CLEVELAND Exhibit shows work of Wellsville native

The beautiful landscape around the family farm is believed to have influenced the artist.
By LAURIE M. FISHER
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
Paul Travis never had seen an oil painting when he left his farm in Wellsville in 1913 to study art in Cleveland.
It may seem puzzling to understand the motivation to move from rural farm life to an artist's world in the big city. Still, Travis was in good company as one of three prominent artists with in Columbiana County. Charles Burchfield, Viktor Schreckengost and Travis lived and worked there. (Burchfield, a painter, and Schreckengost, a designer, both worked in Salem.)
A full-scale retrospective of Travis' work will be at the Cleveland Artists Foundation in Lakewood through Feb. 16. The works include more than 60 paintings, drawings, prints and watercolors. The exhibit is part of the Foundation's annual major exhibition of a historically important Cleveland artist, explained Henry Adams, curator.
"We felt it was important to do his show while a large body of Travis' work was still in possession of his family," he noted. Many works exhibited are from the collection of his daughter Elisabeth Travis Dreyfuss.
"His art sensitively reflects the changes of his life, both in its subject matter and style," Adams noted.
What's likely: Adams said that Travis' early works have not survived the years, perhaps due to a fire at the family home. He believes that Travis was exposed to visual arts through illustrations in books and magazines.
"I think that the beautiful landscape around the Travis farm and his mother's great interest in flowers and gardening also encouraged Travis to take an interest in visual things," Adams noted.
Travis is best known for his trip to Africa and for the free late watercolors, many of which show tigers and animals in combat, Adams said.
"His World War I drawings had never been exhibited before and in general his early work was not well know. One of my major goals in this exhibition was to reveal the range of Travis' work and give a sense of his early development. I think he did exceptional work throughout his career and can almost be considered as four or five different artists in one."
Highlights of the show are Travis' World War I drawings from his tour in France. He was a machine gunner in the Army. He produced more than 160 drawings of soldiers, landscapes and cathedrals.
After the war, he taught art at the Cleveland School of Art and continued to produce his own works. At age 36 he traveled to Africa in 1927 for an eight-month trip covering Capetown to Cairo.
Film and photos: In addition to hundreds of sketches and watercolors, Travis produced nearly four hours of film recording life in Africa's coastal regions as well as the interior Belgian Congo. His photographic works include 200 slides that are in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
In the 1950s, his work became more abstract. Some later works utilize more of abstraction. "I think they grow logically our of Travis' early works but are considerably freer. By this time he clearly wasn't worried about what people thought and felt free to be expressive," Adams explained.
"Many of Travis' paintings are densely packed with imagery and this tendency grew more pronounced as his career progressed," Adams said. "I think that Travis' life was somehow densely packed with imagery and conflict. My sense is that his working method was to make sketches of individual motifs until he had grasped their form in his memory. Then he would go to work on a larger composition and pack these motifs into one design."
Travis died in 1975.
If you go: The Cleveland Area Artists Foundation is at 17801 Detroit Ave. in Lakewood, Ohio. Hours are Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 1 to 6 p.m. For more information, call (216) 227-9507 or visit the Web site at www.clevelandartists.org.
Virginia Krumholtz, archivist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, will lecture using Travis' slides at 7 p.m. Jan. 18. Krumholtz will discuss the technical creation of the slides as well as the context for Travis' work at the Cleveland Artist's Foundation gallery.