Ed Trask: Taking Ego out of Art

by Charles McGuigan 05.2022

Ed Trask grew up in Loudon County, Virginia just outside Purcellville, on the edge of a suburban tide from the east that would eventually swallow a good portion of the county, but in those days, it was still largely rural, spread across hills that gently rolled into the Blue Ridge. As a boy he learned self-sufficiency; how to cook his breakfast and launder his clothes. His parents worked, and his brother and sister, both older than Ed, were seldom around after school. So Ed had the run of the house and the fifteen acres that surrounded it. He would wander the woods, soaking up nature, and on still, cool, cloudless nights he would see the nearness of the stars overhead, and could feel the thickness of the profound silence like a blanket, which he would become one with, and his soul would soar.

We’re sitting at a table in Ed’s studio over top a retail business down in the Bottom. It is a working space with a modicum of clutter, a number of surfboards, two drum sets, several large canvases—commissioned works; two landscapes, one of an interior—soon to be installed.  Ed is framed by one of the four windows looking out on the city skyline. Just over his shoulder I can read the legend, La Bodega in a white cursive script on a red background that is set against a field of turquoise.

Two things have been creative constants in his life since boyhood: visual art and music. As a child, Ed would draw logos of his favorite bands or skateboard brands, and would play the drums almost incessantly. When he was just nine, Ed began taking drum lessons, which he continued to do through high school. “I was getting really serious about concert percussion and drums,” says Ed. “So my dad would drive me to Winchester twice a week to get lessons under the percussive group at the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music.”

In a high school art class, Linda Ackerman, a perceptive teacher, noticed an innate talent in Ed, a shine he possessed like no other. Linda had laid out small packs of oil paints and brushes and 11-by-14 canvas boards. She’d also placed a stack of National Geographic magazines on a desktop. 

“Now,” Linda said, “Pick an image out of a magazine and paint it. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes,” and she left the room.

Three-quarters of an hour later, she returned and moved among the students like a fish among its spawn. Linda looked at the work of her students, one by one, and nodded and smiled, but when she came to Ed’s work, her mouth opened and her eyes grew wide. He had perfectly replicated the image from the magazine.  

“Whoa!” she said. “You’ve done this before.”

Ed shook his head. “I’ve never ever painted before,” he said. 

For the remainder of the semester, Linda continued to challenge her charge.  “She kept throwing painting projects in front of me,” Ed remembers. “And I just kept doing it, and it always felt right.”

Linda eventually set up a meeting with Ed’s parents, and she told them this: “The reason why your son is not getting straight As is because he doesn’t think the same way other people do. He’s an artist.”

Ed’s father, Newell, didn’t miss a beat. “All right,” he said. “We’ll just push him that way.”

Like his son, Newell had an extraordinary and inventive sort of brain. But where Ed’s thrived on artistic expression, his father’s roamed the corridors of scientific inquiry. Newell’s scholastic pedigree was as pure as it gets—MIT, Harvard, Caltech. He was an astrogeologist with NASA for years, working on the Mercury and the Apollo missions. Newell helped the first man land on the moon. He was actually being interviewed by Walter Cronkite just as Neil Armstrong was making “one giant leap for mankind.” Newell, who passed away five years ago, also worked for the U.S. Geological Survey. 

“My mother was that way, too,” says Ed. “They saw that I didn’t really process things on the same side of the brain as they did.”

As high school graduation neared, Ed had a tough choice to make. He could either go to VCU and study painting, or attend Shenandoah Conservatory of Music to major in percussion. But there was a third choice—George Mason University. “I thought maybe I could do the academic route,” Ed says.

That was not to be. “After the first semester at George Mason I was like, this sucks,” says Ed. “Get me out of here.”

So he headed a hundred miles south to Richmond, and everything opened up for him. “I came to VCU, and I think within the first week of being here I was like, ‘This is where I belong,’” Ed says. “These are my people.” 

He hit the ground running, majored in painting and printmaking, immersed himself in the punk culture and art scene, explored the city, and made it his own. Ed also did a fair amount of drinking. 

