By Ana Breton

It starts out as a white canvas–a plain piece of cloth with wooden backing.

That’s before Edward Curry comes in and turns it into music.

He’s thinking, with brush in hand, carefully eyeing the canvas he’s set flat on his kitchen table.

He stops, turning on his own mix of R&B music with a particularly loud bass.

“It’s gonna start now,” he warns.

In less than a minute, he’s in his zone, going into a type of self-hypnosis that helps him paint through his subconscious. He’s in his own trance. His own zone.

He’s lost in the beat, bouncing his entire body with the music, letting it take control of the brush as it swerves and glides black paint across the canvas.

The lines begin long and curvy, and as the music changes, they end up as small, repetitive circles jammed into one of the corners. The lines represent bass. The dots are the tempo.

Then, the senior art major changes colors. From black to brown, then yellow to neon green. The curves of color pile on each other as the beat becomes more complicated.

He briefly stops, stepping back from his work.

“This is gonna change. I don’t know what I’m doing until I’m done,” Curry says. “I don’t like to worry about anything but going with the rhythm.”

Then he’s back in his trance again. But this time he’s dropped the brush, instead using his fingers to blend the paint, moving both hands like a turntable, dragging the colors in and out, spinning the paint with the flowing music.

“Touching the paint makes me feel physically connected to it,” he says.

Both his house phone and cell phone ring several times, but he ignores them, diving into his subconscious.

“I like to paint out of emotion and experience,” he says. “And to get there, I use music as my vehicle and my brush is my mic.”

Many of his experiences are engraved between the brush strokes.

“Concrete Thought,” a painting he created last year, is dominated by a stale gray color, only slightly highlighted with black and white dribbles of paint.

This painting, he says, is supposed to represent the concrete he was standing on one of the first times he was racially assaulted.

Seven years ago, he was in Palmdale, Calif., where he was born, when several men drove toward him with a rope with the intention of hanging him.

“It reminds me of how fast my heart was beating when I was running away,” he said. “And that wasn’t the first time it’s happened.”

He came to the U five years ago to live with his mom, which has really “eased things,” he said.

“I turned to art because I didn’t want to turn into the typical black male caught up in crime,” he said. “Art also helps me deal with pain.”

Back in his kitchen, he’s in the zone, turning the goops of paint on his canvas. Except now he’s cleaned off his hands and has dipped a thinner brush into the canvas, mixing the colors to make a hue of their own.

Twenty minutes later, the colors are mostly gone, having been blended into a brownish tan. He stops and cleans off his brush. Then, with his other hand, he grabs another brush from the kitchen table that he’s painted at for the last couple of months–he eats most meals on the floor.

Kneeling, he examines the surface of his work. He raises both hands and points the brushes up–he recognizes a part of the song. The music swells and he is on, waving the brushes like batons, swerving them in and out of the paint, conducting the orchestra that is his art.

“I see everything from every angle,” he says. “If I see something I like, I go after it.”

This explains how he first became interested in art. In high school, he had dreams of making it to the NBA, having played varsity basketball since he was a freshman.

But something held him back.

“There was a moment my senior year where I changed my focus to art,” he said.

Ever since he was a child, his father knew Curry had a talent, he said. He used to sell cartoons for $1 to other kids when he was in elementary school.

So he dropped the basketball and picked up the brush.

“I was too short for basketball, anyway,” Curry said.

Back in the kitchen, his rhythm is also cut short.

A neighbor knocks on his door. She lives on the floor above him and asks if he can turn the music down.

When she sees the brushes in his hand, she asks if he’s an artist.

“Yeah, sorta,” he says.

When he comes back, he can tell his rhythm is gone, that anything he paints from now on will come out of his “conscious,” he says. He puts the brushes down and says he’ll come back to it after the paint dries.

Maybe it’ll be finished tomorrow, maybe in six months.

“The catch is that I believe my art is never done because our perception changes every hour–every minute,” he said. “I never know when it’s finished until I know that it’s done growing.”

Once it’s truly finished, he’ll display it in the Heritage Center right next to the other 17 paintings he’s created that are currently being shown.

Curry is the first artist whose work has been featured in the Heritage Center. Mike Paulus, Chartwells district manager, said the previous Heritage Center administration didn’t allow paintings to be displayed.

Now Paulus plans to put up student artwork, rotating artists every couple months.

“We want to expose (students’) artwork. We just can’t get the word out fast enough,” Paulus said. “This will give a venue to students and also much-needed decoration to the facility.”

The Heritage Center is currently displaying Curry’s artwork, which is on sale from $200 to $900.

As for what he hopes to do in the future, Curry said he wants to put his designs on clothes and shoes.

“But my biggest goal, though, is to paint the biggest painting in the world.”

Editor’s note: This is the second part in a three-part series about Chartwells. Part three will be printed Thursday.

Lennie Mahler

Edward Curry mixes and twists colors of paint together over the canvas to the beat of music from his stereo. A variety of hip-hop, R&B and rap music that he listens to as he paints influences the subconscious elements of the piece.

Lennie Mahler

Student painter Edward Curry explains the meaning behind some of his pieces on display at the Heritage Center. Color and movement in his work depend on both his mood and the music he listens to. Recurring elements of each piece include Curry’s visualized representation of music, such as black lines representing bass and trails of dots that represent tempo.