  Art of AVAIL'S Ed Trask To fully appreciate Avail, you have to see the band live. With slam pit-fueling rhythms, stage dive-inducing riffs, and singalong choruses, the Richmond, Virginia-based band blows the doors off of nightclubs and dives, leaving audiences exhausted and energized. The songs, which mix DC hardcore punk with a dash of southern rock twang, address social ills and personal challenges but always convey a positive energy that tips the scales on the side of the people. |
   
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Similarly, the artwork of Ed Trask flourishes in real-life settings. Whether applied guerrilla-style on a condemned building, screwed onto a construction site wall, or created as a commissioned art, his paintings breathe unexpected life into public locations. On tour and in his hometown, Trask is driven to post art that jolts pedestrians and motorists out of their everyday slumber, celebrates forgotten aesthetics and discarded values, and fires the imagination.
GR: Is your art really all over Richmond? ET: It is all over Richmond, but it's starting to dwindle a little bit because I haven't done that much illegal stuff lately. It all started when I was getting disenchanted with the galleries. There was a hierarchy and it was a really snobbish thing to get around. It's insanely political, so I started finding different venues. It started off being construction sites that were boarded up or old buildings that I wanted to bring attention to. I started doing stuff on 4-foot by 8-foot sheets. In the middle of the day, I'd pick them up and screw them in or paint them directly wearing a jumpsuit with a fake advertisement on my back of my jacket. I've gotten into some trouble, but the majority of it is hassle-free. At one point I probably had about 50 murals all over the city. GR: How do you feel when you see your work out in the street? ET: It's wonderful. The best feeling is when there's a work I put up in, say, '95, and I'll meet someone in another city who has it. I'm like, "What are you talking about?" "Someone unscrewed it, took it down, passed it to one guy, and it got passed to me." And I'm in New York City sitting in someone's house looking at my painting. GR: Can you talk a specific image you've chosen to paint in a public spot? ET: The very first time, I was reading Isaac Singer. I couldn't believe how good of a writer he was, so I found a photograph of him walking down the street reading. He was the epitome of the walking dead. He'd walk the same blocks to his job every day. I was like, "That's it. I'm going to paint Isaac Singer." I went to a wall and painted a 10-foot by 10-foot portrait of him in broad daylight. That was when I started getting the kick. From then on I couldn't stop. GR: Are you devastated when one of your public pieces is taken down? ET: Not at all. That's part of the process. That kind of art is really transitory. It's not going to be up for that long, but the image and idea are there. All the images are very literal. There isn't any serious, hidden meaning in it. You're going to look at it pretty fast and get the gist of it. If I stop somebody for 10 seconds from his whole pattern of walking to work or anything, then I've been successful. The imagery has changed from almost Chuck Close-type stuff--realistic black and white portraits of different artists and people I respect in the community--to color. Now I do commissioned stuff where a business will say, "As long as you put our name somewhere, you can paint what you want." GR: Your style is more like Constable or Turner than, say, Shepard Fairey. ET: I adore Turner. I went through Virginia Commonwealth University art school for art history and I got into Constable and Corbet. A lot of my landscapes come from being on tour, taking pictures out of the van window and having telephone poles flash past. It creates this beautiful rhythm. Then I started getting infatuated with power lines. I'll be in the sickest rural area in Iowa, in this beautiful pastoral landscape, and somewhere there's a power line. Everywhere you go, you're connected somehow. So I'm infatuated with them. In everything I paint, at some point there's a line connecting it to something else. GR: Your landscapes are very painterly and nostalgic. ET: I like to capture the sense of what the urban landscape was like before it turned into an urban blight-type landscape. I grew up in a real rural area and a lot of my relatives came from working farms and different jobs that are gone now. Whatever landscapes I create are soft, and have a nostalgic air of what used to be. GR: How do you feel about graffiti and graffiti-based art? ET: I love it. A lot of it reflects the struggle that artists go through today. It's not contrived. It's not set up as these illuminati of art snobs. It's actually a working person who's fighting to get his stuff up. It's beautiful as long as it's not stupid tagging. That I don't agree with, but some tags are absolutely stunning. It's a fine line, too. The one arrest I had in Richmond and a lot of the press I have ask, "What is the line between graffiti and art?" I have no idea. A piece I spend a month and a half painting that I put on the wall has the exact same merit as something a guy puts up in one night on a train that happens to be going through South Dakota. GR: Do you approach murals and paintings differently? ET: Yeah. When I'm in the studio I'll work an image and destroy the composition two weeks later if I don't think it's working. If the characters aren't breathing or talking to each other right, I'll keep re-working it. But when it comes to murals it's really fast. Once I work out on paper what I want to do, it goes up and it's done. |