Trevor Lawrence and the artist: Two brothers, two remarkable talents (2024)

Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2021. View the full list.

Update, March 11: Trevor Lawrence’s brother and sister-in-law, Chase and Brooke Lawrence, will create a 50-card limited-run set of the quarterback for Topps, The Athletic’s Bill Shea reports. The set will be released in April.

ANDERSON, S.C. — Amanda Lawrence called her eldest son, Chase, before the big night with an important request.

The Jan. 5 Heisman Trophy ceremony was fast approaching, and Trevor Lawrence, the star Clemson quarterback, had earned one of four finalist nods. The ceremony would not be in New York because of the pandemic, but the Lawrence family would still be on national television, with part of the show emanating from Clemson’s team meeting room.

‘”Wear something nice. Really nice,’” Chase remembers his mom instructing.

“OK,” replied Chase, 25, and Trevor’s older brother by 4 1/2 years. “I’ll wear my nice clothes.”’

Chase and his wife, Brooke, make up an award-winning artist duo and work from their in-home studio in Anderson, not far from the Clemson campus. With the pandemic, there hadn’t been much need to get out of pajamas.

The tan suit Chase wore that night matched his dark blond hair, which was pulled into a bun. He paired it with a plunging dark green floral shirt and accessorized with two necklaces. A cream-colored flower pin on the left collar of his jacket completed the look.

When he and Brooke arrived at Clemson, he figured the spotlight would stay on Trevor, who is expected to go No. 1 in April’s NFL Draft to Jacksonville.

But after Trevor placed second behind Alabama wide receiver DeVonta Smith and the ceremony ended, the couple arrived home to a message from a friend.

Chase’s look had made him a bit of a Twitter sensation.

I wish I had as much confidence in anything as Trevor Lawrence's brother does in whatever that thing he's wearing. #Heisman pic.twitter.com/TnlQr22n9X

— Mike Gillespie (@MikeABCColumbia) January 6, 2021

I have a completely unsubstantiated belief that if he wanted to he could sling it 80 yards as well

— Mina Kimes (@minakimes) January 6, 2021

“I just looked up ‘Trevor Lawrence’s brother’ and then I found posts on it,” Brooke said. “It was so funny. … But that’s just his style.”

“I was like, ‘Yeah — all I did was get dressed,’” Chase added, laughing.

Those who know the Lawrence brothers best say that Chase and Trevor actually aren’t all that different. They look and speak alike, have eerily similar relaxed vibes, hang out regularly, talk openly about their faith and love to be a bit bougie about their coffee.

But though Trevor Lawrence might be the top quarterback prospect in the country, Chase took a different path. He and Brooke are accomplished oil painters and sculptors, working in a style they describe as ghastly and poignant, and show a different side to the Lawrence family. Trevor has even made a cameo.

How one family produced two sons who developed such different passions is a question Chase and Trevor get often. But it’s how it’s always been in the Lawrence household, which includes 9-year-old Olivia. And they like it that way.

“(Trevor) kind of always, since late middle school, early high school, kind of had some level of abnormal attention on him,” Chase said. “But yeah – I’ve always wanted to be an artist since I was a kid.”

Amanda Lawrence still has the photo of Chase with his first piece of art.

It’s a shark he drew at 2 1/2 years old on a Little Tikes chalkboard. Amanda used the image for his graduation announcements from art school at Kennesaw State in 2017. Chase insists now that the shark looks more like a “weird snake.” But his work had the Lawrence family’s attention, nevertheless.

“Of course we were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that is so good, that is awesome,”’ Amanda recalled. “And then I’m like, ‘Gosh. That is really good. You can tell it’s a shark.”’

The running joke between Amanda and Chase is that Chase could look at a piece of thread and entertain himself for hours — which came in handy when Trevor made his debut in October 1999.

Chase remembers gathering sticks in the backyard of the family’s Cartersville, Ga., home and using them to build little houses and cities. He’d also constantly fool around with Legos, Playmobil toys and Lincoln Logs.

“Trevor comes along, and he’s like wild man jumping off of buildings and all this stuff,” Amanda recalled. “But yeah, Chase has always been really creative.”

Amanda and Jeremy Lawrence decided to introduce Chase to T-ball as a way to get him started in team sports. But the couple realized their eldest son was most interested in drawing in the dirt of the field.

Chase dabbled in basketball because he was tall — he’s 6-foot-2 now and Trevor is 6-6 — and played for a few years. But kids on the team got too competitive for his laid-back personality, and he started to realize that competition might not be his thing. He hasn’t played team sports since around middle school.

Around that time, Chase started skateboarding. But something else happened, too. As MySpace grew in popularity, he discovered an artist named Alex Pardee, whose Instagram bio now reads in part: “I create bright nightmares.”

Hooked, Chase began following Pardee’s blogs.

“He just made really weird, colorful, scary kind of stuff, and I don’t know what it was. There was something about it, I just loved it,” Chase said. “I just couldn’t believe this guy existed. So that kind of inspired me to commit to becoming an artist. I was like, ‘I’m going to do this.’”

Though Trevor was a gifted quarterback early — gaining national attention at 13 for the big arm that will soon lead to a guaranteed rookie contract worth around $40 million — Chase continued to thrive in art classes during high school.

