I’ve always said that ‘food is art.’ But I’m not much of a cook, so there’s not much ‘art’ happening in my kitchen, usually. However, right now, there are two easels standing in my kitchen. And it’s not food that’s being created these days. There’s another kind of art going on in my kitchen: painting. I’m actually taking brushes and slopping real paint onto real canvas. I’ve always secretly wanted to be a painter. That secret has been encoded into my songs over the years: “Brilliant colors I have never seen…” from Deep Enough To Dream. “Come paint your pictures on the canvas in my head…” from Power Of A Moment. “We’ll fingerpaint the sky…” from Amusing. Robert Langdon could have easily figured out the hidden code embedded in my music, if he were given the chance! I chose the kitchen for the easels, because Travis and I like to eat while we’re painting. Travis Jenkins is an artist/painter friend of mine who I have begged to teach me to paint. I’ve done a few paintings in the past, and not too shabbily I might add (check out the self-portrait on this month’s cover), but lately I’ve been yearning to REALLY learn to paint. For this, you need a REAL teacher! Voila! Travis Jenkins! Travis and I met about 5 years ago. Travis NEVER leaves my kitchen. (He and his wife have a permanent place on my refrigerator door, held in place by a few colorful magnets.) I have three of Travis’s paintings hanging in my house already. I stand in front of them and smile, quite often. I could never figure out how he gets those colors so bright! But now I’m learning his secrets. And I’m learning them in my own kitchen. There are tubes of acrylic paints and jars of water on the bench beside the easels. There are crackers and cheeses and fruit and other “Narnian feast” delicacies on the table (not to mention the not-so-Narnian pepperoni pizza just delivered in a cardboard box). Yeah, this is how we roll! So, his photo is on my fridge, his paintings are on my walls, and now he’s sitting on my couch, letting me interview him. Here goes: C: When I met you, you were in a band… T: Pillar. C: How would you classify that band? T: Rock-your-face-off! C: Ha! I’ll say! And you and I met in Nashville. You were visiting from Kansas. T: We [the band, Pillar] were in town for the 2001 Dove Awards, and Ricky and Randy Jackson (The Daylights) introduced me to you. C: You were doing the band thing at the time, and I’m not sure when I found out that you’re a painter. Obviously you’re a creative person, as a painter, and as one of the founding members of a rock band, Pillar. Where in your memory does that creativeness come from? Is there anybody you can blame in your history? T: Well, the first thing that pops into my head is my Mom. She has always been so encouraging. She noticed it when I was about three years old. I had drawn a picture of something I had seen back when I was about two. We were on vacation at my grandparents, and I had seen a train go by. Months later I drew a picture of it. It just blew her mind that her little kid was drawing a picture of something that he remembered. She thought it was a big deal. I’m sure every parent… C: That IS a big deal! T: Throughout the years she would encourage me, and take me to get private art lessons, starting in second grade. It wasn’t until the last few years I found out that my Dad’s mom, my grandma Jenkins, used to draw pictures. But she never told anyone about it. So, that might be the genetic connection right there. I do remember my Dad giving me one little art lesson. He drew a picture of a rabbit when I was in kindergarten and I was blown away. “Wow, a rabbit! That’s so awesome!” C: So it started early. T: Yeah. I would be sitting in class in grade school, and I would get in trouble because my math teacher would tell us to do a math assignment, and instead of doing the assignment, I would just write the word ‘MATH’ out really big. Then I would spend the whole time just…drawing… working on that word. MATH! I’d make it three dimensional, with layers of textures. She got really mad at me. But then, with another teacher I remember, I was supposed to be doing an assignment, and on the margins of the paper I drew all these pictures of bats, and pumpkins, and all these pictures of things for Halloween. She thought it was great, and she actually posted it up out in the hallway for everyone to see. So it was at different points throughout my life I had people encouraging and saying I was good at that. So I said, “Ok, I guess I’ll just keep doing it.” C: So you were gifted, you discovered that early on, and you had people who encouraged you all along the way? T: Yeah, exactly. And here we are today. C: Yeah, here we are today, and I have your paintings on my walls! Several of them. T: Encouraging me. And I think back to high school. I was playing high school football and that was a big part of my life. But I had a high school art teacher who I thought was great, and the work he did was great. His name is Floyd Gibson. He took me under his wing and taught me so much. At first I felt like I was a good artist, and he didn’t seem to think my stuff was that great. I wanted to ‘wow’ him. Finally after about three years of working with him, he saw me doing a drawing and he said, “Wow, now you’re starting to