The Prince Holds Court
Photos by Aimee Dilger | Video and Article by Kelly Dessoye
Published January 17, 2022
Travis Prince is hardly alone. Day in and out, he’s swept up in the whirlpool of life.
A woman perches on the kitchen counter, lips pursed around the day’s first cigarette - her partner holding the flame. Little girls dressed up as royalty- hair springing from crowns of braids and gems. One woman wraps herself in a sarong, another coils like a cat in the sun - soft curves nestled in freshly rumpled sheets. Scholars are lost in books. Their eyes beckon you. “Look - or don’t,” they say, “we’ll be here.”
Travis Prince’s art, including the Complex[Ion] series, on display in his home.
They’re figments of Prince’s brush - the immortalized freeze frames of a flesh and blood existence.
Watch the video above to meet Travis Prince.
Travis Prince in his studio.
“My art is part of the realism movement. Not realism like photo-realism. Realism as in the real-ness of life. I paint everyday people that look like you, that look like me,” he ruminates.
In a varied life that’s seen him bounce between Pennsylvania and the South - “you can’t quite place my accent,” he chuckles - painting is a talisman pulling him to center. His earliest memories are coloring a “He-Man” coloring book. A knack for decorating trapper keepers earned him the title of “the art kid” and a nurturing teacher - Ms. Baker - influenced his precise technical style.
Then..poof.
“I didn’t draw for the longest time. I was a real knucklehead,” he says of the years after highschool - where he all but left the arts behind. “I had everything. I had video games, I had cars, I had friends, I had girls I could hang out with [but there was] this numb sensation - I have nothing to do with my life right now.” A thought clicked - “why don’t I paint something.” He picks up a palette knife. “This came out of my Bob Ross starter paint set.”
While craving community after a move to Virginia he met Bill Harris at the Libertytown Workshop. Up until that point, Prince took to painting video game characters and comic book characters - stuff he thought “looked cool”. Unimpressed but intrigued, Harris invited him to the workshop. For two years, Prince would develop his style under Harris’ mentorship - only shelling out payment in the form of a promise that he'd never stop painting.
Prince spends every waking moment in his studio - a small nook on the top floor of a house that he closed on in 2018 for one purpose - to lose himself in a creative process that teeters on obsession.
“What up guys,” he stuffs a heaping spoonful of cereal into his mouth. “Aww you see the Reese’s - gotta have the Reese’s for breakfast.” Comments trickle in from the sidebar of a YouTube Live screen, bantering with him about everything from art to video games to his choice of cereal. Eventually he’ll swivel toward the canvas perched in the center of the room. Ever generous and humble, he shares his process and technique with anyone who has a wifi connection. That’s where viewers can get smart to his color palette, blending style, and even his inventions - like the plastic brush-holder he just patented.
Shortly after settling in his house, he felt the tug of the Northeastern PA community and took a part-time gig as an art teacher with Outreach Center for Community Resources - a hub that supports families and individuals as they navigate curve balls that include economic hardship, run-ins with the legal system, and addiction. He describes it as a place that tries to keep families and communities together. “That’s what I get to do and get paid for it,” he exclaims with an ebullient grin, “that’s pretty cool.”
He was also asked by historian and sociologist Glynis Johns, M.A., to be the executive art director of the Black Scranton Project - the non-profit built on the bones of her research with a mission to learn about and document the positive impact of African Americans on Scranton and Northeastern PA. “I gladly agreed and we made a lot of progress in a short amount of time. We acquired a space for the [community] center and we try to implement our Juneteenth celebrations each year, and hopefully this will grow… and offer a space that’s missing [in Scranton].”
Travis Prince livestreams his Youtube show “Art and Education”
Travis Prince adds a base layer to a painting in his Reader Series.
Back in his studio, Travis fills his livestream camera with a photograph of a man leaning against a wall, holding books.
“We’re gonna redo this one again guys.”
It’s part of the Reader Series - the lovechild of his voracious appetite for learning, his calling as an artist, and a dogged resolve to generate deep conversation. “There is some type of message in the art itself, there is something you can extrapolate and learn from the piece,” he says of the breadth of his work. The series - depicting African Americans reading books by African Americans - has cemented Prince as a cerebral artist who, through flecks of paint and the scrambling of letters, distills and documents the human experience.
Prince’s patented brush-holder.
Travis Prince’s painting Michelle Alexander from his Reader Series.
Bukola on display in Prince’s living room. The paintings in the background are also by Travis Prince.
“Most people don’t find their passion in life,” says Travis Prince under the dueling glows of a single overhead light and the tv holding his captive livestream audience at bay, “and those who do find their passion - they go full throttle with it.” He pauses - the bristles of his paintbrush softly deposit layer after layer of glistening oil onto the canvas. “That’s what we do. That’s who we are.
We can’t turn it off.”
— Travis Prince