SHOP TALK: Rob Schamberger Newsletter 16FEB25

Tell me how you make illegal what we all make in our brain.

Feb 16, 2025

Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. There’s a gateway in our minds that leads somewhere out there, far beyond this plane.

WORDS

NEEDS: CREATIVITY

Watercolor on 12” x 16” watercolor paper

The use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.

Here’s a picture of Kima working on Thursday’s Cope painting. Sometimes a piece really clicks and this is one of those. Mostly because Kima made it.

UPCOMING AEW/PWT PAINTINGS

Cope - SIGNED!
The Hurt Syndicate
FTR
Thunder Rosa
Samoa Joe

Card subject to change.

Trans rights are human rights.

Use the promo code ROBFEB25 at checkout on ShopAEW and Pro Wrestling Tees to get 25% off any of my existing prints older than one month! Several of these are close to selling out so this is a great time to swoop in and get yours.

Rob’s Art on ShopAEW
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Rob and Jason Arnett's novella Rudow Can't Fail!
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Rob’s prints and shirts at Pro Wrestling Tees
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Bluesky
Cara
YouTube

WHAT I LIKED THIS WEEK

Thursday morning I read The Department of Truth volume 5 by James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, Alison Sampson and friends. The high concept of the series is that there’s a division of the US government that exists to make people believe things that aren’t true, because if enough people do it actually becomes true. Wouldn’t that be wild, a bunch of people believing things that aren’t true and it shaping US society? Haha, anyway. The head of the agency is Lee Harvey Oswald, or at least the embodiment of who and what people think Oswald is, and this volume explores exactly what happened (or maybe happened) on that fateful day in November of 1963. There’s also a gripping secondary story about Marilyn Monroe and how her fictional reality overwrote the reality of Norma Jean.

I listened to the audiobooks for The Overlook and The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly this week after bailing on another book that just wasn’t doing it for me. (Quick digression, I heard an interview once with a librarian where she said that she carries ‘Get Out of This Book Free’ cards to hand to people who say they’re struggling with a book. “There’s too many great books out there, read one of those instead!”) Not that these are great books, but they’re really easy to have playing while I’m working.

Brass Verdict, the second of the Lincoln Lawyer books, is the 19th in what’s called the ‘Bosch Universe’, revolving around detective Harry Bosch. It’s been fascinating watching not just the characters and the situations evolve from the first Bosch book, but it seems Connelly himself. He seems to be pushing up against his overall copaganda/ defense-lawyers-are-the-enemy stances while also continuing to explore how the systems themselves often cause their own problems. It’s like if eventually Law & Order became The Wire. When I first started with the books, I was kind of taken aback by how tonally different they are from the show, but I can see the arc of both the characters, settings and author himself leading towards it.

The final episodes of Cobra Kai dropped on Friday and they’re honestly great. It got fully back to the soul of the show and delivered some truly emotional moments for the main characters. Like I said to Katy, “I didn’t expect to cry at this Johnny Lawrence moment while AC/DC’s Thunderstruck plays, but here I am.” The original Karate Kid movie did that character dirty, but golly this show did right by him in the long run. Good stuff.

Katy and I have been excited for Yellowjackets season three to start and that anticipation is paying off. We haven’t watched both of the new episodes yet, but the first one dives right back into the mysteries of what happened to these girls in the woods and what followed them out and into their adulthoods. Plus it’s got a killer soundtrack.

I finished watching The Morning Show season one and got sucked right in. It’s a drama set around a Good Morning America-esque show and the chaos they get thrown into when one of its stars is outed for sexual improprieties. Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell are all delivering career-best performances and elevate everyone around them.

Monday morning I went to the Nelson-Atkins Museum (more on that later) and stopped by their gift shop to pick up art books on Edgar Degas and Peter Paul Rubens to add to my reference shelves in the studio. I’ve especially been on a Degas kick lately, and the Nelson has some Rubens pieces that caught my eye and intrigued me to study his work some more.

The original.

MYSTERY MAN

Above is the first page of Mystery Man, a comic I originally made when I was 13. “Another Rob Schamberger Creation,” apparently. Looks like I was swiping Bruce Timm and Todd McFarlane here and trying to be all dark and brooding. Back before Gail Simone coined the phrase ‘Fridging’, it was commonly acceptable that superheroes needed some sort of tragedy, normally to a female in their life, to then become motivated to fight crime or what have you. I didn’t know any of that at 13, I just thought that’s what you did so I gave this guy that kind of origin.

I also wasn’t big on drawing backgrounds back then, either! Truth be told, I didn’t know how yet. I can collaborate with 13 year-old me now as a 44 year-old and do things a little differently.

