“Only a Mother Could Love,” by Adam Trest.
Next to the shady oaks of Trustmark Art Park in downtown Laurel, Mississippi, a well-crafted storefront lined with cutouts from Adam Trest’s iconic artwork welcomes visitors from around the world, drawn to the city known for its HGTV fame and Mayberry charm. Inside, a curtain opens, and the happy, bespectacled artist emerges carrying a sign that reads “No Trest Passing!” a punny gift from a collector who enjoys a dad joke as much as Trest himself.
On the table sits the original painting for the cover of Trest’s forthcoming children’s book, The Christmas House (September 2026, Baker Book House Publishing), the artist’s latest collaboration with friend and Home Town star Erin Napier. Otherwise, the studio is filled with raccoons, squirrels, dandelions, and one particularly curious opossum.“I have really grown to love opossums in the last six months,” he says, laughing.
Trest is excited about his new collection, he tells me. “It is all of my… I call them ‘bandits.’ It’s the undesirables of the things that I paint—opossums and raccoons and armadillos and squirrels—the things that most people in real life are like, ‘they’re a nuisance.’”
If you live anywhere with porches, oak trees, and an opinion about your front lawn, you might know these creatures Trest refers to as “bandits.” You’ll also recognize the plants Trest pairs them with, the scrappy greens that ruin your otherwise perfect garden, resistant to everything but Roundup. Most call them “weeds.” Adam Trest calls them “blooms.”
It’s the undesirables of the things that I paint—opossums and raccoons and armadillos and squirrels—the things that most people in real life are like, ‘they’re a nuisance.’”
In this collection, he gives these so-called “undesirables” of the yard, garden, and the midnight trash the “Trest treatment”—making everyday beasts and weeds stunningly beautiful. Beneath Trest’s brush, a weed becomes a motif. A bandit becomes a saint. “Name a person who hasn’t picked up a dandelion, and blown, and made a wish,” he says with a smile.
What the artist has always done, with a discipline that looks effortless until you actually try it, is shift the viewer’s gaze from annoyance to awe. He takes the thing that knocks your trash can over at five o’clock in the morning, and paints it as a reminder to find the beauty in everything. “I get to shift the perspective,” he says. “I get to paint it in a way that makes you realize they are kind of beautiful. I want to change the idea behind the way people look at them.”
And so, the title he kept coming back to for this new show, which rolls off his tongue with alliterative elegance: Bandits and Blooms.
Photo courtesy of Adam Trest.
Adam Trest
Trest’s work has always carried the satisfaction of pattern, the sense of an ordered world where color can be arranged into harmony, where a shape can be simple and still provide visual complexity. It reflects the structure gardens seek: rows, borders, trellises, and grids; but also introduces chaos—disorder brought by wind, frost, drought, a vine taking what you give it and then a little more. Trest’s paintings live on that edge. His compositions often begin with symmetry, because symmetry is a kind of invitation. It welcomes the eye. It steadies the viewer.
“Symmetry helps us feel at peace,” he tells me. “You get a sense of calm when you see symmetry.”
He describes a piece he has drawn nearly a dozen times in his sketchbook, an opossum with all its babies on its back, arranged so their heads radiate outward, a composition built on “symmetry and radial-ness.”
Trest talks about trees in this collection with the kind of affection that makes you appreciate them differently the next day. “I love the way that a tree is symmetrical, but not,” he says. “It’s one of those ways that I get to break symmetry, just through the organic nature of how a tree branches.” It’s an argument against perfection, proof that balance does not require mirroring. Trest understands this, and he paints it into form.s
But leave symmetry untouched, and it becomes wallpaper—pretty, perhaps, but passive. So Trest follows nature’s lead. He breaks it up with the unexpected—a change in color, the addition of a small bright red ladybug, or a sudden change in pattern. “When you break symmetry,” he says, “then you get movement. It helps your eye move through the canvas.”
A dandelion becomes his perfect example, because the dandelion is a whole life cycle in one plant. It transforms from yellow bloom, to puffball, to wish. It is equal parts a reminder of childhood nostalgia, impermanence, and movement. “If I have a symmetrical canvas full of dandelions, and then all of a sudden one of them is getting blown away, that becomes a piece of art and not a piece of wallpaper. Because then we’re telling a story.”
"In the Weeds," by Adam Trest.
Trest creates art the way some people cook. His sketchbook, where he has built a whole world, is his recipe, but he isn’t scared to depart from it. When it is time to commit, he commits with paint. “I don’t draw on my canvases,” he says. “I just go straight in with paint. Nothing is really set in stone until paint hits the canvas.”
He describes the process like someone describing a dance they know by heart: paint the subject, paint the background around the subject to refine the shape. Revise, return, and refine again. The painting becomes itself through a constant push and pull.
Trest paints the bandits and the weeds because he thinks we need them. Not in our trash cans, necessarily, but in our imagination.
And then there is color, which is his calling card. “I use a very structured palette,” he says. “It really comes down to color theory and understanding that the way colors sit next to each other affects how they are. Almost every piece that I do is an experiment in color.”
Flatness, too, is intentional for Trest. There is very little perspective or overlap. Shapes sit beside shapes like tiles or a quilt. That flatness gives color the starring role. It decides what advances and what recedes.
Even after a style has settled into something recognizable, Trest still seeks the productive constraint, the art-school assignment. That is why he is excited about hand-pulled serigraphs, where every color is a new screen, and simplicity becomes a puzzle.
“Can I do this in two colors? Can I do it in three?” he asks. “How complex can it be? How simple should it be?”
"Thief of Wishes" by Adam Trest
By the end of our conversation, what stayed with me was not a single raccoon or dandelion. It was the intention behind Trest’s work: a refusal to sneer at the ordinary or undignified. A decision to look closer, with an eye towards beauty.
Trest paints the bandits and the weeds because he thinks we need them. Not in our trash cans, necessarily, but in our imagination. He is doing, with paint, what gardeners do with soil: turning seeds into flowers, making the world a more colorful place, and leaning into the whimsical.
And if you find yourself, after reading this, looking at a dandelion in your yard with new respect, consider that the point. Consider it a small act of surrender to beauty. Pick up that dandelion, take a close look at the beauty of its design, blow, and make a wish.
