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Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. The lights were low, I leaned back on my radio.

I’ve been doing this wrestling art thing for a while now and one of my favorite things to see is a young wrestler start to click, and I’ve noticed that happening with Kyle Fletcher. His persona is getting more pronounced and it looks like he’s getting comfortable in his presentation. That gives me a lot to work with as an artist, matching a likeness with a personality and a distinct look. That said, I intentionally left part of his face obscured in shadow and undefined as he’s still coming into his full self.

Card subject to change.

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Max Beckmann is considered one of if not THE greatest German artist of the twentieth century. Critics classified him as an Expressionist, but he shunned that label and any others and instead focused on making the works that interested him in the manners that equally interested him. His earlier works, like the above of the Titanic or the Messina piece shared later focused more on disaster scenes and themes of death.

As Hitler and the Nazi’s rose to power his work was deemed ‘degenerate’ and illegal so he was forced to flee to Amsterdam and lived in exile until then immigrating to the United States where he lived the rest of his years. Authoritarians fear art and hate artists, it’s a whole thing.

Anyway.

Beckmann continued to evolve his style and his later work like the above Carnival Mask painting became more graphically-leaning stylistically while also beginning to focus more on joyous themes of life, though often contrasted with death.

I included this portrait from earlier in his career to show the range of his abilities and styles. While the Carnival Mask painting may look simplistic in comparison, it actually shows Beckmann’s ability to say more with less and to continue to experiment stylistically. It reminds me of a kid in one of my high school painting classes who, while we were talking about Cubist artists said that he could do that and it didn’t seem that complicated. To which our teacher said, “Then do it. Go ahead. Create something that’s never existed before, be the first to do it, if it’s so easy you should do it because it made these artists world famous.”

To put it another way, so many of these experimental artists were accomplished realists before they continued to push their creativity in ways that arguably changed how others look at the world. They learned what’s there and then started imagining what was NOT there and that’s beautiful.

Back to Beckmann, this piece was made to illustrate the story of a massive earthquake that devastated Messina, Italy, with this specifically looking at a group of escaped convicts warring amongst themselves and a solitary policeman futilely attempting to maintain order. It would be a few years before World War I would show how mankind could unleash the sort of destruction previously only capable by the Earth. It’s in conversation with Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ or Goya’s ‘The Third of May, 1808’ in my mind as a warning of the loss of humanity. I can see why the Nazi’s feared Beckmann and his works.

(I really enjoy having these art chats with you each week. Hopefully you dig them, too!)

Not a lot to report on the garden front this week so I’m going to leave you with how pretty the coleus is. The pigments in the leaves are wildly inconsistent, leading to some cool variations that almost feel like block prints from the end of a run where the plates are slightly off and the colors are overlapping.

Love you more,Rob