He attended Kennesaw State, where he met Brooke, and both received bachelor’s degrees in drawing and painting. An assigned self-portrait of his facial muscles and bones still hangs on the walls of Amanda’s office, where she works as an ear, nose and throat nurse practitioner. She gets frequent compliments and is proud to tell people her son is the artist.

Upon graduation, Chase began working at a Comcast warehouse in Cartersville to pay the bills while doing art on the side. But in December 2018, he took the plunge and committed to art full time.

That meant moving to Anderson with Brooke and a few buddies. Trevor had won Clemson’s starting quarterback job as a true freshman in Week 5 that season, and Chase attended every game. Plus, Trevor’s now fiancee, Marissa Mowry, played soccer at Anderson University, the cost of living was low and most of his clients hailed from the Carolinas.

Chase asked Brooke to start painting with him around June 2019. He jokes she’s the better artist of the two anyway. The in-home studio is a well-lit area with exposed brick in the corner of the house that overlooks the backyard and has displays of their paintings and sculptures.

They classify their style of painting as “impressionistic realism,” which Brooke said emphasizes looser brush strokes and careful color selection. It’s an organic, expressive style of art that Chase finds more challenging and more enjoyable.

Their biggest influences include Dutch artists Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, both from the Northern Renaissance period in the 1500s. The couple, who wed last spring, also enjoy current Portland-based artist Adam Burke, and Chase has a few favorites of his own: American artist John Singer Sargent, who died in 1925, and Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński, who died in 2005.

“His stuff is crazy,” Chase said. “It’s scary.”

Chase and Brooke’s method typically involves one of them starting the piece and the other filling in behind as they rotate until it’s finished. The final projects don’t look like multiple artists were involved — particularly evident in their first big project.

Around July 2019, an art collector from Augusta, Ga., who also roots for Kirby Smart’s Georgia Bulldogs, emailed Chase with a request for two life-sized 40-inch by 60-inch paintings that he could display as a set. He offered to pay upfront — and in full.

Chase and Brooke ordered the materials and got to work the next day.

First, though, they needed a male model for the project.

They had just the subject in mind.

Amanda Lawrence knew both of her sons were home that evening when she got off work. What she didn’t know was what she’d walk into when she entered the family’s sunroom.

The brothers wore hooded robes, Chase in brown and Trevor in red. All of the lights were off, though Amanda noticed several lit candles. Oh, and don’t forget the fake skull for Trevor to hold in his hands.

“I’m like, ‘What are y’all doing?”’ Amanda recalled.

‘“Are y’all doing some kind of weird ceremony or something?”’

Chase explained to his mother that his and Brooke’s new project required that they first take photos of the scene they intended to paint.

The client had seen Chase’s paintingof a monk from earlier in his career and expressed interest. A similar theme made sense for this project, so Chase enlisted the help of his brother, who was six months removed from Clemson’s 2018 national championship.

“They are paintings of these monks in caves, and it’s like a little Easter egg once you realize who it is,” Chase said. “They’re like, as tall as a person, and they face each other. One is of me and one is of him.”

The final product took Chase and Brooke about two months to complete and is particularly special to them. They also built custom gold-leaf wooden frames for each piece.

Once worried that her sons wouldn’t be close because of their different interests, Amanda cherishes seeing Chase and Trevor absorb art and football through the other.

“When we were watching the Ohio State game, we were getting pretty upset,” Chase said of Clemson’s Sugar Bowl national semifinal loss on New Year’s Day.

“When he gets the dangerous hits, we get really anxious. That’s just stressful.”

Trevor is training in California ahead of the draft, but the brothers hung out together several days last week.

Chase is aware that being Trevor’s older brother helps bring exposure to their business.

But his and Brooke’s livelihood is based on creating art that patrons want to buy.

“I love that people see him for who he is and not just Trevor’s brother,” Brooke said.

As business continues to grow, the duo can be selective about which galleries they enter — galleries take about 40 percent of the profit, Chase said — and work on their own terms.

About 60 percent of their work comes from commissions from clients, and the other 40 percent comes from original work the couple paints to sell. They recently completed — and sold — a personal piece that portrayed a house on fire. When protests broke out during the summer, Brooke turned to art to help express her thoughts on the state of the country.

“You have to have that passion — that sort of obsessive art-making push. Those two have that,” said Don Robson, who taught Chase and Brooke in a figure-drawing class at Kennesaw State.

“I always felt that they were going to be successful fine artists — studio artists — in the real world, which is very scary. It’s a very scary thing to do because there’s a lot of unknowns out there. But they stuck with their dreams and they’re still working with it.”

Amanda said that life is busy for her family and Chase has seen firsthand how many phone calls Trevor has had to field since declaring for the draft and hiring an agent and a marketing agency.

Chase will be there to support Trevor during his NFL career. And Brooke said the couple would give Trevor and Marissa artwork for their new home.

Maybe, once the season begins, the TV cameras will pick up Chase again.

“They just connect, they find it real comfortable around each other, and I’m so thankful,” Amanda said. “Let your kids be themselves and nurture what talents they have, because we’ve learned a lot.”

(Top image of Trevor Lawrence courtesy of Brooke and Chase Lawrence)