Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. It's no stranger to you or me.

Study of a 7th-8th Century Thai Standing Buddha

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

I was chasing a vibe for a painting last week, like I told you about on Sunday. I think I got close with this piece. A sort of ethereal looseness balanced by occasional structure, if that makes sense. It pushed me in a few directions I wasn’t comfortable with skill-wise but I’m glad I did because now I know some things for the next time around.

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

I started watching The Lowdown the other day, having missed its debut a couple weeks back. It was Ethan Hawke starring in it as I tend to always enjoy anything he’s in but it’s showrunner Starlin Harjo that made this a must-see. His last show, Reservation Dogs, is one of my all-time favorite shows and Lowdown is a wonderful evolution of it. There’s easy comparisons to the Coen Brothers and Tarantino in its look and feel but there’s a particular humor that was also present in Rez Dogs that permeates this. The story revolves around Hawke’s characters, who owns a barely-operating used book store and works freelance for local Tulsa free press, trying to bring down a local family with shady dealings and a dark past. He steals a vintage Jim Thompson paperback from the estate sale of one of the family members after an apparent suicide with a note inside that says maybe it was instead a murder. It feels like a cross between Jackie Brown and The Big Lebowski in all of the right ways.

I finished listening to the audiobook for The Waiting by Michael Connelly, which catches me up on the Bosch Universe books. It’s the 39th book in the series! There’s a new one coming up in a few weeks but then I have to wait just like everyone else. Wild. I think I like Renee Ballard the best out of all of the characters in this shared universe, although Bosch’s evolution from where these started to now is also impressive. The book follows Renee as she works on three different cold cases that bring differing levels of peril both personal and professional, both physical and emotional. One of the cases is a wild one, probably the most legendary cold case in Los Angeles history, but it made sense in how it ultimately played out.

I read Next Testament by Clive Barker, Mark Alan Miller, Haemi Jang and Vladimir Popov over a few days earlier in the week. It’s a breezy yarn about the being that The Old Testament was based on returning to Earth and not liking what he sees. This is the vengeful and petty aspect that unleashes disasters and swarms of locusts because wtf not. Only a couple who genuinely loves one another and genuinely wants to better the world has a chance of defeating him, but there’s a catastrophic cost involved.

Assorted Crisis Events volume 1 by Deniz Camp, Eric Zawadzki and friends is a rad anthology series that uses the concept of universe-altering crises as a way to explore human existence and the current state of the world. A world that’s constantly resetting with emergency after emergency is used to comment on how we go through the same nowadays. An immigrant man becomes unstuck in time and it’s a moving parable for the immigrant experience as well as PTSD. And so on. Zawadzki’s art is gorgeous, both in the quality of illustration as well as the innovative array of panels and how they’re used to tell each stand-alone story.

I spent the last couple days just north of Kansas City in its suburb Liberty for a plein air event, my first time doing one. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, ‘plein air’ is French for ‘outdoors’ and is also used to describe the act of painting outdoors. If you’ve ever seen someone with a little easel set up in a park or on a sidewalk, that’s what I was doing.

It’s so very different from working in the studio because there’s a lot of sensory input happening that doesn’t indoors. It’s difficult to find that one thing you’re going to paint even though you’re looking at the whole world. Plus, you’re racing against the lighting always changing as well as welcome interruptions as people stop to talk.

Friday evening I did the piece above as the sun began to set. I don’t view it as a successful piece unto itself, as I was a little too ambitious with it but it has a charm to it.

I did this one Saturday morning and it’s my personal favorite of the three. I think it’s a good composition that tells a story about the courthouse poking up from between the trees. Two ladies walked by as I was starting and they stopped to talk with me. They came by a few more times over the course of the 3-4 hours I worked on it (there was also a farmer’s market going on as well as around 20 other artists) and each time they came by they brought more people with them to watch the progress. It was a lovely thing for them to do.

After lunch I did this one. It was ambitious but I felt like I could handle it. I personally didn’t view it as successful, but I learned a long time ago to not voice those thoughts to others and let people have their own relationships with the art. The other artists actually had the biggest connection with this one and that felt great.

I’ll probably revisit this as a studio piece, treating the plein air as a study. Maybe next week!

Love you more,
Rob