Q & A with Brent Wick
Words and interview by Tucker Leverton.
Artwork by Brent Wick.
Local Portland cyclist, artist, and Stumptown coffee roaster, Brent Wick, puts ink to paper and talks to us about his relationship between art and cycling. We've been stoked to travel along with Brent on a number of his long and crazy rides over the years, and it is great to see his art come to life with a series of drawings about his ride from Seattle to Portland via the Cascade Range.
Tucker: You spend a lot of time on the bike. During the hours riding, how do you find yourself reflecting on your creative process or next piece?
Brent: They are pretty separate activities. I do take tons of photos on rides and quite often when I look back through, I get inspired by one or many of them. Sometimes I have the perfect image to work from or maybe one just plants an idea on how to capture an idea next time.
Tucker: You’ve done a lot of portrait work in the past of people and animals—how did it feel to create a landscape piece this go around?
Brent: When I was younger, I was really into oil painting and Plein Air so it wasn’t a huge jump for me, just a much more finicky medium using just water and India ink.
Tucker: What has cycling meant to you over the past decade? What is your motivation when you get out on the bike?
Brent: Early on the bike was just a way to get back in shape after trying to recover from too many skateboarding injuries, but very quickly I realized it could be a tool to get to places I couldn’t go by car. Then once I learned how to use mapping software and build routes things just went crazy and that was when I was all in on bikes, it really tapped into the skateboarder mentality I had always had to go find spots people had not been to yet. Even now I am not that interested in riding vetted routes, I need to go through the highs and lows of thinking “this probably won’t work” only to come around a turn and realize it’s gonna go through.
Tucker: How’d you discover your interest in animal portraiture?
Brent: When I moved to Portland I was still in my oil painter phase, but as a young broke skateboarder having a space to live and set up a studio just wasn’t in the cards for me, so at some point I gave all my oil paint stuff to a painter friend and just decided to work in brush and ink. I could carry the whole kit with me anywhere and I could just sit and draw wherever. I started pretty quickly doing portraits of friends and realized in the brush and ink medium I really liked drawing hair and beards, I used to spend a lot of time in dive bars and started asking to take photos of the old timers at the bar (they had the best beards) and drawing them later. This led into realizing animals are covered in hair/fur so that would be the perfect next step, it's been all animals ever since pretty much.
Tucker: You always have cool bikes which one have you been enjoying riding the most on these longer trips?
Brent: I am finally at a point where they all have their own job. There was a long time where I had like 3-4 CX bikes that were all SRAM 1x and fit 40mm tires, not so much overlap these days. The Tan Sourdough has what I feel like is the best geometry of any of my bikes. This bike I would take on a Motel camping trip with some dirt connectors on 40 to 45mm tires but if I was going on some deep cut "who the hell knows what we are gonna encounter" ride, I would definitely be taking the Allied Able with some 700x55 tires.
