Once a month, 28-year-old Curtis Bean, a former Army sniper and fine arts student at the University of Colorado Denver, offers free classes to veterans at South Broadway’s Hope Tank as an outlet for the sometimes ugly images locked in their minds. “The ability to put the thoughts and images in my head into a medium has been a healing I’ve needed for a long time,” says one veteran who attended the classes. In this slide show, we showcase some the work that comes out of them, as well as some of Bean’s paintings.

Read more about Bean and his work in our February 2014 issue.

—Images courtesy courtesy of Steve Ellsworth, Vietnam combat veteran

Kasey Cordell
Kasey Cordell
Kasey Cordell is the former Editorial Projects Director for 5280.