Pencils and inks.

On Wednesday I drove around Kansas City taking pictures of buildings around town and thought it’d be fun to composite them together to make a city that doesn’t quite exist. I wanted a super-involved environment as a balance to having not done one at all originally. I also wanted to make this a little more than a series of ‘kewl’ images, to give it a bit of narrative flow, so I have the panels breaking up the environment while also showing Mystery Man moving through it in similar poses to what I had originally drawn 31 years ago.

I used technical pens, a parallel pen, brush and ink and a little white acrylic paint to ink the page. The ink in my parallel pen reactivates with a little water so I was able to get some fun washes for a midtone. I also added the pigeons flying by to give the composition some depth and as a fun design element.

The colored page

I haven’t colored anything digitally in over a decade so it was fun using the bits I remembered along with what I’ve learned from being a full-time painter to give this a shot. I think the colors make it a little more readable as the inks got a bit too busy.

Once I’m done with all six pages I have a new narrative I’m going to use, giving this whole collaboration with my younger self a voice that’s current to me now.

Gosh, I’m having a lot of fun with this! Comic books were my way into the arts, back when I got my first one when I was 8. For a couple decades my life revolved around wanting to be a comic book creator before I diverged into painting. It’s really lovely to start flexing these artistic muscles again.

Yeah, that’s an actual Water Lilies painting by Claude Monet.

A DAY AT THE MUSEUM

After therapy on Monday morning I went over to the Nelson-Atkins Museum to ‘touch some grass’, as it were. I needed to immerse myself in some beauty. I started off in their portrait gallery, which is maybe now my favorite section of the museum since that’s what I focus on so much myself. I mean, they’ve got a Caravaggio and a Vermeer, how could I not take an opportunity to study them? It’s funny, this used to be my least favorite section. Hooray for personal evolution!

There’s one piece in this section that particularly spoke to me, Christ Crowned with Thorns by Dirck van Baburen. It’s gorgeously painted, but it was when I read the gallery label that I finally put it together that the figures on the left were modern for the time it was made, making a statement about the story of Christ and how it keeps repeating without people learning. How would it look today with militarized police and ICE agents doing the same to a historically accurate Yeshua? Something that’s been haunting me, for sure.

Then I walked over to their section on 20th century European art, which has become an impressive collection since I started going in the early 90’s. A big addition has been several notable Impressionist paintings from the likes of Monet, Manet and others.

They’ve also gotten more contextual about the provenance of the paintings, of the history of ownership of them. This hits a lot harder in those European pieces from the first half of the 1900’s and why they’re over here now. When Hitler and the Nazis took power, they began to seize art collections for being ‘deviant’, but instead of destroying them they put them on the market and said the art would be destroyed if not sold by a certain date. They oppressed these people, called them subhuman, and used their work to fund Germany’s military. They did the same when they invaded other countries, notably France.

‘The Record Player’ by Karl Hofer, 1939

This piece in particular haunted me this time around. From the gallery label:

“The woman in the painting is lost in her thoughts. One strap of her undergarment has slipped from her shoulder. Red light bathes the left saide of her face, shoulder, and arm. The background is dark and cavernous. No music sounds.
“What could account for this ominous tone? In 1937, Adolf Hitler labeled Karl Hofer and other modern artists “degenerate.” Hofer’s paintings were confiscated. He was removed from his teaching post at the Berlin University of the Arts and was forbidden to paint. In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. World War II began. Still, Hofer painted.”

Still, we painted.

History may not repeat itself, but it does echo and those echoes are being heard now in America. The words may change (although not much) and the current administration’s attacks on trans people and immigrants, its assault on science, its censorship efforts, and now its direct attempts at controlling the arts are all too familiar.

Here’s hoping our own voices can drown out these echoes once more before it’s far too late.

I don’t want to leave you on that down note, so I’d like to talk about the area I visited next, upstairs in the late 1800’s/ early 1900’s American Art area. They have a gorgeous collection of Thomas Hart Benton paintings, one of my very favorite artists since childhood. His stylized realism and bold colors are like a blast to the synapses and his paintings do a wonderful job of exploring the myths of Americana while also not shying away from its reality. There’s also a fascinating side-by-side of his iconic ‘Persephone’ painting next to an earlier study he made, giving a unique view into his process.

For me, the best example of Benton’s explorations of the myth versus the reality is ‘Hollywood’, showing both the artifice and the mundanity. It’s a MASSIVE painting to see in person, giving its epic scope an even larger impact. But its also about people coming together to turn dreams into reality, to bring art and entertainment to a mass of people who were desperate to hold onto any shred of hope.