In his junior year, three of his art professors conducted something of an intervention in a studio classroom in the old Pollack Building. 

“This is ridiculous,” one of them said. 

“You’re showing up half drunk sometimes,” said another. “We see a lot of talent, but you’re not doing it.”

And the third one said, “You’re just wasting your parents’ money.”

Ed was outraged. “F*** you, I quit,” he yelled and then walked away, slamming the door behind him. He did not look back.

“That pissed me off so much that all I wanted to do was prove them wrong,” Ed says.

Almost immediately he found a rundown place in the 300 block of West Broad Street, the space that is now occupied by Black Iris Gallery. He negotiated with the realtors who were managing the property, and got it for song with a lease that ran for two short months. But Ed and other local artists had a vision for the place. They transformed it into a sort of anti-gallery gallery.   

“It was me and five other underground VCU artists,” Ed recalls. “We knew we didn’t belong at 1708 or in that whole realm of academia. For us it was like a big middle finger to the establishment.”

When the two-month lease expired, the gallery was thriving, so Ed renegotiated and ended up renting the space for the next year and half. “The artists made money and we made our rent and power, so it became viable,” says EIt was during this time that Ed did his first illegal mural, and he did it out of something that was akin to necessity. “I couldn’t get into the commercial galleries and I just don’t honestly think I was all that good of an artist,” he says. “I didn’t know where I belonged or what I was doing, but I knew I had to put a brush to a surface.”

Ed had just finished reading the collected stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a thick tome of biblical proportions. “So I started putting stuff on sheets of plywood on the sides of buildings that I thought were ugly,” he says. “At first, it was the thrill of doing something illegal. But then I started realizing that it was a beacon call to a lot of these buildings. Some of these buildings were tax write offs, sitting there rotting.”

Armed with a can of black paint and a few brushes, Ed attacked a large plywood panel surrounding the renovation and expansion of a building near 14th Street. Working from a photo of Isaac Singer of the dust jacket of the book, an image not much larger than a postage stamp, Ed began painting. He’d finished his work within two hours—an eight-by-eight foot portrait of one of the greatest storytellers of all time.  It was rough, it was fast, and the immediacy of it all appealed to Ed.

After he finished, Ed packed up his gear and walked up the hill toward Bank Street, and from that height looked down on his handiwork. He watched as a business suit slowed his pace, which seemed partly impaired by a two-martini lunch, and inched up to the mural on plywood which was still tacky to the touch. Several seconds later, the suit shook his head and walked away.

Ed could hardly contain his thrill. “Oh my God,” he thought, nearly out loud. “I won, I did it. I just stopped him in his tracks, made him contemplate his position.  I just made art that was for him, that was for everybody, not just for the bourgeois gallery crowd. I made something that everybody can either hate or love.”

He had a studio on 14th Street in the old American Die Company building that was later raised when the city built the Flood Wall. “I would spend every waking moment at that studio,” Ed says. “I would sleep, wake up, make art on wood on paper, and sometimes just attach it to buildings. I was putting it everywhere.”

More often than not they were quick portraits of authors he had read, or people in the news, or artists he admired. “Anything from J.D. Salinger to Vonnegut and Mother Theresa, to Rauschenberg,” says Ed.

During this entire period and for years thereafter, Ed also played drums for a number of punk rock bands, starting with Backlash and others along the way.  He also decided to return to school and finish his college degree. “I added a ton of art history classes and loved it and thrived and saw it in a whole different light,” Ed says.

As drummer for bands like Avail and Kepone, he was often on the road both stateside and abroad. And he would bring along his art kit and paint murals in Amsterdam, in Germany, or wherever else he landed. On a couple occasions he had run-ins with cops, but nothing much came of it. Not overseas at any rate. 

One of his worst experiences with the cops did not involve the illegal painting of murals. Instead, it was because Ed decided to swing like a monkey from the punk tree in Shafer Court, in those days the very epicenter of VCU.

