On 104th street in Manhattan between 1st and 2nd, we sit in a room lit only by the windows on one of those dark February days. On the 3rd floor of this old building, we eat bagels & lox with Curtis Eberhardt,he has a tie-dyed blue shirt, but not to be mistaken with the bright primary tie-dyed shirts that you buy off Haight street or St. Marks. He dyed this shirt himself, using an old Japanese technique at his family’s home in Michigan. He sits relaxed after we just filmed him playing the flute, a photoshoot done in the first floor of his studio. Curtis unwraps his bagel, and we begin to learn more about the man who runs the world.

Our first question is always, what is it that you create?

I try to take creativity into all aspects of my life. I would say that priorities go from painting in a very kind of strict sense, you know, into various making activities, the one that's almost at that same level is music for me because I I've always done music. My parents were both musicians. My dad had an accordion Symphony where they transcribed classical music for a whole orchestra of accordions, Flight of the Bumblebee or something like that. And one of my earliest memories from about two and a half years old is being on the tour bus with them, because they toured the country and played at Carnegie Hall. And I remember, this guy next to me, giving me like one of these little, these little hand buzzers.

At that point were you doing more abstract or more realistic work?

I've always gone back and forth between painting realistic and painting abstract because I feel like they inform each other. And they're kind of the same thing. The abstract is basically comes out of... not to make it sound too clinical, but almost like a philosophical thing, where you come up with systems of how you're perceiving and representing things. Then you're taking that and kind of improvising in a certain way, within a certain framework the same way a jazz musician would.

It's like how you can't just pick up an instrument start playing Jazz, you have to know the technicalities…

Right, the way I explain it, yeah, anybody can do it. Not to say that. I think I am John Coltrane and with a paintbrush, but anybody could pick up a horn and do what he did to but you know, not many people blew the notes and composed music the way he did in the same way, you know, and there's a lot more to it.

Absolutely, all the original abstract artists were trained like super classically, not just going crazy, I'll throw these colors here.

Yeah, the ones that I really admired, like Mondrian and Paul Clay was a very big influence on me and very little of his work is actually abstract. But he was super influential.

Do you still do a lot of realist stuff?

Oh yeah, I always love to do flower paintings. To meet flowers are very unique in life, the way they portray color. There's nothing else that has those kind of organic shapes, the way that it naturally intersperses and kind of modulates the color and light and shadow. So I always love to paint flowers. You might think it's just an abstract painting, if you saw it, especially if you were looking at a bunch of my abstracts, and then all of a sudden you saw that one, you probably wouldn't tell right away that it's representational painting. I've always felt was really strong feelings of being pulled in, kind of like polar directions and certain things. And it feels very healthy for me to do realistic paintings and then abstract paintings. Because when I do one it to really make me want to do the other. When I paint realistic things, usually the very first parts of it I'll really have to kind of force myself and then at a certain stage, I'll get into it. But I won't really start having fun until I get things going and in place, and then all of a sudden, I'll lock in and I'll be in zone the same way with sports. At one point I was really into play pool and like gamble do with it. He did it a little bit. In Texas. when I was a teen, I would get money and go play nine-ball. And I loved it. I mean, I knew all these guys that were these french criminals. And one guy who was amazing, this young kid who really was a thug, but he was like an amazing nine-ball player, and he was a preacher's son. I'm talking about like, at the highest levels of like, pool hustling, and this kid was like, my age, he was probably like, you know, 17 or so. And the woman who ran it was called Granny.

Granny!

She would like to take care of all the young boys, yeah when you won a few games, man, you would splurge and buy like, an amazing frozen sandwiches. And  she would heat it up, and you'd smell it. Everybody be smelling it when you're waiting. And then you were the one.

Hahaha, alright, if I'm going back a little bit, because you started in Texas, then you decide to Chicago.

Well this interview is kind of like Pulp Fiction, man. I have to jump in the chronology.

Yeah, exactly. You jumped around. That's what Chuck is.

You guys figure that shit out afterwards. Cause I am the master of time and space to be willing to go between the different time titles.

Alright, so you when was it, when you were a kid or not even, when you were in high school and you're deciding on where to go to school...

I have a framed drawing that I did when I must have been under two. It's like all scribbled on one of those big dinosaur sticker things. It's pretty cool friggin' drawing, I would think, you know, that kids got some skills.

So it was always, you were always doing it.

Pretty much, I went into high school. Basically at the high school I was at, you could pretty much get out of any science class or anything, if you opted for art. So unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it, I never took biology, or anything like that, and took tons of art classes. Then, I went to the University of Houston, and there I met this really good art teacher who had gone the Art Institute of Chicago, she convinced me to go there. So I took my money and flew up to the University of Chicago and stayed with her friend and decided I wanted to go there. I went there, and then the year left, I dropped out and didn't like living in Chicago. And then I moved to New York with the assistance of my friend, my mentor, Joseph Glassgow, and he got me a job here at an art gallery in SoHo at the time, and he got me an apartment. And job was actually really cool, it was at this really lame gallery that had the worst art, which was great, because then it didn't influence me at all. And I worked in the frame shop, it was right on West Broadway, in between Houston and Prince. It was just a big party seen a lot of kids around my age, and we would all hang out.

And what were you working on like what what type of stuff were you doing?

At that point I was doing more acrylic and a little bit of oil paint and there was a wild New York art scene going on especially in the East Village there was probably like 250 galleries there. When I first moved here and it was really fun, it wasn't like you'd go there with wine and cheese and stuff, all your friends would be there. There were super cool, like, music venues, performance spaces, really good bands and performances and places to show your work. Then after I'd lived here for a while I went back to school at NYU, finished up my undergraduate which was good because I had had a lot of time to see why I wanted to go back to school, I could see the business side of the art world, which I really didn't like it all and I saw what I needed to get if I might want to teach. So I went back, just finished up one year on my undergraduate and then also subsequently got a master's degree. To go back a bit, one of the coolest parts is going to Art Institute of Chicago was I went on this European art tour, which went on for like a month. And that was a huge influence on me because somebody told me about this crazy place in Paris, where this American University professor taught and he would let people stay there. And it was really like a hippie haven. He slept upstairs, and then there was a main floor in the bottom floor, and everybody would just sleep. So I met this girl, and then she had a place out in the country. We stayed at her place in Paris and their place out in the country. But it was really my first glimpse of an artist's life that was very international. And her father was very influential on me, he was really cool, we had kind of a similar aesthetic.