Born in Kingsville, Texas in 1943, Trussell was trained as a painter at The University of Texas at Austin and at Yale School of Art and Architecture.

Growing up with a father who was was a jazz DJ, band leader, and writer, Trussell was surrounded by books and records, something he realized was unique among his South Texas peers. As a child, his father brought him along to shows and interviews where he had the opportuinty to see and meet jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk.

When he moved to Austin in the early ‘60s he met Stephanie Chernikowski, one of his classmates who became a mentor, friend, and muse. An English major, Chernikowski pointed him not only toward readings, but also music, introducing him to friends like Janis Joplin. Stephanie would eventually move to New York City and became one of the great rock & roll photographers, shooting immortal pictures of friends like The Talking Heads, Blondie, and Andy Warhol for the New York Times and The Village Voice.

When Trussell arrived at Yale, not only was the coldness of New England a culture shock, but professors there didn’t understand why his work was so divergent. They told him to find a style. Eventually though, some of them, like abstract expressionist painter Al Held, said that because Trussell was so deft at myriad styles (and media, including sculpture and writing) that he was the first true postmodernist they’d encountered. Sure enough, Trussell's work was more inspired by filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Georges Méliès than by other painters at the time.

So it was serendipitous when he moved to West Newbury, Massachusetts in the late '60s and began working with Harvey Brown at Frontier Press designing and illustrating books. One of his first projects there was working on a book with Stan Brakhage. He also designed a book for the poet Ed Dorn, a protege of Charles Olson. Dorn had been a student of Olson's at the short lived Black Mountain College alongside other luminaries like John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Buckminster Fuller. Dorn became one of Trussell’s favorite poets and a life-long friend.

In 1982 Trussell returned to Austin and has since become a sort of godfather to the outsider artist and literary scenes there, hosting salons, guiding the reading of counter-academic students, and connecting spiritual isolates like himself. On Dorn’s tip, he worked closely with Skanky Possum Press and made art for their publications for over a decade.

Even though he shuns involvement in mainstream art-world politics, and will only show his work in alternative spaces, he's regularly cited by the Austin Chronicle in their top 10 arts lists, has had paintings shown in the Austin Museum of Art, and has a multitude of collectors like his friend, filmmaker Richard Linklater who, at last count, owns around 40 of Trussell's paintings.

In 2012, Trussell started writing discontinuous sentences as a daily practice which he soon began arranging into sequences on postcards, and mailing out to people on map he calls a “speculative geography of his fellow dog-paddlers in the river of shit.” In 2019, Cuneiform Press published Sentences, an 84 page book of his poetry.

Trussell's prolific daily writing and painting disciplines continue.

“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 JMW Turner, the early 19th century landscape painter, and from studying Eugene Atget, the early 20th century Parisian photographer. Another hero is George Méliès, 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.”