do something … you’re getting into a groove.” I was like, “Yes!” C: So did you study art more after high school? T: Yeah, I actually ended up going to the same college my high school art teacher went to. Fort Hays State University, in Hays, Kansas. They’re well-known for their whole art program, but especially for their graphic design. And then they’ve also got great painting and print-making and all that. C: Did you focus mostly on painting? T: I was pretty well rounded. They really had a broad spectrum of things to study. I took ceramics, drawing, printmaking, graphic design. But my emphasis was in painting, so I had the most hours in painting. C: Was that your favorite medium? T: As a freshman, I thought I knew it all, and I wanted to do drawing. That’s what I was having success with. But my professors encouraged me to try something else, so I chose painting. A lot of it was due to the fact that I really liked our painting professor. Her name was Kathleen Kuchar (pronounced KOO-har). Her paintings are very bright, beautiful, abstract, colorful paintings. And as you can see, that’s a very huge influence on my stuff. Another professor was Michael Florian Jilg--they called him Uncle Mick--and his stuff is unbelievable. He has had stuff printed up in books. Those two professors influenced me in college, for five or six years…and I played college football…so again I was doing this other stuff, but the one consistent thing has been art all the way through. College is where I found out that I could probably do this for a living. Just seeing the potential of doing a series of work, presenting it a shows, meeting people one-on-one, word-of-mouth, having the internet…all of this at my hands made me start thinking, ‘Wow, I can do this.” I remember when I sold my first piece in college, and I thought, “Wow, this is incredible!” C: I bet that felt great! T: I think I sold it for like $25. My sister-in-law bought it. C: That still counts! T: She knew how to get a deal! C: Along with technique, did you study art history too? Was that part of the program? T: Very much. C: Did that have any influence on how you chose to paint? Like, did you have a favorite period, or favorite artist or group of artists that you would ‘blame’ for what appeals to you? T: Yes. First of all, I would say that I love ALL of art history. Even back from the very beginning …like people discovering cave drawings. I love all the different periods of art. It’s hard to say that I like any one more than another, but I see that I have been influenced most by the Impressionists. Monet, Van Gogh. And I most often tell people that my work is influenced by Van Gogh, because I love his colors. He just uses that kind of ‘dreamscape’ style. C: And he pretty much owns the color yellow. T: Remember “Starry Night” (Van Gogh), with the stars and everything? I guess that’s been another huge influence on me—nature. Nature…and people in my life. But nature, especially the nighttime stars—which you see in almost every one of my pieces. C: That’s one thing I’ve noticed in your pieces. There are elements that appear a lot in your stuff. One element is stars, for sure. And you use brilliant colors. That’s the one thing, the main thing that attracts me to your stuff, and why I want it on my walls. Your work has a sense about it, and it’s very serious when you look at it, but the colors make me happy. It makes me feel good, like music, only visual. So it was Kathleen Kuchar who influenced your use of such rich colors? T: Yes. I was at a show in college, and her work was there, and she had a big abstract painting with all these colors, and it was so beautiful. I’ll never forget that moment looking at that painting. Just standing in front of the canvas and looking at it just hurt my heart. It was so beautiful. I almost teared up and started crying, because it was so beautiful. That was such a good thing, in that it inspired me to want to go and do that myself. I wanted to go and do paintings that were beautiful, achingly beautiful. From that point on I tried to pour my heart and actually pour love into a painting, if that’s possible. And that’s what I’m attempting to do now. I’m glad to hear your reaction [to my paintings] because I’m trying to evoke those emotions. And being a Christian, I think it’s possible for people to look at a painting and experience joy. Or all the words you could attach to it: love, hope, joy, faith, peace…all those things I want people to experience…especially love, when they look at my paintings. I want them to just feel great. C: Well, it works on me! Your work is very colorful. Your work is abstract, and that word can mean a whole lot of things, and there are a lot of people who completely blow off abstract right away and say, “I don’t like abstract. I don’t understand it.” How can you help clear some of that up, or help somebody appreciate abstract work? T: The easiest way to do it is to give a little art lesson. I love sharing this with people. The three types of art are [1] “realism”, which is objective art—you draw or paint exactly what you see in reality. The next one would be [2] “abstract” which is taking something from reality and distorting it however much or little. The third one would be [3] “non-objective,” where you have nothing