Travis Walker was born in Tokyo, Japan, an Air Force brat whose nomadic childhood was filled with comic books, science fiction, and drawing. After graduating with a degree in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, the allure of the western landscape drew him to the valley of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he has lived and worked for nearly 20 years, blending contemporary landscape painting with the fictional worlds of his past.
Travis Walker's work has been featured in SouthWest Art Magazine, Big Sky Journal, Mountain Living, Forbes, and The Guardian. He is the founder of the nonprofit Teton Artlab, an Artist in Residence program based in Jackson Hole.
"A common subject in my work is the road, which represents our journey through life. We start off staring down the lines of a road, and our entire lives we continue to follow the road to new places. My fascination with roads led me to another symbol in my work: the trailer home. I have found so many of trailers scattered throughout the West that I have come to view them as representations of the American Dream, full of hope, uncertainty, and memory.”– Travis Walker
For the last twenty years, Travis Walker has made landscape paintings about Jackson Hole, a place that never ceases to inspire him to pick up his brushes. He works on location, capturing the essence of the seemingsly mundane scenes around town: a morning on the Elk Refuge, a decaying house with a fence made of skis, a vintage trailer park. His work is influenced by the work of American regionalists Edward Hopper and Grant Wood, Japanese printmaking, and German Expressionism.
Guest Lecturer, Panel, and Visiting Artist:
National Endowment for the Arts 2010, Artist Communities Panelist
National Museum of Wildlife Art, 2012, Artist In Action Presenter
Grand Teton National Park Foundation 2013, Artist in The Park Series