At first, Eric Limeback just wanted to solve the Rubik’s Cube.

Then he got fast.

So fast that the six-sided stocking stuffer most of us love to hate has become the 17-year-old’s plastic passport from speed cuber to art darling. The fringe benefits along the way: a world record, romance, an appearance on Oprah Winfrey and money in the bank.

All because Limeback’s long, slender fingers can twist 54 coloured squares into pixilated versions of iconic images, from The Last Supper to Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans — chunky art that a Distillery District studio sells for small fortunes.

For a teen who awakes at the crack of noon and forages in the fridge every half-hour, it gets even better.

“Not only is it the No. 1 job I could ask for — it’s not every day you get to do what you like to do as a hobby — but I also get to do it on my own time at home,” said Limeback, casually solving the classic puzzle at his family’s East York bungalow in about 15 seconds. In competition, he’s five seconds faster.

“So, I can get some food or sleep in late and start building it during the day.”

“It” refers to computerized blueprints delivered by Cube Works Studio’s creative owner, Josh Chalom, who hired Limeback last year after placing an online ad for speed cubers. Michael J. Fox, Bob Marley, Marilyn Monroe and Eva Longoria are some of the celebrity faces brought to prime coloured life when Chalom’s cubing team — Limeback is one of 25 — follows step-by-step directions for pieces ranging from $1,000 to (if Chalom can sell his Sistine Chapel idea) nearly $2 million.

But this art form isn’t simply plunking a face of solid colours — red, blue, green, white, yellow and orange — on a grid. The skill is in the pixilation, strategizing how to put two green squares amid a cube’s yellow face, for instance, to construct the illusion of shades and tones.

The Last Supper was an intricate project that last October set a Guinness World Records mark (since broken by a school in Japan) in using 4,050 cubes — not Rubik’s but Chinese knockoffs. Chalom says they’re cheaper and the coloured tiles are plastic (not papered like the stickered Rubik’s model) and therefore durable in any climate.

Chalom wouldn’t reveal the mural’s price, citing the owner’s privacy, but said a new 7,000-cube project, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, will be priced at $74,000.

Assembling The Last Supper took five cubers two months to deliver all the dots, rows and blots of colour in modernizing da Vinci’s 15th-century masterpiece. Limeback was faster than most of the others; Chalom calls him an “uber cuber.”

Besides flying fingertips, the teenager’s speed is rooted in mathematical brilliance.

Limeback graduated with honours from Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute in the spring, where he studied advanced math and science. Since Grade 9, when he received a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas and solved it during winter break, his gunslinger’s speed and accuracy has been honed by learning algorithms.

An algorithm is a set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps. Limeback has memorized about 150 to solve the original 3 x 3 cube in as few as six turns or as many as 16. He completes a “normal solve” in about 60 turns — about six twists per second.

In competition (there’s a Canadian Cubing Association that holds speed tournaments in Toronto and Vancouver, mostly), participants are given 15 seconds to study identical “scrambled” patterns on their plastic puzzles. During inspection, Limeback looks for the easiest way to line up white squares as a “plus sign” — his first step when the timer starts.

“It’s not like once I see it I know the entire solution because I have to constantly keep seeing what patterns I have,” said Limeback, ranked No. 2 in Canada behind Thornhill’s Harris Chan, 16.

“As soon as I do the (plus sign), then I have to start thinking of and applying all the algorithms. That’s where the practice comes in, because now I can do it without thinking.”

Without thinking?

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“It goes into muscle memory and I just know, I just turn it,” he said.

He can conquer the cube with one hand — his left, even though he’s right-handed. And he can do it with a blindfold after studying the cube; no one in Canada is faster. He can also successfully coach a blindfolded player by shouting out instructions.

A YouTube video of Limeback solving 11 cubes blindfolded aired on an Oprah Winfrey Show segment on whiz kids last year. The trick: He studied each cube, mentally organized its algorithmic solutions, then memorized all 11 solution sets, in order, before being blindfolded. It took him about 80 minutes to inspect the plastic toys then about 20 more to physically solve the lot.

Chalom hopes his blockbuster idea, The Sistine Chapel, will beguile a Las Vegas hotelier. The ceiling art would weigh 52 tons, run half the length of a football field and cost $1.8 million, including installation.

If there’s a buyer, the piece would be built in Toronto. Limeback would delay college plans (he’s looking at Princeton) for a year to help send Michelangelo to the Vegas strip.

But before the neon lights in the desert beckon, there’s work here.

Next up is a hip-hop legends mural for September’s Manifesto music and arts festival, then Birth of Venus for Nuit Blanche in October. Limeback makes between $800 to $1,000 a week spinning colours full time.

Cubing in Toronto allows him to spend more time with girlfriend Celeste Anderson, 20. She’s a model and professional video gamer who, at a local Halo competition last year, noticed the pleasant, lanky blond watching the action while repeatedly solving his Rubik’s Cube.

Today, she lives with Limeback and his mother, Brenda McCallen, housed in a spare bedroom. Yup, he now competes at Halo while Anderson, under her boyfriend’s tutelage, can solve a cube in 20 seconds.

Boy meets cube. Girl sees cube. Boy gets girl.

A modern masterpiece, no blueprints required.

Seventeen-year-old Toronto boy is using his Rubik’s Cube prowess to help recreate famous paintings with cubes. The artwork can sell for more than $70,000.