Too drunk to drive or even mount a bike, Ed decided to walk home from a local bar. This was during his final semester at VCU, and as he headed down Shafer, Ed decided to swing from the punk tree.  A campus cop ended up arresting him and because it was the weekend there would be no magistrate downtown, so Ed had to spend the next couple days and nights in Richmond City Jail. 

“It was rough,” says Ed. “It scared the crap out of me.” 

On Monday, the judge hearing the case, looked at the cop and shook his head.  “This is insane,” he said. “All charges are dismissed.Along with his punk rock gigs, Ed worked as a bike messenger, and for about fifteen years at Millie’s in the back of the house and the front of the house. But all the while, he was honing his skills as an artist.

“I was starting to get known,” he says. 

Johnny Giavos hired him to paint a mural on the wall of Sidewalk Cafe. “I started making money that way,” Ed says. “They were stylistically close enough to what the illegal things were, and people liked them.”

Then he did a mural of Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara on the side of a video store in Shockoe Bottom. He was then commissioned to paint Princess Diana on the facade of Island Grill, also in the Bottom. “I remember there were these bows in her crown, and they turned into little skulls,” says Ed.

One commission led to another. “And they were getting bigger all the time,” says Ed.  “I was starting to understand the commercial side of being a mural artist. I was starting to confront the idea of how murals sit, not only in the public eye, but with the fabric of architecture in an area. Does this image that you just put on a wall become an iconic image that gives identity to a neighborhood?”

As his name spread, he began picking up jobs in other states. He did a mural in Florida and shortly after that was asked by Partners in the Americas to help create a mural in a city just to the south of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was an experience that would change Ed Trask for good and all, would awaken him to a new truth about himself and his art.

He traveled down to Florianopolis, Brazil, and for the next three weeks he would help create a sixty-foot long mural along a fifteen-foot high wall in the center of the town. His objective was to tell the story of the town. To that end he worked closely with an older man who supplied him with scores of photographs, and narrated, through a translator, the entire story of the city.

“And I worked with kids from the town and some of these kids came from pretty humble environments,” says Ed. “It was a very profound time for me because that’s when I started to divorce my ego from what I was doing. I started seeing how impactful public art could be. Working with these kids and seeing just how powerful it was to have this kind of creative outlet. I knew it had to be less about me and what I was putting up on the wall, and more about using my creativity to inspire another generation of younger artists and to inspire creative conversations that could really bring about positive change. That is what became my goal.”

Not long after that, Ed got a call from Hands On Greater Richmond. They wanted Ed to head up a giant volunteer piece about a hundred feet long. “I decided I was going to try this almost paint-by-number approach where I would draw everything out, and everybody paints it in,” he says. “And I saw the impact it had on a lot of these volunteers and realized, I’m gonna be doing this for a while.”

About twelve years ago, Ed Trask and Jon Baliles had the foresight to realize we were entering a sort of Renaissance in Richmond where murals were concerned. Jon had just returned from Europe and was excited about a mural festival he had seen there. 

“It turned out he had a lot of the same interests I had,” Ed says. “So we had a great conversation at that point. We kind of said: ‘Let’s come together and create a festival of street art and murals. So more than ten years ago now we had the very first Street Art Festival, and we brought in some of the biggest hitters of street art from all over the country.”

Over the next several years there would be other Street Art Festivals here, and they were all successful. In 2017 there was a sort of alignment in Ed’s long career as an artist. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts had just purchased Ed’s painting of the iconic Bill’s Barbecue on Arthur Ashe Boulevard near The Diamond, a unique part of Richmond’s culture that was unceremoniously reduced to rubble to make way for corporate boxes. 

The VMFA, on a Sunday, was going to host a reception for Ed’s family and friends as the museum welcomed his painting into their permanent collection. The day before, a cloudless Saturday,  Ed was at The Diamond overseeing the latest incarnation of the Street Art Festival. He watched in utter joy as his daughter and her friends painted a mural. His eyes shifted to his son who was playing softball out in center field. The boy’s face seemed to say, “Can it get any better than this?” No, thought Ed, this is it.

