Brett Whitacre straps on a gray, full-faced respirator and steps into the plywood booth he built. In a three-car garage, tucked away from a residential neighborhood of Sycamore, he retreats daily to spraypaint images on whatever he can find — windows, old television sets, suitcases.

Whitacre stares at a small 3-foot-tall window pane in front of him. Various strips of masking tape cover the glass. His hands hover over a line of orange spray paint cans on the wall to his right. There are eight rows of different colors stacked horizontally, each meticulously grouped. The entire wall looks like a linear color wheel, each can progressing in the pattern of a rainbow. Starting from the end of one row, he taps on each individual bottle, counting to get to the one he needs. He grabs one and lays a coat. Two bright lights on opposing walls illuminate the room. Without them, he’d paint grass brown.

When he finishes a layer, he slides each can back into its correct space. Not all the way. Each one he’s used sticks out slightly farther than the others, his way of referencing what he’s already painted with. After he sprays eight shades of orange, each one darker than the next, he sizes up the piece and squints. He moves in closer and locks in on two stripes of distinct colors.

He turns.

“Do those look the same to you?” he says.

***

Whitacre, 37, doesn’t see his art the way everyone else does. He’s colorblind. At times, red looks brown, green looks bright orange and blue and purple can look nearly identical. He learned about the condition in the first grade, after failing a routine test. “The doctor told me you can’t be a pilot, which makes plenty of sense,” he says. “And he said you can’t be an artist. That’s silly, he just wasn’t thinking too much.” In spite of those words, Whitacre’s been a professional artist since 2005 and has designed products for CB2 — Crate & Barrel’s modern design store — and Modify Watches, an online retailer out of Berkeley. He’s had numerous showings in the Chicago area, from a solo display at the Elastic Arts Foundation in December to a current display at the Hubbard Inn, among others. On top of all that, he hopes to have an art piece featured in an upcoming Nike advertisement.

Reactions vary when he tells people he’s a colorblind artist. Some think he can’t see colors altogether. In bright light, he claims, he can see hues like everyone else, though experts say that’s unlikely. But Whitacre makes it work, hustling daily in his shop, painting on whatever he can find. His art hangs from walls in neighborhoods from River North to Wicker Park. He’s sold pieces to customers across the country. He’s mastering the science of being a professional artist, even though — at times — it didn’t seem like he would.

***

Whitacre hunches over a 5-foot-wide window propped up by a wooden stand. He sports gray skinny jeans and black Jordans. “For how many hours I’m on my feet, tennis shoes are the most comfortable,” he says. He wears a gray cotton knit sweatshirt underneath his turtle-green vest, the only thing on him of color. Over the window in front of him, he plans to paint a pair of black Ray Ban wayfarer sunglasses. He prefers to paint on glass, or anything besides paper, since he never could afford canvases as a struggling artist. Living in decayed neighborhoods of Chicago, he used whatever he could find in alleys or rundown streets. His shop resembles an organized junkyard, with random pieces of urban substrates lining the shelves on the walls.

Whitacre has no formula to figure out what he’ll piece together next. He paints what he calls his drugs, everyday objects the he enjoys. A painting of half an avocado sits on the shop floor. He’d been eating fresh avocados all week after a customer handed him a fresh bag. One time, a woman approached him during an art show. She looked at a fried chicken leg painted over a soft blue background. She tilted her head, looked at Brett and asked: “What were thinking? What brought you to this?” He paused. “I couldn’t make anything up,” he says. “I just told her that I liked fried chicken, so I wanted to paint a piece for fried chicken.”

Whitacre never thought he’d be an artist. As a struggling student in high school, he found music. He moved to Chicago in 2001 to be a drummer. “I’ve been playing since ’94 out in Rockford, but you can only go so far out there,” he says. He joined whatever bands would have him. Eventually he landed a gig with the Legendary Shack Shakers. After his first two-hour practice, he whisked off on a three-month tour. Then came another. And another. For the next six years, he rocked out in 48 states and all of Europe, living his dream as a traveling musician. The years and memories blur together, so much so that it’s hard to remember particular details. Even so, he loved every second of it. But one night, sitting alone on his bed in a hotel on tour, he began to sweat. His head felt light. Within moments, he blacked out.

***

Whitacre sat on a velvet red couch in his mother-in-law’s living room. During a brisk winter evening in Freeport, he started feeling the same way. He never told anyone about what happened in the hotel room because he didn’t want to be forced off the tour. He did his best to hide it, but he kept facing blackout after blackout. One time he blanked right before a show. His short-term memory escaped him. He didn’t think he’d remember the songs on-stage. He did, by muscle memory, he says. But his band members soon noticed, and following the show, he couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.

It always happened the same way. His body turned warm, his head felt light. And sitting next to his wife, Kate, on the couch in an empty room at the in-laws, he felt it again.

“I’m going to faint,” he told her.

He fainted once, then regained consciousness. He got up and fainted again. And again.

“We didn’t have health insurance at the time so we didn’t really do much about it,” Kate says. “And there was always circumstances we could explain as a way he passed out. He passed out on the road when he had a lot of caffeine, or he passed out one time after an international flight. There was always something like, ‘Maybe this is why that happened.’”

