SHOP TALK: Rob Schamberger Newsletter 29DEC24

It's natural, it's chemical, it's logical, habitual.

Dec 29, 2024

Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. I swear I won't tease you, won't tell you no lies.

WORDS

NEEDS: SEX

Watercolor on 12” x 16” watercolor paper

This finishes off both the physiological needs and also my collaboration with model Zelda Calderon for the Human Needs Series. I was so impressed working with her before on another project that I knew she’d be perfect to get this started and it seems like I was right. I’ll start in the next couple of weeks on the self-actualization needs with another favorite model, Joanna.

A few days ago I started working on the final Emotion Series painting. I hadn’t worked with acrylic paints in a few months and it’s a bit of a curve getting back into the swing of it. Since acrylics are opaque, they’re wildly different in how they behave than watercolors so it takes a minute.

Here’s a little insight into how the Tortured Artist Brain works: After I painted that wall in the background I kept looking at it and asking myself, “Self? Should I turn that perfectly-fine background wall into a wallpapered wall? It’ll only take an extra hour to do.” An hour later, I had a floral print up on that sumbitch.

It was a bit of an instinctual decision, but it was also because I knew that I’d have a leaf-patterned table runner and one of the figures will have a patterned shirt, so the design on the wall will give some balance and feed into the composition.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Ricochet painting. I’m rather fond of this one, personally.

UPCOMING AEW/PWT PAINTINGS

Ricochet - SIGNED
Private Party - SIGNED
Adam Cole
The Outrunners

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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Instagram
Threads
Bluesky
Cara
YouTube

WHAT I LIKED THIS YEAR IN GRAPHIC NOVELS

Comics are my first love and this was a good year to be in love. Not everything that I read came out in 2024, but it’s the period I read them in, just in case you want to tell me that the Planet of the Apes omnibus I read during my Italy trip came out several years ago. Yeah, I know, but I’ll forever associate it with that transformative journey. Also: Apes.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ graphic novels Where the Body Was and Houses of the Unholy were naturally both great. I feel like they make books that are just for me, I enjoy them so much. Paco Roca’s Return to Eden is very much the same in how it feels so perfect for my tastes. I argue that Roca very well may be the best cartoonist working today. Harlem by Mikael is another one of those where the lush art has stayed with me since reading it.

Immortal Sergeant by Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura did a wonderfully nuanced examination of how difficult the relationship between fathers and sons can be. An equally challenging book is Whistleblowers by Rafael Medoff and Dean Motter, which tells the true stories of the people who tried to bring attention to the Holocaust. Worm, a memoir by Edel Roderiguez about he and his family’s exodus from Cuba in the 1980’s is among the best graphic novels I’ve ever read.

Then there’s the fun stuff like Matt Wagner and Kelley Jones’ Dracula and the Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired Star Trek Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way. Fun and arty books like Charles Burns’ Final Cut and Eric Drooker’s Naked City have also stuck with me since cracking their spines.

The book I’ve had the most fun with this year (and the past few years) has been Brian K Vaughn and Niko Henrichon’s very adult-themed Spectators, which recently finished serializing. The book on its own is a full-on experience like no other, and I thoroughly enjoyed the online community they built around its online release. A print collection of it is coming in the latter half of next year that I can’t recommend enough. Sure to wind up on a whole mess of banned book lists, I’m sure.

WHAT I MADE THIS YEAR: RASSLIN’ ART

Hell of a journey for these, personally and professionally. I started off the year working with WWE and then in April I decided to make the move over to AEW, as WWE was no longer the right fit for me. Because of that, there’s a painting of Bayley in there that was never seen. There’s a few AEW pieces that never made it to the light of day as we learned each others’ processes, but that’s natural with any new relationship. There’s also one of The Road Warriors that was done with a party who will remain nameless that was the single worst experience of my professional career. I still like the painting I did, though.

So yeah, a real rollercoaster of a year with this particular body of work. Thanks to you, it’s been a good rollercoaster and not like that time when I was a kid and my seat belt broke and I was literally holding onto the security bar with my whole body out of the car. True story.

The truth is that they’re cross-eyed.

YOU GOOD?

We had my mom and stepfather over for Christmas and had some Indian food and a delicious apple cinnamon coffee cake pie (yes, those words really all go together!) that my neighbor gave us.

Then on Thursday I got a delightful surprise that my friend Andy was in town and he was able to join us for trivia night. The men in his family are notoriously hairy, so we named our team Sasquatch Truthers (shoutout to Katy for coming up with that one). Digression: One time I drove by his house and his dad was out mowing the yard in August in what looked to be an Angora sweater. I called Andy up asking what the hell was going on and he chuckled and said, “Actually, Dad didn’t have a shirt on.”

Oh.

The big question of the night was whether he would help our score, be neutral or hinder. We came in second place, so that answered that! Our highest score to date.

Another funny Andy story: If you ever visited our exhibit at WrestleMania Axxess you may have met him. It didn’t make the show, but The Miz’s dad George Mizanin came up with the Miz & Mrs camera crew to flip through the print books and asked Andy, “Do you have any paintings of me?”

“And…you are?”

Damn, I wish that had gotten in. When I told Mike that story he shook his head, laughed, and agreed it should have made the cut.

Okay. See you next year.

Love you more,
Rob