And then he felt the vibration of his phone. He hesitated answering for a second so as not to shatter the memory of this singular moment. 

“I pick it up,” Ed remembers. “It's my mother. She says, ‘Your father just had a stroke and he’s in the hospital.”

He planned on leaving immediately, but his family told him to attend the event at VMFA, that their father would have wanted him to. They believed their dad would be fine. “Do not come here,” one of his siblings said. “Sunday is the biggest moment you’ve had in your life. Dad’s not dying. Come Sunday night.” Which is what Ed ended up doing. By the time he arrived in Loudon Country, Newell Trask had passed. 

“It’s such a balance between beauty and loss and forgiveness,” Ed says. “It took about a year for me to get back in the right mind frame.”

As he looks around the studio, his eyes fall on one of his recent paintings, one that features the Lost Trail on Belle Isle.  “Canvas is turning into the biggest thing now,” says Ed. “Visually, I’m going to interesting places on canvas, and I’m seeing light and a rhythm within nature a lot differently than I used to. I feel like I’m in a different place with canvas painting now, and I love it. And I was lucky to have Jennifer Glave and BJ Kocen who really have faith in me. Every time I would have a show she would push it, and the shows would sell out.”

Which is not to suggest that Ed no longer paints murals. As a matter of fact he’s about to begin one along the wall of the former Dry Cleaners at the corner of Bellevue Avenue and Brook Road. The objective will be to tell the story of Northside, an extremely complex and intricate web. 

“It’s gonna be almost a collage of different imagery that I think represents Northside in a very broad way,” says Ed. “There are so many historical story lines that have happened to shape Northside. I think I would have to use a whole city of walls to portray all of it. So I’ve picked certain ones that I’m attracted to and that reflect a broader range.”

Among other people, places and things, the mural will feature Arthur Ashe and Gabriel Prosser, the entry to Bryan Park and the old trolley line that ran through the Northside. Follow this link to watch a brief interview with Ed about the Bellevue mural.

Ed met the love of his wife more than 25 years ago in one of Richmond’s earliest coffee shops—World Cup Coffee over on Robinson in the upper Fan. He had just come off tour with Kepone and he was hungover. He ordered a breakfast bagel and an iced coffee, and then he saw her.

“This is true,” he says. “It was like she was walking in slow motion. It literally was that love at first sight thing.”

“What the f***?” he said in a whisper. “Who is that?” His friend Michael Bishop shared her name with Ed. 

“I’m totally in love with that woman,” he would tell other friends in the days to come.

But he could never quite find the nerve to ask her out. That is until very early one morning at the Hole in the Wall, when Ed had consumed  a lot in the way of liquid courage.

“So I walked right up to her and said, ‘Hey I’d like to take you out to lunch tomorrow,’” Ed tells me. 

“It just bloomed from there,” he says.  “She’s such a stunning woman in every way, and she’s so grounded, and she is wicked smart. She believes in the best of all people. She has always had faith in me, and has pushed me when I needed it.”

In fairly short order, the pair married and now, more than two decades later, have two children, a son and a daughter. 

This fall, their daughter will begin the journey of her life. She heads up to New York on scholarship at Parsons School of Design in the heart of Greenwich Village.  “She is so talented and we are so proud of her,” says Ed. “We’ve always been open with our daughter and our son.”

His brow furrows a bit as he considers his daughter’s move to the north, but then the muscles relax as he recalls a discussion he had with Kelly not long ago. 

“We were remembering what it was like when we went to college,” he says. “You were kind of scared, but you knew you were supposed to take that step. You were supposed to get out of your comfort zone, and you had to go, but you were petrified.” That memory brought instant joy to husband and wife. 

“We felt great remembering that,” Ed Trask says. “We were nostalgic about it,  but at the same time we realized it put us in the place where we are today, and that made us feel good about where we were then, and where we are now.”