Travis Lawson

Travis grew up on a farm outside of Lyons, South Dakota where he spent much of his childhood taking care of horses, cows, sheep, rabbits, chickens and goats. When not taking care of the farm animals or doing chores,  he spent a lot of time in the tree grove building forts and goofy contraptions.

When Travis watched the Special Edition Star Wars Trilogy for the first time as a teenager and seeing what CGI could do, he knew he wanted to do something in the computer graphics field. With that inspiration he attended Dakota State University majoring in both Computer Science and Computer Graphics.

While the Computer Science part of his degree had nothing to do with art at all, the Computer Graphics portion had him learning skills in both digital and traditional fine art. Although Travis’s mother had taught him how to do ceramics as a child, he did not have any art classes until attended college.

Travis was lucky enough to get an internship as a graphic designer at a tech company in Sioux Falls SD while still going to college. After graduating he dabbled in traditional fine art, going to life drawing and painting a few acrylic paintings here and there not taking it too seriously.

In August 2019, Travis had attended a local paint out (Plein Air) event happening in De Smet SD. One of the participating artists encouraged him to give oil paint a try. Taking that advice to heart, he bought his first set of oil paints and has not looked back since.

Travis has a fascination with how a two dimensional picture can look real and lifelike with just a few well placed brushstrokes. This fascination explains his loose yet realistic style giving his art an impressionistic and painterly feeling.

His influences are Bryan Mark Taylor, Scott Christensen, Christine Lashley, and Richard Schmidt.