from reality--like a Jackson Pollack splatter painting. When people go to an art show, and have that information in their head, they can start categorizing and see, for example, what might be a great attempt at realism. It will help them appreciate it more. [Realism] is what I try to do with my pencil drawings, the home portraits, and things like that. And then as kind of a breather from that world of being objective, I’ll go to the abstract, and take something like a window, or what appears to be a window in a room, and paint stars so it looks like you’re looking through that initial wall into another world, which would be a nighttime sky. C: That helps a lot. I think if you just start with those three things, you automatically start enjoying art a little better. You can walk into and exhibit and at least see which is realism, or abstract, or non-objective. T: And the lines blur. You can see varying degrees of those three blurring into one another in some paintings. C: Are those categories kind of an historical sequence of how painting has evolved? T: I’ve been told that when cameras were first invented, that technology helped inspire the whole Impressionist movement. For hundreds of years, people were being classically trained to do very realistic, beautiful paintings. Then all of a sudden [with the invention of cameras] artists were wondering, “What are we going to do? A camera that can just take a picture, and we’re not going to be needed anymore. So let’s do something a camera CAN’T.” It’s kind of a sad and beautiful thing all at the same time. C: So the impressionist painter, in order not to be replaced by cameras, started to use paint to ‘interpret’ something real (to varying degrees), instead of just trying to paint an exact replica, like this new invention called a ‘camera’ could. T: I’m glad it happened, because it’s another example of technology affecting culture, and affecting the history of man. C: Doesn’t THAT keep happening! T: Yeah, look at the music industry, with the internet, and how it’s changing things. I think it’s for the better. If it weren’t for the camera being invented we wouldn’t have Ansel Adams, and all these great… C: THAT kind of art. T: And THAT’S a beautiful art! But we wouldn’t have Monet doing all his “Water Lilies”, or Van Gogh, unless the invention of the camera interfered in history. So I think it’s great! C: When technology advances, it forces us historically and as humans to change and to develop and to come up with new things. Now, when I look at your works, even the ones hanging in my house, there is a reality to it, because it has dimension. You see objects, whatever they might be, spatially. You see a horizon line. You see something that’s in the foreground, something that’s in the background. You have things like that in your painting, but you can’t exactly point at it and say, “This is a…fill-in-the-blank.” Then add to that mystery the colors you use. The colors are such a huge part of that. The series that I have paintings from is called… T: “Dream Windows” C: And you still do those along with other things? T: Right. C: What’s behind that series. What inspired you to do that? T: The Dream Windows series goes back to college, maybe the first semester I was in a painting class, and I was experimenting. I was cranking out these paintings, and my teachers were like, “Yeah, that’s cool. That’s cool.” And then one day I was working on this painting and it actually ended up being the first Dream Window. My professor, Michael Jilg, and actually Kathleen was there too, and they both said, “Whoa, stop! This is amazing. You need to touch it up a little bit and call it good. Do not paint over this. This is great!” I was getting really thick with the textures and everything. And [Michael Jilg] said, “You need to do a whole series of these. You need to do tons of them.” I thought I’d be doing these for the next year. Well it’s been almost 10 years now that I’ve been working on them. I think the reason I keep doing them, first, is that I love them. I’ve sold almost every one that I’ve done, and that’s a good thing. There’s so much in my Dream Window series that I still want to explore. So one year turned into five, and five has turned into almost ten now. C: Are you getting more than $25 for them now? Ha! T: Yes! Yes! Not only did my professors influence me, but it’s amazing how much the music I was listening to at the time influenced me. A friend had introduced me to your music around that time. And I was listening to Switchfoot in their early days. And I would sit at night and paint during the day in my college facilities, and I would have my little CD player with me and I’d listen to Switchfoot. The words and the music they were singing were also going into my head and into my heart. It’s so mind-blowing that I would love some of the stuff that you were doing too, like “And Your Praise Goes On.” I would listen to that song, and it was achingly beautiful to me, and that would inspire me to turn around and paint. And now here we are sitting here…so many years later sitting in your living room. That brings up the point I wanted to express, which was how when you have this strong, strong, passionate desire for something, and you keep working toward it, it’s neat to