2022 Senior Exhibition Artists 2022 Senior Exhibition Artists: Travis Purcell

About Travis Purcell

Travis Purcell is an illustration student from Swansea, Massachusetts. His craft focuses on character and creature design, with an emphasis on story and aesthetics. His interest in the arts extends beyond the visual and into the realms of language, music and philosophy. Purcell’s truest passions are for worldbuilding and storytelling, taking particular interest in abstract ontological concepts and the terrible beauty of the human condition. He believes art and aesthetic beauty in all forms are equally crucial to the civility of society as, say, laws and education — that without the relief provided by creative entertainment, fantasy and fiction, the plain objectivity of life would be insufferable. Stories, to him, are like reflecting pools: we offer up our thoughts, emotions and experiences to them, and in return they tell us something about ourselves, reassuring us that we are not alone in our wanderous search for meaning.

“Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.” — Norman Podhoretz

Statement

Green Light

Strafe Heza is a character who I created sometime during high school. He is the protagonist of a dark fantasy world, the youngest in a long line of royal angels, and the heir to a holy kingdom called the Cloudsurf. His ancestry is muddled, though, with bloodlines rooted in a blasphemous lineage that threatens his people and challenges his perceptions of existence.

As a teenager, while I fleshed out Strafe’s character and story, it became apparent to me why I gravitated so much toward him — more than just a fictional hero, Strafe represented an idealized version of myself. He embodied who I saw my truest self to be, in appearance and personality, but who I felt I was not in reality. My life experiences during that time racked my head with questions and confusion which I internalized and, later, mythologized, translating both the pain and the beauty of growing up into a creative fantasy narrative, with Strafe at its center. It was a means for me to put my experience into context and attempt to understand it. My passion for worldbuilding became my way of dealing with my demons.

In a sense, Strafe’s character arc, roughly translated here, is an allegory for the internal turmoil that characterized my transition from adolescence into adulthood — a journey that I’m still making. The transformations he undergoes mirror the changes in my heart, mind and spirit as my inner world crumbled apart, and gradually mended again.

It’s been difficult for me to face this project. Only recently have I been able to move on from the stages of “submission” and “corruption” toward something resembling a forthright mode of being. I was ready to share it as a simple project based on a fictional character, with no real-world implications, and hide any glimpse of myself that might’ve shown through. But this isn’t a call for help or a cry of victimhood or anything like that. It’s just my take, based on my perceptions, on the human spirit’s capacity to triumph over its own darker parts and moral failings. It’s also something that, now that I’ve done it, I no longer need to do, and can move on.