Trevor Dahl at work on his Road Home mural, April 2025. Image by Steve Coray.

Spring is emerging. Critters are out, both in the soil and on the canvas. There’s no one better than Salt Lake City painter Trevor Dahl to manifest the good happy stuff of this season of re-emerging life and blooming. Whether it’s on canvas, stretched linen or the side of a UTA Trax stop, Dahl transforms life’s creepy crawlers into happy friends palatable for families and children, or the intellectual dream philosopher. Dahl has been busy, to say the least. A spring chicken, if you will, chasing project after project.

In March, he unveiled wraps designed for UTA Trax stops at the new Bees stadium in Daybreak. It’s a project titled “Past, Present, & Future of South Jordan,” illustrating the duality and dynamism that is the Salt Lake valley—the beauty of horses running in pastures, the sun setting over the high desert, purple mountains, the Jordan River running below; bison that still roam and the persistent agriculture still active among increasing urbanization. He doesn’t shy away from the lived realities of the industrialized extractive practices that equally exist and thrive here: black smoke rises from the trains chugging out of mountainside mines, refinery smokestacks billow into our airshed, construction trucks claw away at the land. It’s a tender yet unabashed ode to the quirks of this place.

In early April, he was one of eight artists to design a water droplet installation along North Temple in the heart of downtown for the Hidden Waters project. The brainchild of The Blocks and Seven Canyons Trust, the project aims to bring awareness to the different water sources that have been buried under our incessant urbanization. In his first sculpture to date, Dahl’s water droplet has the third-eye chakra seen in many of his oil paintings, representing the inherent intelligence of water and the consciousness of nature, “something so easily forgotten or taken for granted in our urban landscapes,” Dahl writes. He hopes to bring attention to the importance of conserving water and the hidden creek below our noses in this concrete jungle—an example of how art and social action can harness the power in each.

Trevor Dahl’s vinyl wrap “Past, Present, & Future” at the Daybreak TRAX station. Image courtesy of the artist.

Trevor Dahl’s eyedrop for the Hidden Waters project was unveiled in April, 2025. Image by Steve Coray.

“Martian,” from Trevor Dahl’s exhibit at Sprague Library in Salt Lake City.

Dahl had a solo show  at the Sprague Branch branch of the Salt Lake City Library, which closed on April 24. Titled Archetypes, it showed a mixture of mediums newer to Dahl’s repertoire. The larger oil pastels on paper are interspersed with smaller, wood panel acrylic paintings centering his staple characters. The oil pastels are another textural journey in the plein air realm he has opened up in his practice, while the wood panel pieces offer a new canvas to his familiar creature friends. “Frozen Stream” catches the cold, wintery shadows with baby blues behind the snow piles. “Stansbury Island” catches the golden mid-summer dry brush on the shores of the Great Salt Lake with the iridescence of the water at sunset. “Mr. Moon,” and “The Sun” bring some new characters, looking at the duality of night and day, light and dark, cold and warm. The two are placed perfectly amongst the warm golds of “Stansbury Island” and the dark cold blues of “Frozen Stream.” Dahl turns the panels from utilitarian to fine art by adding painted frames unique to each: “Martian” has a bike chain–like frame evoking its UFO and mechanical qualities; “Spirit Bird” has one with ruffles resembling the bird’s feathers. It was a small show, but loaded with signature Dahl-isms taking new forms.

Also in April Dahl, opened a solo show titled Good Friday at Red Flower Studios’ Salt Lake location. Open until May 11 in the front showroom of the glassblowing studio on the city’s downtown west side, the exhibit includes old work like “A Prayer to Beauty Itself,” a piece I saw years ago, before— full disclosure—becoming personal friends with Trevor. I took a picture of the dancing hibiscus flower for its elegance and its viability as a tattoo, which I would paste on my body forever. But there are plenty of newer pieces, which range in size from small accessible plein-air works to huge dreamscapes riddled with parables and lessons and contemplations baked into each composition.

“Whom Does the Grail Serve?” is a scene of the medieval crossed with the biblical and spiced with a fantasy world of dragons and kings and desert roamers and astronaut beach loungers. It doesn’t feel like we could ever possibly know the full meaning of each character in their micro scenes building out a larger parable on the canvas. But it certainly evokes thought, contemplation, slowing down to see all of the moving parts that build out this dream-scaped world of Dahl’s internal sphere—to see where we can each find ourselves in the scene.

Installation view of Trevor Dahl’s exhibit “Good Friday” at Red Flower Studios in Salt Lake City. Image by Steve Coray.

