For a guy who paints rock stars, and looks like a rock star, Trevor “Stickman” Stickel lives a quiet Edmonton life.
“In 2012, I signed a publishing deal with Michael Godard, who was out of Vegas, so a lot of people associate me with Vegas, but I actually live in Ritchie,” says Stickel, whose current tour, which is also U.S.-based, makes a hometown stop Nov. 25 at Sterling Gallery.
In 2022, Stickel met visual artist and lyricist Bernie Taupin when he was in town with long-time collaborator Elton John. The two hit it off, and Taupin connected Stickel with his manager, which sent Stickel “off on this new, independent path” in which he and his wife do their own publishing — and this new tour.
The artistic change coincided with personal turmoil, as Stickel suffered kidney failure and needed a transplant, which he received from his wife (“She runs my business, and gave me a kidney, so I haven’t won an argument since,” he jokes). Looking not that far back, Stickel sees the last year as a time of rebirth.
“You get a lot of time to think when you’re on dialysis,” he says. “And the kidney transplant didn’t go quite as planned, so we struggled for a bit. But as we came out of it, we reevaluated life, and our career. My relationship with the Godard team is still great, but commercially, we wanted to explore things a little bit differently. So the sickness was the turning point, and things keep snowballing, and it’s led to this tour.”
Whatever paintings you picture when you read “rock star-looking artist paints rock star portraits,” you’re probably close. A perusal of his past prints shows a time- and genre-spanning collection of icons mashed up with skulls, instruments and even other icons. It all started when young Stickel saw an all-time great ‘70s album cover.
“I was probably about six years old, and my brother brought home Kiss’s Destroyer. I was mesmerized by it, and I remember to this day how I fell in love with the art of it, and album cover art in general. It started everything for me,” says Stickel, whose first-ever show was at the old Suede Lounge on Jasper Ave.
This tour features Stickel’s “New Shit,” which includes paintings of late rock stars Gord Dowie and Taylor Hawkins, as well as rock star-adjacent things like leather boots, Harley-Davidsons and Jack Daniel’s. “Even if a painting doesn’t look like it’s music based, the inspiration for it 100 per cent is.”
And whether you’ve been to an art show before or not, this one’s unique. “At my shows, the music’s a little louder, the beers a little colder, and it’s got a very blue collar feel, no matter where it is. We’re playing the Stones and Zeppelin, and my favorite thing is when an old timer walks in, looks at one of my paintings and says, ‘I saw the stones in ‘66.’ And he’ll tell me everything about that night. The greatest thrill for me is to just sit at an art show and talk music.”
Rock out with some art out, Nov. 25 at Sterling Gallery.
