Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. It’s our blood and bones and these whistles and phones.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) - The Temptation of the Man’s Heart and Mind

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

#6 in the 40 movies I haven’t seen from the AFI 100!

I went into this knowing nothing about it, having not even heard of it before putting my list together. I’m an appreciator of silent film but not an avid watcher of it so this was a big blind spot for me. It’s the most artistically powerful I’ve seen so far for my project and I can’t stop thinking about it.

A farmer (the Man) begins an affair with a visiting city woman, and she urges him to kill his wife (the Wife) and make it look like an accident. He’s about to do it but stops at the last moment, but the Wife knows what was about to happen and flees. The Man follows her to the city and they rekindle their love for each other, somehow involving a drunk pig. There’s a BIG moment that happens on their way home that I won’t spoil for this 99 year-old movie but it’s powerful.

It’s nearly a century old but it feels so current and fresh. A lot of that is FW Murnau, adapting his signature German expressionism for his new American audience. There’s impossible angles and boldly-lit scenes aplenty but all in service to the characters and the story. I’m still feeling this movie weeks later.

This was the first movie for this project where I got genuinely excited because it’s a real gem that I got to see. You can watch the whole film on YouTube for free:

For the painting, I captured a moment where the Woman From the City is superimposed over The Man, a visualization of the temptation he’s wrestling with, both in his mind and in his heart. I thought it’d be fun to do this all with sepia tones to give it an appropriate look for the time. I don’t know that I’ll always go monochromatic for black and white movies (I didn’t with Yankee Doodle Dandy for instance), but they were all shot with such lovely high contrast that a lot of times I want to lean into it.

Next week: The incomparable performance of Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night!

Abraham Lincoln

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

There’s another couple we team up with at trivia night and we’ve become friendly with them over the past year. The wife when she was younger discovered that she’s related to Abraham Lincoln, which created a fascination with US Presidents (present company excluded). As a surprise I made this painting of ol’ Honest Abe and gave it to her on Thursday night. I didn’t intend to at first, but the copper and green color palette I went with speaks to the penny and the $5 bill that his likeness is on, which is pretty fun.

Anyway, she liked the painting.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Hangman Adam Page painting.

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
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Katy’s book Oldest Kansas City

Wonder Man was a delightful surprise, reimagining Simon Williams as a struggling actor with the realities of that existence. I honestly feel like the super-powered stuff is the least interesting aspect of the show and instead found myself drawn to this man struggling against a professional system that won’t accept him and a family who’s minimally better. Plus he’s getting complicated and messy help from a former sorta-terrorist. It’s full of heart and humanity and homemade candies.

I finished listening to the audiobook for The Dark Wind by Tony Hillerman while working yesterday and gosh I love these books. A plane full of cocaine crashes next to a reservation’s constantly-sabotaged windmill. Tribal Policeman Jim Chee finds himself in the middle of tribal cultures, a lawless Federal government, and the drug trade as he tries to untie the knots drawing them all together.

I’m almost done reading Shade: The Changing Man Omnibus 1 by Peter Milligan, Chris Bachalo and friends. I’ve only ever read the first dozen or so issues of this series and it’s lovely to finally dig in on it. That said, it’s a very challenging read that rewards a slower pace, an issue or two a day. It’s wildly surreal, especially in the first couple dozen issues, and coupled with some dense prose that takes a bit to disentangle. Ain’t nothing wrong with that and I welcome it but it’s definitely not a book to breeze through. It’s also fun to watch Bachalo quickly evolve as an artist, going from a fairly generic ‘Vertigo House Style’ artist to an exceptional stylist. It’s still a little while before he goes even more cartoony but I adore this era of his work.

Mothra: Queen of the Monsters by Sophie Campbell and Matt Frank is a big fun romp. It’s sort of like Terminator but with kaiju, in that two sisters have to travel backwards and forwards through time to aid Mothra in her battles against Megaguirus. Unlike Shade, this isn’t a dense read at all and I was able to fly through it and just enjoy the giant monsters fighting.

I didn’t plan on crying to a Bruce Springsteen song but here we are.

And if you’re angry and plan to stay angry, NOFX is here for us.

The first one is a color sketch for one of my movie paintings, to see if the layout would work. Looks like nonsense on its own but it was helpful to the process. The second one is playing around some more with the palette for that piece, as well as the third one. The fourth one is a sketch for the below study (which I think is more successful than the study as a piece unto itself). The fifth one is an attempt to recreate something that happened in an upcoming painting with a color combination.

And the sixth one is a skull because skulls are cool.

Geometric Study 1

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

I’ve been playing around with geometric mark-making for a few weeks now with my warmups and did this study to see how it would play out at a bigger scale. I think there’s a lot to play with here and a couple early things I learned are: Render the face and hands traditionally, and highlighted edges should be maintained. I’ll remember that in the future.

I talk about my cats all of the time, but that’s just because they’re great. They don’t know about the awful stuff happening in the world, they just want their food and water and love. They only know that their dad sometimes is struggling and they correctly know that laying on me and purring will help.

Cats are great. Ten out of ten, no notes.

Love you more,
Rob