After high school, Edades and his friends traveled to the United States. Before enrolling in Seattle, Edades incidentally made a detour to Alaska and experienced working in a couple of factories. Nonetheless, he moved on to Seattle and enrolled at the University of Washington where he took up architecture and later earned a Master of Fine Arts in Painting. The significant event that stirred Edades, and made him as what he is known now, was his encounter with the traveling exhibition from the New York Armory Hall. This art show presented modern European artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and the Surrealists. His growing appreciation to what he saw veered him away from the conservative academic art and Realistic schools and thus he began to paint in the modern manner. The two former schools of thought were inclined more towards idyllic subject matter, and require a mastery of refined detailing. What attracted Edades to the modernist movement was its principle to go beyond the idealistic exteriors propagated by Impressionism and Realism. Modernist thought encourages experimentation in artistic expression and allows the artist to present reality as he sees it in his own way.