see it all tie together. That could mean a million things. But for example, like us sitting in your living room, I’ll never get over the fact that “I’m friends with Chris Rice!” C: Ha! T: I’m like, “I get to go to Chris’s!” I’m still a huge fan, but at the same time, now that I know you as a friend (we’ve talked about this a million times) it’s so fun! I love how things start to tie in. Another example of that is…I met Jon Foreman from Switchfoot years back, when I was in Pillar, and I gave him a couple of my paintings, and I said, “I love your music.” The last track on their second CD (New Way To Be Human) was called “Under the Floor” and he sings about the stars. And how God’s glory fills up the sky. And I literally did half of my semester’s work with that song on repeat. So I guess what I’m saying is that music has had such a huge influence on my work, and it comes back around. It’s crazy! C: Isn’t their current single, “When I Look At The Stars” or “Stars” or something with that same theme? T: Yeah, that’s what…I was just going to read a line from that. That blows me away. That’s a recurring theme like in the poem I’m working on, “Love Communication.” I love how there’s this deep mystery in the night sky. And I love looking up at it and thinking “Wow, God! You know my heart is just pounding for You…” It’s just that connection. So one of the lines from “Stars” (Switchfoot) is: “Stars, looking at a planet, Watching entropy and pain, And maybe start to wonder how the chaos of our lives could pass as sane. I’ve been thinking about the meaning of resistance, Of a hope beyond my own, And suddenly the infinite and penitent Begin to look like home.” It’s so beautiful that I’m sitting in a classroom in Hays, Kansas painting and thinking about how much I love Jon Foreman’s music, and then his music is influencing my paintings, then I meet him and give him a painting. And I don’t think that my star painting influenced his song, but then he puts another single out and it’s about the stars. I think it’s more just a thing between God and me. He’s letting me hear it and say, “Oh, thank You!” Which is why I started to write that poem, “Love Communication.” It says: Fireflies float and blink in black Fields and meadows of the night. Above, the stars whisper back Mysterious words in twinkling light… You know, the creation communicating love. I hope all that made sense. C: It does! I find the things that inspire every artistic person I know, whether painting or photography or music…they’re all inspired by the ultimate art around us. Nature. What God has created. It’s almost cliché to say it now, but we are being imitators of the greatest Artist ever! As humans, that’s one of the ways we are His image-bearers. Some of us get to do it in an artistic way. There’s something about that which is, as you said, (and I love your phrase) achingly beautiful. When I’m writing or performing, or putting paint on canvas, or deciding where to plant a bush in my yard, I’m taking part in beautifying the world in some way through sounds, or balance, or colors. T: Beautification. C: Yeah, and the process is amazing, but I find it in all my artistic friends…there’s a very spiritual element. T: Definitely. And God takes all those cool things, the music and the art, and then weaves it into the relationships and friendships, which ends up being one of the most important things. Just like through those past friends, and teachers, and family. When I was in college listening to your music, I couldn’t have dreamed up a cooler thing than that I’d be friends with you. Wow! The thing to say to people is, “Just put your stuff out there, and let it roll!” C: The funny thing is, artistic people tend to be on the solitary, internal and brooding side of the personality spectrum. But we’d go insane if our art was our only thing. We still have to have the connections with people. I’ve had this conversation with others before, but the art community here in Nashville is such a great thing to be connected to… T: Oh, it’s huge. C: It’s great to be a part of it, because we’re not alone in our passion for beauty, or for what stirs something deep inside of people. So being connected with other people who feel that way bolsters us, and encourages us, and makes us all better people, and better at what we do. T: Definitely. My dream is to be out playing music and doing art on the street corner with friends everyday! But then I need time to be alone in my studio to balance it. C: Tell me about your studio. What’s your set-up? Do you put an easel up out in a meadow and listen to birds? Ha! What do you do for a studio? T: Recently it’s been cool. The main studio that I work out of now is our apartment. My wife has been gracious enough to me to let me set up my studio smack-dab-in-the-middle of what would be our dining room! It’s mobile, so I can tear it all down if I need to, but it works out great. We’re on the fourth floor with this beautiful view. As soon as I turn around, I look out at all of Franklin, Tennessee. But that’s not the only place I paint. Recently I’ve been painting on TV shows, like the “National Day Of Prayer” broadcast, which was really cool. I’ve been painting in Chris Rice’s kitchen, doing art lessons here. C: Thank you. T: You’re welcome. Painting