Little did Dr. Curtis Bullock know when he began spray-painting in 2019 that he would soon become one of the most sought-after bike painters in the industry. Better known as @savethepostalservice, Bullock’s impressive clientele includes notable cyclists like Andy Schleck and Ayesha McGowan, alongside brands such as Specialized, Vitus, State Bicycle Co., Chris King, Goodr and Miir.
Bullock's bold and colour-popping work has garnered high demand yet despite his rapid success, he remains modest, referring to himself as "just a guy in my garage playing with spray paint."
Cycling Weekly visited Bullock at his Portland, Oregon home to find out how this former high school principal transformed into a celebrated bike painter and to explore the inspirations behind his eye-catching designs.
Save the Postal Service
Reflecting on his journey, Bullock tells Cycling Weekly that he was “always making things.” Pottery, sketches, structures, paintings – his hands rarely sat idle, yet his first endeavour in selling his creations was a self-proclaimed flop.
While working as a high school teacher at the time, Bullock launched his @savethepostalservice Instagram account in 2018, focusing –as the name might suggest– on mail and his handmade envelopes and stationery.
“I was taking books with really great colours and quality paper and I would take them apart and make envelopes and letters,” Bullock explains. “Everyone loves getting mail, right? It’s nice and I literally made thousands of envelopes but no one was interested.”
While his sales were minimal, the experience in setting up the social media account and accompanying e-commerce website would soon prove valuable.
In 2020, Bullock painted his first bike: a Lemond Poprad disc he’d bought specifically to paint. He was immediately taken with the process and more creations quickly followed, delighting his growing number of followers.
“One of the things I think that people responded to is that I'm just a guy in a garage,” Bullock says. “For a long time I really resisted using a vinyl cutter or other more advanced tools because I wanted my process to be something others can do, too. I painted these bikes using spray paint, a paper cutter, painter’s tape, some scissors and some vinyl I bought online. That’s it.”
“And that's definitely the teacher in me, you know, the lesson being: don't just sit there being amazed by what I do, you also can do this yourself.”
But as a teacher, Bullock couldn’t afford to keep buying bike frames. And so he took inspiration from New York artist Wizard Skull, who reportedly painted on McDonald’s wrappers when he couldn’t afford art supplies. His advice? ‘Paint on something, anything.’
And so Bullock made trips to his local thrift store, bringing home water bottles, coffee mugs and anything else with shapes and curvature similar to that of bike tubing.
Bullock particularly favoured Miir’s camp mugs and purchased them in bulk. These mugs provided an affordable canvas for Bullock to hone his style and artistic skills, and he reinvested any profits from their sales back into art supplies.
Legos and Pee Wee’s Playhouse
When asked about his distinctive bright, colour-blocking, Keith Haring-meets-Pop-Art style, Bullock points to his childhood and the primary coloured bricks of Lego.
“To the exclusion of every other toy. Lego is the only thing I ever played with when I was a kid,” Bullock says.“[My generation] was the first to have Lego. While the plastic from the 1970s would become brittle and faded, Legos remain perfectly colourful. So Lego and the colour of that plastic is definitely a big part of the inspiration.”
The other part? Pee Wee’s playhouse and its whimsical and eclectic interior bursting with bright, bold colours and fantastical elements.
The internet was taken with Bullock’s style and his work quickly gained traction. The Miir mugs sold well while requests for custom bike paint jobs came in from followers around the globe.
In 2022, Bullock decided to quit his position as school principal at the Sabin-Schellenberg Professional Technical Center to finish his PhD followed by a well-earned break from his career endeavours to pursue his art. Fueled by clientele all over the world, Bullock embarked on his first international paint tour in January 2023. He’s been on three more tours since, painting bike frames all over Europe.
Everything comes back to bikes
When asked about his connection to bikes, Bullock replied that everything in his life can be traced back to bikes.
After a childhood spent pedalling around the neighbourhood, Bullock rediscovered bikes as a form of transportation while studying at the University of Maryland. Reconnected with the joy of being on two wheels, commuting turned into mountain biking which led to group rides, working at a bike shop and, even, a welding course at Oregon’s United Bicycle Institute.
Although the life of a bike welder wasn’t for him, bikes remain a steadfast presence in his life.
“What I need out of bikes has definitely changed over the years,” he reflects. “When I was teaching, [my job] was so stimulating that I actually never rode with other people because I just needed to be alone. Now it's almost the opposite, where being able to be more social with people on bikes is really nice.”
And then, of course, there’s his art. Though increasingly drawn to shapes other than a bike frame –his latest creations, for example, include watering cans and a series of Ikea lamps– Bullock hopes for bike industry collaborations where his designs can be reproduced in scale. Right now, each piece Bullock creates is wonderfully unique but also tremendously time-consuming.
He meticulously maps out each colour-block and design element in a notebook before painstakingly cutting dozens of laser decals and painting each section layer by layer by layer.
Bullock admits that sometimes the process takes so long that even he is excited when it’s time to reveal the final result.
“One of the things I enjoy a lot is that even though I have the map of the project, by the time I actually unwrap it, I very frequently actually don't remember what's under there,” he says with a laugh. “By the end, it's a surprise to me, too.”
While he’ll never stop creating original pieces, Bullock dreams of scaling up his work, collaborating with industrial and interior designers, and ultimately being a full-time artist living in Italy – a dream he’s working to make a reality. “Only a few hundred more bike paint jobs to go,” he jokes.
Want a piece of rideable Curtis Bullock art of your own?
Bullock's paintjobs are wildly intricate and laborious, so be prepared to be patient and shell out $2,200 - $2500 per bike frame.
In the meantime, his Columbus gravel “party forks”, lamps and mugs are for sale on Shopify wesbite, while Portland-based bikeshop CyclePath has a collection of custom-painted Enve seatposts and stems on offer.