Each piece has an accompanying paragraph of varying lengths of copy written by Dahl—artist statements, manifestos to the pieces, the origin stories and dreams that inspired each. They bring context to pieces that perhaps would not have struck me without the words. Like “Madonna & Child,” where, painted in oil, an anonymous astronaut coddles a dinosaur-like creature. Although aesthetically it is something I wouldn’t necessarily hang in my house, the story behind this piece brought light to a message far more reaching. The story came from a dream of Dahl’s where he was faced with the conundrum of saving a creature with the risk of his own life on the line. In the end, they both survived, speaking to how the risks we take for other people karmically benefit us for choosing the harder but morally right path. It’s the hidden stories in Dahl’s work that bring the playfulness of anthropomorphized creatures into serious contemplations.

An infamous piece of Dahl’s, “Integration,” is a giant, seething-at-the-teeth, lizard monster that sits in profile, showing its teeth in drooling aggression, layered strokes of poppy red peeking through the black background while an innocent blue bird sits on the beast’s tusk. Dahl shares on the wall card how he has had this beast within him and his struggles to keep it at bay so as to not attack the goodness in this life. Earlier on in his painting tenure, Dahl would put the innocent blue bird between the beast’s teeth, conveying the insatiable thirst for power and domination the beast would constantly tempt inside him. But in this piece, the blue bird sits atop the tusk, unbothered and content, the beast no longer acting in aggression. Coexisting, tamed.

Trevor Dahl, “The Vanquishing of Hell,” 2024, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in.

Dahl’s valiant self portrait, “The Vanquishing of Hell,” depicts his caricature raising his jagged sword high while crushing the multi-eyed beast below his foot. It’s Dahl’s rise to action, his vanquishing of all the demons in his personal hell, how he has conquered the wrapping snakes holding him down and avoided the temptations before him, with his blue bird guiding his optimism out of the burning red scape. This piece, although serious in its contemplations of self, does not forget the play indelible to Dahl’s work, with characters both in the fore- and background that tap a sense of humor in their absurdity without undercutting their very real symbolism of destruction. The characters smoke cigarettes, lie flat on their face like a star fish in a river of neon green, mischievously up to no good—they are generally funny guys that bring light to messages that contemplate existence itself, our internal spheres, the tribulations of being human. Making it all not so daunting to face.

Dahl’s plein air works balance a play between impressionism and Dr. Seuss whim. Like in the work of the French masters, the strokes and texture of the oils convey the different lighting each moment finds itself in—a dash of purple here to acknowledge the fleabanes, and a dash of pink there for the paintbrush. Coupling it with his fantastical style of his dreamscapes makes for an impressionist Whoville.

Trevor Dahl, “Two on Two,” 2025, oil on canvas, 20×24 in.

Dahl took his plein-air works to the the Delta Center as one of 16 artists live painting during the Jazz game against the Washington Wizards and the Utah Hockey Club game against the Buffalo Sabres. The project is a collaboration between the Smith Entertainment Group Foundation (SEG) and The Blocks, looking to better connect the arts and athletics in this city for their shared cultural benefits to a place. A basketball with eyes, arms and legs, a saxophone (Dahl’s own instrument of choice) with a raised brow, and the artist’s signature “conscious flower” and blue bird shows how his style is adaptable to different contexts; how Dahl can capture the serenity of a shorebird flying over the Great Salt Lake, or the frenetic energy of a stadium full of rivaling fans. SEG is auctioning off the work of the artists, all the money going directly to the artists.

Dahl’s busy spring doesn’t stop there. He was awarded a SLC Arts Council Project Support Grant, partnering with The Road Home to paint a mural in early May for the facade of their Ballpark neighborhood headquarters. Then with support from the Salt Lake City Arts Council and Bloomberg Philanthropies, he will be painting a mural in Rose Park at Don Daniels Restaurant for Wake the Great Salt Lake. “Our Precious Great Salt Lake” will depict a whimsical GSL and 20+ of its native species to bring an optimistic and unifying ethos to the issue of restoring the lake’s water levels. It’s part of the largest public art grant in Salt Lake City history, with $1 million in funding for a dozen projects that have again begun to intersect different fields to harness the power of art as a mechanism for change. Dahl has been working with Great Salt Lake Institute scientists as well as elders from the Northwest Band of Shoshone Nation on this project to refine the designs and ensure it’s scientifically and culturally sensitive.

It is really encouraging, satisfying, and, quite frankly, inspiring to see a young artist of this rising generation go from personal passion to succesful career—possiblly because of that exact passion and dedication to the practice Trevor Dahl has voraciously worked at. He has shown the city how a practice can evolve, manifest into many mediums to bring art to the community, bring relatability to the fore, connecting us all through palatable, fun scenes of animated internal dialogues with nothing but good happy stuff.

Trevor Dahl: Good Friday, Red Flower Studios, Salt Lake City, through May 9

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.