at the “Cocoa Tree.” C: What’s the Cocoa Tree? T: In downtown Franklin, it’s a gourmet chocolate store, which has helped me out bigtime by just letting me stand in their window and paint on random Saturday nights. They had me there for their opening, and they asked me to do it whenever I can (I remember now, that’s the place where Travis mixed some of their chocolate in with his paint and did a painting on their opening night!) Just being in front of people. I think it’s a trend in America right now, people doing art live in front of people. Like while a band is playing. Especially in a worship setting. C: Speaking of a ‘worship setting’, do you classify art as “Christian” or “Secular?” T: I wouldn’t classify my work as “Christian” but I put it out there for everyone. And ultimately, if in some crazy roundabout, random, God-breathed way, someone looks at my art and it moves their heart, and they look at the title of the painting (and a lot of my titles are from the characters and chapters and books of the Chronicles of Narnia), I hope that leads them to the Chronicles, which I hope leads them to the Bible, and to Christ. That’s been a motive of my heart since I was about 20 years old. C: What a cool journey that would be for someone… from one of your paintings to other works of art like the Chronicles, and then they’re introduced in a gradual journey-like process toward knowing God. T: That’s been one of my motives. And I’m excited about that. If that ever happens and I find out about it, either here or in heaven, I’ll be blown away! I like the trail. Just painting a cross in every painting is not really going to necessarily attract someone to God. C: I agree. If every painter who is a Christian decides to paint only crosses, that can become a cliché, corny, ‘hotel art’ kind of thing. T: And I have a few of those, but I can’t do that every single time. I can’t put an icthus fish on every one of my paintings and… C: …and think that that somehow legitimizes your art. T: Right. C: I think there are levels of being an artist. And one of them is “going for the obvious.” And I’m not sure that’s really artistic. Maybe it’s pseudo-clever, but not really artistic. T: Look how mysterious God is. He is the ultimate Creator, the ultimate Artist, the ultimate Graphic Designer. The big thing in graphic design is ‘concept.’ Look at creation—that’s a concept. C: Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” They don’t spell it out, or sit there and say it out loud and obvious for you, and yet they declare it. I think there’s something more valuable to art when it causes the viewer or listener to have to dig and wonder and stretch. It reminds me of Jesus telling a parable. He would take something that would become a symbol of something glorious, but it would be something simple like a mustard seed, or a glass of wine, or a farmer sowing seed. He would tell that story and it became a picture of a huge kingdom truth. That stirred people to the point of asking, “What does it mean?” Sometimes he explained it, but many times he just said, “This is for him who has ears to hear.” He didn’t always make it really clear. He didn’t put a cross or fish on it, tie a bow around it and make it so accessible and… T: Packaged. C: Yeah, just so the religious people were happy with it. His evangelism probably would have failed a lot of our modern seminary evangelism classes. Ultimately he was stirring people’s hearts to search. That’s what our works need to do. There will be plenty of people who will do the obvious. But I really believe some of us need to go a different route. T: Yeah, like another huge influence on me: C.S. Lewis’s literature. “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” is one of my favorite books. C: Definitely one of my favorites, too! T: He’s describing a picture on the wall in the very beginning of the book. It’s a picture of the “Dawn Treader” and he describes it: “It was a picture of a ship--a ship sailing nearly straight toward you. Her prow was gilded and shaped like the head of a dragon with wide-open mouth. She had only one mast and one large, square sail which was a rich purple. The sides of the ship--what you could see of them where the gilded wings of the dragon ended--were green. She had just run up to the top of one glorious blue wave, and nearer the slope of that wave came down toward you, with streaks and bubbles on it.” Already there, look how many colors he just used! Rich purple. Green. Glorious blue wave! He’s describing all these things, and as a kid I had these read to me by my 5th grade teacher. I was just sitting there with my mouth wide open. It was just blowing my mind. All that imagery! I guess all my life, the things that have touched my heart, in music and in literature, have influenced my heart and influenced my paintings. Almost the biggest influence on my life has been those books! As crazy as that sounds. I will never get over them. I think it’s because of that magic he talks about. The magic of Narnia. All the beautiful, and good, and great things. C: I’m agreeing. So many images in my head that I write from are from that kind of thing. Like the way C. S. Lewis wrote. Whether he’s describing a feast that the Pevensie kids are having, where you can taste every