This short video by Richard Swafford shows Philip Trussell at work in his studio, explores some of his paintings, and features his commentary on the work.

“I was born in Kingsville, Texas in 1943. I started painting when I was 14, guessing Mexico City was the center of the art world. That would have been 1957 — the tail fins on our Plymouth convertible were spectacular.

Between 1961 and 1965 I worked toward a BFA in painting and a minor in art history at the University of Texas in Austin. My mentor was Robert Levers, protestant like myself and mystical: he taught that good drawing was mysterious. I agreed, and followed up.

At Yale University from 1965 to 1967 I worked toward an MFA in painting and a minor in art history. Most of my time there was spent adapting aspects of experimental filmmaking to my painting, instead of paying much attention to the fashionable avant garde hysterias. Andy Warhol’s multiple silkscreen prints on canvas chimed well with the works of “underground” film makers Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas. Brakhage’s hand-made 8 millimeter work in particular reoriented my sense of the possibilities open to painting: cognitive thresholds in projected light. I also stududied with George Kubler the art of the pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas.

One practice learned at Yale continues all these years later: work in series, don’t do just one, do as many as seem possible to outrun precious and egotistical attachment. A series may run anywhere between 20 and 200 before exhaustion sets in. The point, while working, is to become completely lost in the ongoing unfolding. Uncertainty is key, and suspension of criticism. The jazz standard “Let’s Get Lost” says it all. Good things are found, not forced.

Some of the paintings are divided into panels. They look something like movie storyboards or film clips or contact sheets. The imagery is calculatedly low-grade, gritty, bleached-out and hard to read. There is a good deal of image completion required of the viewer: Much of what you see is what you project. Another set of paintings explores the effect of drawn black lines on complexes of color heavily applied by painting knife. How a simple black outline tilts the cognitive processes at work in perceiving an image, how it actually changes the color of shapes how it hovers between annotation and denotation, and how it determines possible readings while at the same time subverting them — these are all dynamic possibilities. Mapping, writing, graphing and charting come together here.

One of the influences in these line works is the drawing tradition of the Maya in Central America, works dating from the 6th and 7th centuries AD. Screenfold books, cylinder vases, and large platters display dazzling brush-drawn images of gods, heroes, dancers, ball players, warriors, and local rulers among spoken words in brilliant hieroglyphs. Another series is a selection of 12 black and white drawings — like stage sets without actors. There is an internal logic in the way they present, fold, slide, and maneuver to make provisory places, imaginary, where events might be enacted.

Cutting across the various series are some common traits — a landscape structure — ground plane, middle distance, glimpsed horizon, and sky. This is from years of appreciating J. M. W. Turner, the early 19th-century landscape painter, and from studying Eugene Atget, the early 20th-century Parisian photographer. Another hero is George Méliès, the French film magician.

Part of a painter’s task is to translate any and all influences into something original. An artist’s originality consists in broad and deep awareness of the achievements of others accompanied by a power of reduction and adaptation in producing a necessary formulation.”