Lawrence resident Frank Janzen, pictured here, has spent the majority of his life overseas. After visiting more than 50 countries, Janzen, 72, says he's probably settled here in Lawrence.

Some artists use a paintbrush, others a chisel or a camera or a bit of charcoal.

Frank Janzen uses his passport. He’s accumulated half a dozen or so over the years, which he’ll proudly retrieve from one of the many boxes stacked in the northeast corner of his East Lawrence living room if you ask him nicely.

Janzen, 72, is a self-described “travel artist.” He’s spent a collective 25-plus years living, working and traveling outside the United States, visiting more than 50 countries — meditating on an Indian hillside, teaching English in Oman and Yemen, building a pharmacy with the Peace Corps in a Senegalese village — along the way.

The longtime Lawrence resident invented the term during a photo session with artist Rachael Perry, who at the time was collecting black-and-white portraits of the local arts scene for her Lawrence Inside Out project.

She asked Janzen if he was an artist. Giving it some thought, Janzen told her, “I’m a travel artist,” and the moniker stuck.

“Here in Lawrence, we have all these artists — painting and sculpture and all that stuff — but ‘travel artist’ is not something anyone thinks of, so I made it up,” Janzen says. “Traveling, you’re experiencing all kinds of new things all the time.”

If Janzen’s an artist, the pile of faded, worn passports fanned out across his living-room floor — in addition to the countless maps, language guides, photographs and other souvenirs he’s accumulated over the years — might represent a body of work that’s been nearly seven decades in the making.

“To me, it was just the way things were,” Janzen recalls of his globetrotting childhood, which first took him to Brazil at age 5.

Janzen’s father, a civil engineer, worked in U.S. aid programs overseas and relocated his family from Chanute to Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon River, for a yearlong stint beginning in 1948.

After returning to small-town Kansas, where Janzen attended elementary and middle school, the family packed up and moved again — this time to Saigon, South Vietnam.

It was 1956, Janzen recalls, and the country had emerged from the First Indochina War, which resulted in Vietnam’s independence from its French colonizers, a few years before.

The Vietnam War had only just begun, though it would be nearly a decade before the first U.S. combat troops arrived.

Conditions in Saigon were relatively peaceful, though Janzen remembers two bombs being detonated in the city during his two-year stay.

The first went off at the United States Information Service Library on a Sunday — “nothing happened,” Janzen says, except for a blown-out window — followed by another at a movie theater the Janzens and other American expatriates used to frequent.

“They put mesh on our school-bus windows after that,” Janzen remembers.

Even after the family’s eventual return to the states, Janzen couldn’t shake his restless spirit. Post-high school, Janzen enrolled at Kansas University — where he would eventually return to earn a bachelor’s degree in Slavic languages and literature and a master’s degree in education — but dropped out after less than two semesters.

It was in the Army, which he joined in 1962, where Janzen discovered his aptitude for languages. At the U.S. Army Language School in Monterey, Calif., Janzen studied Polish six hours a day, five days a week for an entire year.

And then, just like that, he was off — to Germany, where he was stationed from 1963 to 1965, then to Poland, where he studied in a foreign-exchange program through KU.

Despite establishing his Lawrence residency in 1961, Janzen says he’s only lived here intermittently over the years. From hitchhiking across Europe and Asia (“that was the period of the so-called hippie trip,” he recalls of his journey from Venice to New Delhi in a Volkswagen bus driven by a couple of Canadians he’d met along the way) to his volunteer work with the United Nations and the Peace Corps in Africa, Janzen never stayed in one place too long.

Until now, that is. In March 2011, after his one-year teaching contract in Yemen had ended, Janzen finally decided it was time to go home. Just a few weeks later, North American expatriates were told to leave the country due to increasingly unsafe conditions.

Looking back, Janzen admits it may have been his last overseas trip.

“The thing is, I have roots here. I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere,” he says. “In my later years, I’ll be around here, doing things and being involved here.”

Since returning to Lawrence, he’s been diagnosed with cancer and has undergone radiation treatment.

That was nearly three years ago, and these days, Janzen says he’s “relatively healthy.” He’s become something of a local activist, keeping himself busy with City Commission and East Lawrence Neighborhood Association meetings, submitting letters to the (Journal-World) editor and working on his ongoing Leo Beuerman commemorative project.

His efforts led to a plaque honoring the legendary Lawrence pencil salesman that now stands at the corner of Eighth and Massachusetts streets. Janzen says he’d like to develop a Beuerman-themed website through Explore Lawrence.

He wouldn’t mind traveling again — maybe to Poland, which he’s revisited several times over the years and which remains close to his heart — but simply doesn’t have the funds for it.

“The farthest I’ve went is California, to visit my stepmother who lives there,” says Janzen, who’s also working on organizing his “hundreds of photographs” into albums. “I need to label them, because when I’m gone, who’s going to know what they’re about?”

Janzen’s part-time gig at the KU Writing Center, as much as he enjoys it, won’t buy him a ticket to Poland. And he’s OK with that, somewhat.

In his many years of “free-wheeling vagabond travels,” Janzen realized he would have to continue working after his contemporaries retired.

The adventures — and now, the memories — are worth it.