Tray Corley never attended art school, but his paintings are already intriguing enough to have drawn fans from across the globe. His once-latent creativity has exploded into a personal passion that drives him to spend nearly every waking hour churning out new works.
Tray Corley can explain his motive to start painting in just four words: “I needed a hobby.” The simple sentence conjures up images of a casual artist dabbling watercolor onto a square of paper, producing a basic butterfly or a humble landscape before walking away to watch TV, text a friend or find another way to occupy his time. However, painting involves so much more for an unconventional artist like Corley.
Most artists use a single room as their studio. Corley uses his entire 200-year-old house. Tall shelves line the walls, filled with thousands of paint tubes and bottles. He is not picky with his media, using everything from acrylics to oils and gouache to spray cans. It does not matter to him if paint splatters all over the hardwood floors, as he points out that they need to be redone anyway. The dried drips on the ceiling fan’s blades add character. His colorful chaos extends into the kitchen, where half the sink is filled with dishes and the other side holds palette knives and brushes waiting to be washed and reused. Had someone told Corley two years ago that this would be his life now, he would not have believed them.
“When I was in seventh grade, I guess that’s when ADHD decided to roam into my little head. I got in trouble for drawing all over my notebooks,” Corley said. “My teacher confiscated the notebooks and scheduled a parent-teacher conference. She thought I was disturbed and needed therapy.” Corley admits that his drawings were potentially alarming, as many of them illustrated violence. “I have a dark personality,” he said. “I don’t mean you’re going to see me walking around wearing eyeliner, but I was introduced to horror movies at a young age. They fascinated me.” Having his parents, a teacher and a therapist think he was troubled turned Corley off from creating art entirely. “I knew some artists were known for that type of work, but the whole experience changed me so much,” he said. “it felt like art was just another project to please someone else, so I didn’t want to do it anymore.”
Decades passed before hard times bubbled Corley’s creativity back to the surface. Cancer, a divorce and issues with his career in facility maintenance management opened up his schedule, and he felt an overwhelming need to find an outlet for his frustrations.
“Now that I’ve let go, I’m just pumping stuff out.”
Tray Corley
“I had a range in my backyard and all I did was shoot, so I started playing music on my phone, and that’s when I learned that I can hear color,” he said. “I dove into some leftover paint and started going ham.”
Corley sees his ability to hear color as the force behind his dramatic works. This ability to cross senses is called synesthesia, and though it sounds like something from a science-fiction film, it is a real condition that affects as much as 4% of the population. Corley experiences chromesthesia, a subtype where certain sounds trigger color perception.
“That’s how I get all these crazy backgrounds,” he said. “I turn up the music loud and spend most of my time on the background. That’s when I begin to see the objects. There can be a 90-degree angle, and I turn it into a cityscape. Then I feed off that one thing, building the composition up and down.” When Corley paints, he always has another canvas behind him. He uses it to clean off his palette knives. Then those random swaths of color provide the start of another background, and the process continues. “I will end up having 17 in a line, ready for me to go. Right now, it’s in the teens, the number of projects I’m working on,” he said. “That way, I’m never stuck on one thing because I have 15 behind it. I’ve been allowed to focus on art right now. I wake up, paint, go to bed, repeat.”
Corley has created a truly astounding number of works, considering that he only started painting full-time in January 2024. He estimates that he has painted over 700 canvases in less than two years. They are not small pieces, either. His favorite canvas is a 30-by-40-inch gallery wrap, and he has recently started framing some pieces in older, gaudy gold picture frames. He also started painting on glass and discovered that he loves it.
“Now that I’ve let go,” he said, “I’m just pumping stuff out.”
Corley’s neighbor in 2024 urged him to create an Instagram account. He named it @art_theperson and uploaded photos of his paintings, pairing each with one of the songs he listened to while painting it. He immediately began getting noticed. Two weeks later, an art curator from Spain reached out, and Corley contracted with them.
“That’s when I started getting serious,” he said. “I noticed that my style was changing, but any time I change bands or albums, my style changes. I just enjoyed letting my head and hands do everything without my brain interfering.”
His work is currently displayed at a gallery in Madrid, and he has been invited to participate in several international art shows, including Red Dot in Miami. Closer to home, he has gained the support of Southern Heartland Art Gallery, where he has several works for sale. His parents, once worried about their young son’s propensity for horror, now fully back his endeavors. Corley admits that he sometimes finds himself toning down the dark vibes that naturally make their way into some paintings.
“I live in Covington now,” he said, “so I have to change it up a little.” However, he was quick to acknowledge the therapeutic value of his craft, specifically the non-aggressive catharsis that comes from expressing negative emotions through art rather than acting them out. “If I’m angry and I draw it, I’m getting it out of me,” Corley said. “I’m not taking it to work with me or taking it out to dinner. Look at it this way: Would you rather have someone paint a picture of knocking you upside the head or actually do it? Either way, the negativity gets out of their head.” Corley also notes with a laugh that strong negative emotions inspired some of his most colorful paintings. “Someone asked me if I was trying to say that not everything dark is evil,” he said. “I replied, ‘No, what I’m saying is that evil can be really colorful.’”
Corley points out that he has never adopted one style of painting. He lets whatever he may be going through and whatever he may be listening to at a given time flow onto the canvas.
“I literally don’t plan anything. I’ve never planned what I wanted to paint,” he said. “I don’t even know what the end result will be when I start, so every day is a surprise to me. I don’t sit down until I go to bed. It’s great.”
Click here to read more stories by Kari Apted.
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