Nothing came of it that night. But before long, it happened once more, this time in front of his parents. They phoned 911. As paramedics loaded him into the ambulance, they hooked Whitacre up to a heart rate monitor. Before they could pull out the driveway, he fainted again. The heart rate monitor went flat for eight seconds before he woke up. The rest happened so fast. The ambulance rushed him to the hospital. He saw a cardiologist. He learned he had bradycardia — a slow heart rate. The next day, doctors scheduled him to have a pacemaker installed.

***

Whitacre didn’t pick up a pair of drumsticks for the next three months. The band went on a hiatus later that year. It’d been running nonstop for close to seven years and needed a breather. With newfound time, Whitacre turned to art. He’d been painting whenever he was home from tour. He’d display whatever he had in cafes when he was gone and collect the money from whatever sold when he got home. Until his surgery, music came first. But now, art became the priority.

To this point, his paintings resembled visual vomit. Experimentation. He aimed to create his own personal style and learn how to paint while being colorblind. But it didn’t always go as planned, like the time he commissioned a painting for a customer with brown bushes. As he put the finishing touches on the piece, Kate stopped him and asked him what color he saw.

Green?

Nope.

***

He often relies on others when it comes to his art. Kate’s been the biggest help. She’s his visual copy editor. He shows her nearly half his paintings. He asks for criticism, and she never holds back.

“I have to be honest with him,” Kate says. “I want him to know exactly what I feel because he’s putting it out there. And if I see something that could be edited or perfected a little bit, I think it’s important that I tell him. It would be really disingenuous of me to say something’s awesome if it wasn’t. It would be like letting him walk around with spinach in his teeth.”

It often works, mostly because Kate loves color. She flips through color books for leisure. She draws with crayons for fun. When she found out Whitacre was colorblind, it nearly became a deal breaker — which she says she knows sounds a little crazy. But over the years she’s grown accustomed to seeing things the way he does, even if it elicits a laugh. Like the time he thought her favorite seafoam-green leggings were white. Or when she asked him to run to the grocery store for blood oranges and came back with limes. His vision isn’t perfect, but the very thing he’s had to overcome every time he’s commissioned a piece may also be what makes his work unique.

“He sees things differently than we do,” she says. “He sees color blends that we would think never go together, but work.”

***

Whitacre’s now wielding a metallic yardstick, spattered with yellow and blue spray paint. He rests it against the window and draws a set of long vertical lines half an inch apart with a black ballpoint pen. He used to use fine-tip sharpies, but they ran out of ink too quickly. The ballpoints make it easier to draw on the 2-inch masking tape he uses.

“I’ve been doing this for nine years and I’m still learning things,” he says.

Whitacre’s entire studio is a testament to what he’s learned. He designed it to cater to his needs. He boxed off the back corner of his garage in plywood to create a painting booth the size of a walk-in closet. He equipped it with its own turbine fan that blows fumes from the booth out of the garage door. It boasts its own set of lights. The brighter the booth, the better he can see color. The carefully organized spray cans on the wall to his right follow the same pattern as a chart he keeps pinned to the back of the booth. It groups each set of colors, progressing from darkest to lightest. He keeps two worn reference books close, ones with color wheels and other complementary progressions. At any time, he’s in arm’s reach of numerous resources to help him.

“When the band stopped touring, my wife was like what are we going to do? Are we just going to live off of your art? Selling paintings here and there?” he says, never taking his eyes off the painting in front of him. “It’s been almost two years and I’m starting to see some commercial success.”

***

As the elevator doors swung open on the second floor of the Hubbard Inn, Whitacre entered a swarm of people. In his black and gray Jordans, he paced the second floor of the River North gallery under dim lights. It looked as if the dress code called for business attire. Skirts. Dresses. Collared shirts. At 9 p.m. on a Friday, these crowds ran everywhere, but he’d barley ever seen a group so large at one of his gallery openings. A showing he had in December drew 40 or so people — this one already had close to 100. The show’s curator told him there had been a private party before the event. He expected the crowd to die as the showing wore on. It never did.

The show kicked off what’s been a busy few months for Whitacre. He has art hanging on the walls of Feast, a restaurant in Wicker Park, and had exhibits at both the Dock 6 Collective furniture and art show and the “Festival of the Arts” north of the city in Deerfield. And, on top of an ongoing display at Janik’s Café, he had pieces at the Wells Street Art Festival in mid June. But bumping through elbows and shoulders, the Hubbard Inn showing felt bigger than what he’s used to doing.

In a leather jacket layered over a thin hoodie, he made his way to the corner of the gallery. His pieces hung under five metallic vanity lights, a painting of a feather as its centerpiece. On a white, 6 by 2-and-half foot frame, the piece featured 60 different colors. It’s made up of various lines, differing in thickness, each a different hue than the next. Every single one of his paintings screams color, decorated with swatches of candy-colored spray paint. By any means, you can’t tell the artist who painted them is colorblind. In fact, some pieces scream more color than the ones around them.

“Colors, really, if it looks beautiful to me, then it will probably look beautiful to someone else,” he says.

***

Kate walks into the garage, wearing a bight red sweatshirt that’s nearly as vibrant as her thick red lipstick. She motions at a painting on the ground, pointing at the window decaled with the green avocado on top of a purple gradient.

“I like it,” she says.

Whitacre turns. Joins her in staring at the painting.

“Do you like the purple?” he asks.

She pauses, shifts her weight onto her back leg and scrunches her lips.

“I would have gone with a pale yellow,” she says.

As she leaves, he stares at the painting a second longer. He decides this one will stay the same. Sometime in the near future, he’ll paint another. This time with a lighter background.