Atlanta Arts category interest

Photographer and painter Trenity Thomas grew up picking fruit with his cousins in neighborhoods around LaPlace, Louisiana. Now in his mid-twenties, the artist renders lemons, pecans, and misbeliefs (or loquats) throughout his paintings, homages to the women who raised him and visual prompts for his viewer: “Life gives you choices, gives you lemons — what will you do with them, what will you learn?”

For me, How was the Party? (2024) is Thomas’ most successful painting to date. The artist completed this work right before the installation of his show Little Me Would be Proud at The Front in New Orleans, the piece still smelling like the toxic promise of something new. The work features three shirtless men blowing into party horns and wearing jeans, sporty sunglasses, and party hats. The mean neighborhood dog from Thomas’ childhood growls at the viewer behind a chain link fence, on which rests a dragonfly and hangs a strand of Mardi Gras beads. Thomas shares: “We didn’t have a lot of birthday parties growing up. Gallery openings are such a party, such a celebration.” Thomas sees himself in the figure on the right—apart from the group and somewhat melancholy despite the celebrations, a talismanic lemon tucked in his pocket. Even with this perspective, the painting buzzes with playful eroticism and dynamic geometry.

An adroit photographer, the artist returned to painting during the COVID-19 pandemic, working from old photographs and childhood memories. Over coffee, as we discuss the symbolism and figures in his various works, he has a story and a name for every detail. I learn about the thrift store red cowboy hat, the stolen bike from his youth, his nickname “Batman”, and his models (always friends) both living and departed. Painted dragonflies, powerlines, and paper planes are all particular and personal. In high school, Thomas worked as a teen docent, and later as a gallery assistant, at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. The grid above the three men in How was the Party? is a recreation of photographed shadows in galleries at the Ogden. Just as the museum appears in this work, another painting by Thomas is currently on view at the institution for their annual Louisiana Contemporary exhibition. That piece, Reflecting (2023), also features Thomas’ signature fruit and the subject of photographed friends.

Fruit is color, sweet and tart and sour, the stuff of pies and cocktails, a means of spreading seed. We find fruit again in the work, Fishbowl (2023). As a middle school student, Thomas was instructed to think of New Orleans, a city below sea level, like a bowl. From this prompt, he envisioned a fish bowl, like those in his grandmother’s house, and he brought this vision to life as a work in oil pastel. I love this piece. I love that it captures New Orleans as a place under water, as a landscape of voyeurism, where beguiling betta fish are fixin to fight and cockroaches await their survival after the flood. And still, life gives lemons and we have things to learn.