There is a mystery and a magic that bind history to memory, and memory to artwork. Occupying a space between past and present, Bill Travis's astounding visions of the Appian Way challenge us to examine this otherworld where the real and the imaginary intersect.
One can conceive of history as an accumulation-an amassment of events and stories, monuments and relics, which like the massive agglomeration of thousands of heavy stone blocks together form a stretch of ancient road. Ultimately, history is an attempt to organize memories; yet, as we know, it also constructs them. Photography holds a privileged position in this dynamic, recording moments, but also shaping and interpreting them.
The Appian Way offers a particularly wide field of investigation for, more than hulks of rock and stretches of concrete, it is a collection of individual incidents and entire lives. Again, like a photographic image, the road is embedded with chunks of information-vestiges of the past that may be read piece-by-piece as steps along a path.
This layering, this richness is precisely what has made the Appian Way a reoccurring subject for artists through the centuries. Artist Bill Travis's approach is richly ambivalent-at once sympathetic to and markedly distinct from its antecedents. Eighteenth-century painters catering to Grand Tourists come to mind (including Canaletto and Giovanni Battista Piranesi), as do nineteenth-century artists and their Romantic visions of the Mediterranean landscape (such as Théodore Géricault and Camille Corot). In a broad sense, Travis's artworks fall in line with this tradition, but rather than carry a sketchpad and pencils, Travis toted a camera as he traveled the Appian Way. His novel technique of transferring digital photographic prints to prepared boards on which he then extensively applies paints and pigments of various kinds is of interest in that it melds the newest technologies with the oldest traditions.
While historically architects and archeologists have made systematic studies of the antique monuments along the Appian Way, drawings and paintings, in general, are thought to be more subjective than photographs. Yet Travis, choosing a digital format (which lends itself to manipulation more readily than indexical film does), uses the camera to begin the creation of "inner landscapes," as opposed to direct representations.
Setting his work apart from a photojournalistic interest in objectivity, Travis has no interest in strict documentation. Nonetheless, by commencing his creative process with the production of a photographic image, Travis alters the interpretation of his painted landscapes, too. Perhaps the most direct comparison of his approach in historical terms is to the early twentieth-century Photo-Secessionists who went to great lengths to paint their photographic prints-but for decidedly different ends. These artists, fighting for the legitimacy of photography as an artistic medium alongside painting and sculpture adopted those means, hoping for the elevation of the medium above mere reportage.
Travis's intentions in mixing media, on the other hand, are a matter of personal artistic expression. While many contemporary artists deliberately blur the line of media in the spirit of what has been coined "the post-medium condition," Travis's intention feels less calculating, and more involved with establishing an atmosphere or mood.
Travis's blending of present technologies with the most time-honored artistic approaches seems particularly apt, as his subject matter is contemporary life along one of the world's most ancient roads.
The paint somehow softens the photographic images, transporting the scenes to a timeless realm. One is suspended between past and present, as the artwork must be read somewhere between a photograph and a painting. Indeed, Travis writes that he is "looking for an Appia that lies outside time. . ." While there are sometimes Neo-Classical elements to Travis's artworks (the first image, "Entering Lazio," is an example), his vision is usually more Neo-Romantic, as he imbues scenes with emotion and personal vision. And while Romanticism is seldom used to describe the photographic (outside discussions of the Photo-Secession's Pictorialism as described above), Travis's images also resonate with the work of other contemporary photographers, such as Sally Mann. Travis observes that "landscape has a memory," and I suspect that Mann, who researches the history of the places she photographs before exposing any film, would agree. Both artists create landscapes deeply imbued with emotion and clearly marked by the hand of their maker.
While Travis's work to this point has focused entirely upon the figure, it seems in many ways that he has now found his ideal subject. In the same manner that the Appian Way embodies both the ancient and the modern, Travis's depictions are rich with meaningful and pleasurable dualities.
