Todd Whitley began the formal study of art in high school.  He split time between his studies, his art, and his tennis, for Mr. Whitley was a varsity player on his high school tennis team and was offered a scholarship to play in college.  A diving accident in his senior year of high school changed Mr. Whitley’s athletic plans.  His doctors call him their living miracle, for none of them expected Mr. Whitley to walk again.  After years of hard work and recovery, Mr. Whitley not only walks, but he is an athlete and an artist.   Todd Whitley plays and teaches tennis as a professional in the Houston area, and has initiated a career as a specialized portrait artist.  It is his strength of spirit and tenacity in the face of life challenges that Mr. Whitley brings to his art and to his professional teaching career.

As an artist, Mr. Whitley has painted murals and private works for his friends.  A little over a year ago, one of his adult students in tennis began discussing the mental and psychological components of playing winning tennis.  Together, Whitley and his student explored the psychology of anxiety in sports and how that anxiety in sports influenced success in life.  Out of that series of tennis lessons and discussions, Whitley began to draw images on paper that expressed a sense of his student’s inner life.  Eventually, Whitley showed his student what he called an inner portrait he had painted of another tennis player and the student wanted Whitley to do a painting for him.  Ten months later, Whitley presented his client with a new kind of painting: the psychological portrait. 

Unlike traditional portraits, the psychological portrait requires that Mr. Whitley learn about his subject’s hopes, dreams, values, and experiences that have formed a part of his life as a businessman, athlete, hunter, professional or parent.  From those conversations, Mr. Whitley gathers a sense of the subject’s inner perspective on life, the images that move his emotions and his spirituality.  From these images, Mr. Whitley creates a collaborative work resulting in a painting that becomes a portrait of the outer person and his inner self.  Having met and overcome serious challenges in his own life, Mr. Whitley seeks that optimistic spirit in the inner life of his subjects and gives that image an artistic rendering that is more significant and meaningful than the usual portrait artist brings to the canvas.