Artist Statement

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I discovered as a child that I could build countries. Though I believed in magic, somehow I never quite found the means to conjure the two-inch high human beings needed for my lilliputian world. Instead I provided for a nonhuman populace from the underbrush. Cities grew from twigs, mud and discarded material in the back yard. Bold patterns in poster paint transformed rubble into bright buildings topped by multicolored onion domes. Interiors housed exotic artifacts, furnishings and fashions for the city snails and country leaves with faces scribed onto them. A make-believe culture needs its own indigenous script. My languages are constructed with an equal amount of care and detail as the metropolis they serve. Becoming an adult added new perspectives to the work. Learning more about the principles of art and acquiring new languages continue to expand my horizons, providing the much awaited tools to relate my real and fabricated histories.

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The recurrent themes in the artwork showcase relics from my developing culture. The ingredients I use range from oil paint and ceramics, to language. Ornately sculpted ceramic borders frame introspective scenes in oil, and may carry a verse in a writing yet unfamiliar to the world. I also relish the pixels and vectors from our computer age. The plastic obedience of polymer clay offers yet another tool with which to expand my repertoire. The language, Tapissary, that I began inventing in 1977 shares many elastic qualities with polymer. Composed of some eight thousand hieroglyphs, they are bound in a stretchable grammar. I find that the compatible mediums of ‘village’ and ‘constructed language’ marry well on the palette.

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Steven Travis

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My work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Paris.

"Red Poems" oil paint on sculpted ceramic tablet