said that his father struggled with short-term memory loss and bi-polar disorder, so he saw first-hand the uncertainty of not having a firm idea of how things should be.

“I have never given a voice to growing up in a house with bi-polar disorder — where do I fit in with these people who see the world a certain way?” he said. “I like to think that all artists are somewhat outsiders. In order to have the role of re-representing something, it puts you in the position (different) than just someone who’s just receiving this information. It’s very much a two-way dialogue.

“At the same time you can’t be too far out, you can’t be too crazy. In order to have people relate to you, to relate to your work, you do have to have a sense of conformation so people don’t think you are absolutely nuts.”

Like many artists, Walthall said he was always drawing from a young age.

“I don’t know where it really came from,” he said. “Looking back, growing up I always had a sketchbook for some reason or other. Most of them are so old that the graphite just starts blending in with the page in front of it so it’s hard to tell what (it is). I’ve always been into the figure. I was really into action figures growing up, cartoons I watched when I was little. It’s funny looking back at how ambitious it is, and how wrong, but it’s great because it sparks these different ideas — some kind of superhero or salvation of sorts.”

“Every now and then I will pull back some drawings from a journal, and I will want to revisit it in a different medium, to see a new spin on it.”

When he is not painting, Walthall works at Rao’s.

“I feel that in today’s age I am just hit left and right by imagery,” he said. “There’s something out of place, disconnected. That’s one of the things I like about Rao’s. I’m lucky to meet a lot of fabulous people in the business — it’s a way for me to get out. When I get off work, I am ready to go back inward and just work on a drawing the rest of the day and zone it all out.”

Walthall said he hopes visitors to the show will pick up on the idea of a universal search. A lot of it is introspection of self, but also of one’s environment. Part of that exploration is to look at what has come before, and Walthall emphasizes the influence of his art history studies. In the painting, “The Garden of Earthly Southeast Texas Delights,” Walthall draws on the work of Hieronymous Bosch.

“You have a lot of this local cultural imagery going on,” he said. “There’s a fine balance to searching both internally and externally to find one’s spot in time and space. It’s a pretty broad study, but I do a lot of anatomical study, evolutionary references, to keep people in on where we came from.

“In today’s art scene everything’s been done, everything redone and undone, and deconstructed and put together in different ways. I think it’s important to find (artists) you connect closely with. It’s just like life. You find these different people who influence you, and you learn from them — you try to be the best work of art you can, based on other people’s self-portraits that turned out well. Or turned out shitty. Moments to learn — pull these different influences together.”

With so many distractions­­ going on between advertisements and technology in the modern world, Walthall said that art has the ability to ask intimate questions.

“I hope these fine arts paintings and drawings give people a look at the tradition of looking at a piece of art and actually studying it, seeing where it comes from. In turn, trying to figure where we all are and where we’re going — which, I guess, is the million-dollar question, which I’ve not found any answers to, but I like to think it’s a broad human condition,” he said.

“I’m not here to provide any clear answers. These aren’t just pretty paintings. They generally have a pretty dark overtone to them, which I think complements the Surrealism. It doesn’t have a clear narrative. I don’t have all the answers but that’s why I’m here and why I paint.”

Walthall said he is enjoying a break from classes, as it is a full-time job less than he has been doing over the past few years, but he is also looking at applying to graduate school so he can teach painting and drawing on the university level.

“Halfway through my undergraduate work I realized I’m not just doing this work for school. I genuinely I enjoy it,” he said. “I would willingly teach at the university level.”

Walthall returns again and again to the idea of the self. His self-portraits are an attempt to find his place in the universe.

“In the big picture, I like to think I’m a collection of all my paintings,” he said. “If you were to roll them up and give it a voice, they’d sound something like me.”

The Art Studio is located at 720 Franklin in downtown Beaumont.

The show runs through May 25.

Andy Coughlan, ISSUE editor