November's Featured Artist!
Welcome to November’s Featured Artist! Meet Travis Usher, a local artist in Joshua Tree, California. Let’s learn about his creative background!
Welcome, Travis, tell us about yourself, when did you start creating?
I try to paint what I see the best I can. I think like most people I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember. Some of us become more obsessed with it than other’s but I drew on everything and luckily my parents encouraged it. I just recently saw one of my first signed finished pastel chalk painting that I can remember at my mom’s house, I was nine at the time. I started painting with acrylics a couple years later and finally found oil paint shortly after high school and fell in love with the process.
Tell me about that, what is it about oils that attracts you? Are there any other mediums you like to dabble with?
Everything from the dry time and blending to just the history of the medium. There is just something about an oil painting. I also do mural work which I use acrylic with a polyurethane clear coat over the top. I also love sculpture and like to tattoo on willing friends of mine.
Ron’s Horse
Wow, I would love to have a tattoo done by you! I will definitely have to talk to you about that some other time — What artists, photographers or designers do look up to or aspire to be like?
I do try and learn how people I see as successful have built a career and use that information to hopefully guide mine, I have found that for the most part there is no real blueprint to be an artist. Everyone’s journey is different hopefully I can carve out something for myself and even though there are many, many people I can look up to for inspiration and guidance who are better than me in so many ways, I inspire to be me.
I love that, it’s a great reminder to believe in your ability to get where you want to go. What else inspires you?
Seeing an amazing painting is the best inspiration for me, great work amazes me and makes me want to get back in my studio and make better paintings. Inspirational painters for me is a long growing list that is constantly evolving. Luckily with the internet there is so much that you can learn about different painting techniques and the painters themselves. Right now I’m really into contemporary artists like Mitch Griffiths, Carl Dobsky, Mark Maggiori, Pamela Wilson, Jeremy Lipking and Colin Chillag. Then if you dive into the master painters of the past like DaVinci, Velasquez, Sargent, Vermeer, Rockwell and my personal favorite William Adolphe Bouguereau, inspiration is all over the place.
All are excellent artists. Do you have any special talents aside from your creativity?
I think I’m a pretty good dad.
I’d have to agree, your family is beautiful. What are some rituals or processes you do while creating?
My process is constantly being tweaked as I learn new things and like I said it really is amazing what someone can learn with the internet. Depending on how I decide to handle a painting I use a couple of different techniques usually starting with some kind of underpainting or drawing. I don’t really transfer drawings onto canvases or boards anymore I usually just jump in and paint a monochromatic somewhat rendered underpainting straight onto a canvas or board that is gesso’ed, sanded and lightly tinted with burnt umber. The color I use for the under painting is usually flake white with raw or burnt umber, raw umber for skin tone if I’m doing a portrait because of its green color. From there its usually either layers with glazing and dry time or direct wet into wet alla prima style and sometimes a little bit of both. More often than not my paintings end up with a gloss varnish.
Fido Mural
I like that technique, I’ll have to try it out next time I play with oils. Tell me about some of the art shows you’ve been in.
My most recent exhibition was the 2019 Joshua Tree National Park Art Expo. The JTNP Expo is a juried show that I’ve been apart of for the last three years, its a group show at The 29 Palms Art Gallery with a weekend event with booths and entertainment at the local 29 Palms Inn. The last two years have been heavy on commission work, but I think this coming year I’m going to try and focus more on gallery work.
I was fortunate to sell my gallery work at this year’s expo, also a few small study’s and plein air pieces I had made specifically for the weekend. I mostly paint commissions portraits as of late and with my last murals being a couple large murals in a residential home and a couple large murals in a commercial building in Palm Desert, Ca before that.
That’s great, I would love to see one of your shows. What are your plans for the future of your skill?
Hopefully the future of painting for me involves a healthy market for my work, happy wife and kids, and better paintings than I made last year.
Travis’ advice for emerging artists: “The best advice I think I have heard is it takes 10,000 hours to start getting good at something so better start now. Putting in the actual time it takes to get competent at something is a great start.”
To find more of Travis’ work, visit:
Bob cat
Thank you for joining me for this month’s featured artist! Tune in next month for our next featured artist!
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