cake, and Turkish Delight, and whatever’s on that table… T: Nuts and seeds… C: Yeah, or the colors…I just think the more we can explore the arts (and I know I’m focusing on art right now) but I believe this is also true about everything. The more we learn and understand and stretch our minds, the more we understand about science, math, or literature…all the things we get tired of and want to hurry up and get out of school so we won’t ever have to study again…but the more we learn, in every category, we open and stretch our own minds so that God can fill those places. It’s like building mental and spiritual muscle. If we’re not learning, we’re not expanding our ability to understand God better. And I believe great art, and literature, and music contribute to that. As we start doing better art, we will be helping people in some way understand God better. I fully believe that. In studying art history, and the periods, and what’s happening right now in the art world, do you see anything right now that’s the big trend, and/or is there a way to predict what the next logical thing might be? T: It’s hard for me to say, because there are so many people now doing so many different kinds of art. And we live in that generation where ‘anything goes.’ It’s almost like the answer you’d get if you asked someone on the street what kind of music they like. “Oh I like everything!” Out there with art, everything is going. One trend I do see is that some churches are becoming a part of art again. The church used to employ artists. Look at the Sistine Chapel! I think the church needs to get back to music, art, poetry, literature, and realizing that those things have a huge influence on culture. C: The Sistine Chapel ceiling is a great example. It was commissioned by the Church. It’s in a beautiful building that is architecturally gorgeous. The paintings that cover the ceiling make people walk in, look up, and drop their jaw! That Jump Little Children song comes to mind, called, “Cathedrals.” Basically sums up everything you just said. The chorus says: “In the cathedrals of New York and Rome There is a feeling that you should just go home And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is.” T: Wow! C: That’s how Art moves people. Here’s someone saying, “Here’s what I feel like when I walk out of that place. I’m so awe-struck, I don’t even know what to do. I just have this sense that I need to go home and figure out where Home really is.” T: That’s amazing. C: Bingo! That’s the point of what we’re doing. We can paint flowers, we can paint abstract, we can paint something as real as we want, we can paint scenes of the cross, we can write songs…everything that we get to do can in some way have that effect on people. And I believe it’s because we bring ourselves into it…and this is what I appreciate about you and your work. I stand two inches away from it, (or now that my eyesight is changing I have to stand about 12 or 14 inches away!) and don’t even know how to put words to it, but I’m loving what I’m seeing in the colors and the balance, and whatever’s on that canvas, and it makes my life better somehow. It makes me feel something, an unidentifiable something… T: But it’s good. C: It’s very good. And to me, when I say ‘unidentifiable,’ I’m going to credit God. “Thank you for eyes that work, and for giving Travis a gift to put paint on this piece of cloth, so that I get to experience this right now.” But it’s still an ‘unidentifiable.’ What is it that makes me feel that? The more people are aware of something unidentifiable inside, the more they’re going to search. And I think that’s what you’re about, and what we should all be about. It makes me love what you do. T: Pour passion into something and something is bound to happen. Whether I want to be or not, people tell me I’m this passionate person. C: You are! Ha! T: They say, “You’re nuts!” And I’m like, “Look at these amazing colors! Look at that flower coming out of the earth! And the light!” How many times have we just sat in your backyard and watched the light coming through the leaves, and just freaked out about the colors! The simplicity and the beauty of the creation around us. If people would just stop and be inspired. There’s something about slowing down and looking at things around us. And realizing that ALL of life is art. C: It’s achingly beautiful. T: In my Philosophy of Art seminar class in college, one thing we had to do was to try to make up a definition of art. We found it was impossible. And the reason why, I think, is because art is everything. Everything we see, our entire existence IS art. So yeah, you can say that art is a painting on a wall--people follow around and buy it because certain people say that’s what art is. But to me, art is everything that God has created. It’s a living piece of art with meaning a purpose behind it. ************ You can view Travis Jenkins' paintings online at travisjenkinsart.com. And be sure to check your local TV listings to find out when “The National Day Of Prayer” events will be airing, so you can watch Travis in action! AND... if you're ever in Franklin TN on a Saturday night, you might just want to walk past "The Cocoa Tree" and glance in the window, just in case Travis is sloppin' some chocolate on a canvas.