SHOP TALK: Rob Schamberger Newsletter 19JAN25
One day I'll fly free.
Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. I was stranded alone in my Southwest dream.
WORDS
NEEDS: PURPOSE
Watercolor on 12” x 16” watercolor paper
This is the first of the Self-Actualization Needs, working with my incredible model Joanna.
This was actually my second attempt at this painting. I had started another one earlier this week based on my original sketch that didn’t quite come together. Since I call these emails ‘Shop Talk’ I thought it’d be interesting to share the journey this piece took me on.
Here’s the original sketch:
For the concept I was inspired by Michaelangelo’s Doni Tondo, both in the figure and the lush colors. It’s something I’d still like to revisit conceptually, but it wasn’t the right fit for the message I wanted for this particular painting. Here’s the one that didn’t work the way I wanted it to:
It’s a perfectly fine painting of a model, but I realized when I was in the third act of painting it that the story here was in her looking at her hand, needing it to have a purpose, and compositionally I wasn’t telling that tale. Too busy, not cropped where I wanted, it simply wasn’t feeling right. And that’s actually a good thing. This painting became a study for the ‘real’ painting and led me to knowing exactly what I wanted.
Before starting that final painting, I made these new color sketches to work out the palette, composition and framing I wanted. I like several of these, but to stick with the focus on her looking at her hand I opted for the sixth one, more inspired by Caravaggio’s ‘Cardsharps’ than Michaelangelo’s colors.
It’s a similar thought process to how I’ve long viewed my work, in that each painting I make is informed by every other painting I’ve ever made. The difference now, since having the idea of the painting study introduced to my process after the Italy trip to study with Olga Litvinenko, is that I can be more intentional in the work I do leading into a specific painting. I guess a lot of that has come from slowing myself down and having the good fortune to spend longer on a piece.
Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Adam Cole painting. Bay-Bay.
UPCOMING AEW/PWT PAINTINGS
Adam Cole - SIGNED!
Toni Storm
Kenny Omega
Cope
The Hurt Syndicate
Card subject to change.
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
Katy and I caught up on Severance this week and are thoroughly sucked in. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a mix of The Prisoner, Twin Peaks and The Matrix where people have their personalities split to divide their home and work lives, creating wholly new personas for their jobs. The two personalities are completely shut off from one another and don’t know anything about their other self. The company they work for is mysterious, their work doesn’t make sense, and there’s more going on than any of them realize. And there’s a room full of baby goats.
I watched the first season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and overall enjoyed it. The first couple episodes and the last couple were strong, especially. Anna Sawai, who also portrayed Lady Mariko in the outstanding Shogun miniseries last year on Hulu, was a standout for me. Had a good amount of Godzilla but could have used some Jet Jaguar, though.
Everything could have more Jet Jaguar, honestly.
The vintage Hollywood podcast You Must Remember This is back with its new season The Old Man is Still Alive. The first episode focused on Frank Capra and how the decisions he made personally and professionally, especially around the time of the Black List, affected the rest of his career and lack thereof. Great stuff that speaks to how history may not repeat itself, but it can definitely echo.
Yesterday I finished reading The Amalgam Age Omnibus and overall found that it served its purpose of making fun mashup comics. If you’re unfamiliar, back in the 90’s Marvel and DC were doing crossovers and had the idea to imagine what would happen if different characters were combined, creating fun concepts like Super Soldier (Superman and Captain America), Darkclaw (Batman and Wolverine), Spider-Boy (Spider-Man and Superboy) and so on.
Some did better than others and some REALLY shone like the aforementioned Super Soldier by Mark Waid and Dave Gibbons, Spider-Boy Team-Up by Karl Kesel and Ladronn, Iron Lantern by Kurt Busiek and Paul Smith, Thorion of the New Asgods by Keith Giffen and John Romita Jr and the utterly gorgeous Dr Strangefate (great name) by Ron Marz and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, inked by Kevin Nowlan. A few of my other favorite mashup names: Doctor Doomsday, Shatterstarfire and Nightcreeper.
I picked up a copy of Taschen’s Vermeer: The Complete Works this week since I’d really been wowed by his and the other Dutch masters’ paintings at the Uffizi last year. He amazingly only had 35 major works, most famously ‘The Girl With the Pearl Earring’ but his overall use of lighting to portray a figure is something I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out.
A one minute film from 1995 by David Lynch, shot on a camera from 1895. It tells a complete and very human story in a wonderfully haunting and artistic way. It’s amazing how this encapsulates all of the Lynch ‘isms’ in just sixty seconds. What a treasure his work is and what a loss that he’s passed on, a man from somewhere else who’s now gone back home.
GRANULATING WATERCOLOR SKETCHES
I picked up a set of Kuretake Gansai Tambi granulating watercolors a couple weeks back and finally started playing around with them this week. They’re fascinating, in that as each color dries it reveals multiple other colors within. Seriously, each of the above are just one of the colors! Definitely something I’ll continue to experiment with, even if just with smaller sketches and studies. It’ll be interesting to do a figure drawing session with them, I bet.
See? Everything is better with more Jet Jaguar.
YOU GOOD?
That’s a loaded question today, right?
Things are going to be different starting tomorrow. How different will reveal itself with time.
Beyond things you can do with your community and degree and activism, I want to focus here more on you, the person experiencing what you might be experiencing. We have to put on our own oxygen masks before we can help others with theirs, right?
Here’s some things I’ve learned that may or may not be helpful for you to keep in mind, if you’re also struggling with (waves hand broadly) all of this:
Physically define your sphere of influence. Like, for me, right now in this moment I have control over my house and my yard, these are my physical boundaries. I acknowledge that beyond those borders my ability to influence becomes limited. That said, keep an ear to the streets so that you know if you need to take some appropriate action to keep yourself safe, like relocating or other changes. You’re the one who knows if an environment is no longer the right fit for you.
Real world connections. As much as we think we know someone online, we’re ultimately only getting what they choose to publicly share and that can create limited emotional connection. Keep your ‘real’ relationships close. It can also be helpful to find interest groups that meet up in real life and see if they’re the right fit for you. For instance, there’s drawing groups I get together with.
Allow good things to also be true. This comes from my most-used therapy tool of holding multiple truths without letting one invalidate the other. Bad things can be happening in your life, and that’s true. But a meal can taste good, or your pet can be amazing, or you can enjoy growing plants and those things are also true. Intentionally noticing those and letting them exist alongside the bad things can help you from getting overwhelmed.
Protect yourself, but not at the sake of yourself. Pull in those boundaries, limit your doomscrolling and overall social media usage, all of those things, but we don’t have to shut ourselves off from the world. As someone who lives with PTSD, my brain is trying to predict what may happen based off of relevant experience. That means it’s going back to 2020, the pandemic, the civil unrest, the interpersonal relationships breaking down, all of it and expecting that to immediately happen again. Hell, it might! Or worse! Who knows. Those are valid concerns to have. But I also need to recognize that it -IS- PTSD I’m experiencing and to utilize my grounding tools to be able to navigate what’s currently happening, without transferring all of the emotions from that prior experience. I don’t have to immediately shut myself off from the world but maybe I’ll be mindful and intentional of how I’m interacting with the world.
That’s MY experience and YOUR experience will be unique to you. But I wanted to pass that along in case it’s relevant to you or someone in your life.
Now pardon me while I go pet my cats, water my plants, and think about my next meal.
Love you more,
Rob