Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. And we can build this dream together.

Art Deco Study

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

Combining a couple things from an art deco exhibition I saw back in July at the St Louis Art Museum that turned into an exercise in maximalism. It ignited an idea for me with mannequins that I hope to explore in the months to come, as weird as that sounds. I’ve been trying to figure out my next big series of personal paintings and this may have been the seed crystal that unlocked it. Always fascinating how that can happen!

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Julia Hart painting. Easily the biggest thing happening on Thursday.

Card subject to change.

Actually, here’s a preview of Omega vs Okada to whet yer whistle:

Toldja.

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

Good stuff this year! Both new shows and catching up on stuff I’d missed. A friend of a friend is really into Outlander and sold me on it in a conversation and I fell in love with it. The whole series is a giant trigger warning but it’s all so well-earned emotionally. Looking forward to the final season starting next month! Speaking of emotionally-earned, Adolescence blew Katy and I away just like everyone else. On the lighter side, I think the latest season of The Diplomat is the best yet and it’s not a coincidence that Allison Janney became a regular cast member. We also loved Death By Lightning, the story of President Andrew Garfield’s kinda-sorta assassination.

I had watched the first season of Better Call Saul when it originally came out but never watched past that and over the past couple of weeks I fixed that. Hey, guess what, this critically-acclaimed well-loved show is pretty dang good! I actually finished it up yesterday.

My favorites on HBO Max or whatever it’s called were Task, Common Side Effects and the latest season of The White Lotus. Quite a variety of shows there! Over on Hulu, The Lowdown is one of my two favorite shows of the year. It did everything right to my taste. We enjoyed the latest (last?) season of The Bear and while it was kinda uneven I enjoyed Alien Earth. I watched both seasons of Andor this year and gosh it’s good. My favorite of the post-Lucas Star Wars stuff by a country mile.

The final season of The Conners left me crying, with the best final one minute of any series I’ve seen. That John Goodman fella’s a heck of an actor.

Probably the most fun we had with shows this year was digging into Apple TV. It was like when we first got whatever HBO’s streamer was called originally and finally getting to watch everything, except most of these we didn’t even know about! There’s the Dennis Lehane crime shows Smoke and Black Bird, the Mick Herron spy/ crime adaptations Slow Horses and Down Cemetery Road (AWESOME finale last week btw), the sci-fi alternate history For All Mankind, the comedies The Studio and Platonic, the excellent docuseries Mr Scorsese and a lot of others. Naturally Severance lives up to all of the hype and hopefully it’s not too long of a wait for the next season.

But my very favorite show of the year (and I don’t think it’s just recency bias) is Pluribus. It’s a rich vein of story potential that’s slowly being realized bit by bit and centering around a generational performance by Rhea Seehorn. Super excited for the season finale this week!

Trans rights are human rights.

Half of these are non-representational pieces where I was trying to work out a couple of techniques for some paintings I’m working on. There was something that happened with the second one that I liked and it sparked an idea that I expanded on.

There’s a First Watch next to my therapist’s office that I’ll have breakfast at before my session. They’re all really kind to me there so this week I’m going to surprise them by taking in all of these little warmups and letting all of the staff pick out their favorites. Is that the reason I started doing these? Maybe.

Looking back on the year, I see it as a period of rebuilding and rediscovering myself. There was a several-month depression hole that took up a lot of it but I got on the other side eventually. Thankfully. It was something that came out of the hard work I’m doing in therapy, letting out stuff I’d buried down and finally allowed up to the surface. Tough stuff but it allowed me to have a better all-around understanding of who I am. Therapy! It works!

I’m also slowly working past the big career change I made in 2024. Switching any job after over a decade is a big undertaking but this was one I’d fully wrapped my sense of identity around. It’s been a process to extricate myself and I’ve still got a ways to go but I’ll get there.

I’m proud of the art I’ve done this year, too. Historically I don’t like my own work but in 2025 I think I did more successful paintings than unsuccessful. That’s a first! And by ‘successful’ the gauge I’m using is that the piece accomplished what I wanted it to. Art’s just as subjective for me as for everyone else and I learned back in the beginning to not correct people when they like something I made.

Next week I’ll start a recap of all the art I made this year, both personal projects and the rasslin’ stuff I do for a living. I did a lot of experimentation this year and going way outside of my comfort zone with some comics stuff, the plein air paintings and the recent urban landscape works. They all feed into each other and I’ve enjoyed the results.

I have no idea what the future holds and I have very little control over it, but for the very tiny area that I have some autonomy over I know that I’m working hard at it and I can see the results.

Thanks for being a friend and letting me share my journey with you.

Love you more,
Rob