Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. I hope you're waiting for me across your carpet of stars.

Study of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Crouching Flora

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

More than anything this was done to play around with planes of color and seeing if it could still be a recognizable form. I added that bit of dark shadow in the upper left corner to make the composition come together. It’s fun when a mess of experimentation turns into something nice.

Study of a Zapotec Seated Figure

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

I saw this sculpture at the St Louis Museum of Art and loved it, but wanted to make sure I remembered correctly how they were originally colored. The one I saw was just the stone, with pigments either faded away or removed. And friend, what I found in researching Zapotec art was so wonderful. I’ll share some examples with you on Thursday but this MesoAmerican art is so rich and magnificent. I adore classical European art but there’s so much to learn and appreciate when you get outside of that Eurocentric viewpoint.

Batman

Watercolor on 7” x 10” watercolor paper

For fun yesterday I whipped up this little Batman piece for the sake of doing it. A nice change of pace!

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Tony Schiavone painting. My first one of him, if you can believe it!

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

The Morning Show season four is off to a great start. Katy and I got into it a few months back so for us it’s the new ‘our show’ to watch each week. It’s set during last year’s election cycle so, y’know, it hits some raw nerves knowing how things turned out and where we as a society are at now. So there’s that, but it’s also a stellar workplace drama where everyone’s dependent upon one another but constantly stabbing one another in the back.

Earlier this week I finished up watching Outlander season three and it’s probably around here that this went from a good show to a great show. After being separated through tragedy and time travel stuff, Claire and Jamie are reunited after 20 years apart. It’s such a wonderful human aspect to explore how and if their meaningful young romance survived such a long time apart. They’ve each lived whole lives apart and it’s a conflict to see if that connection is still there. The show also doesn’t whitewash any of the very hard things about life in the late 1700’s between basic human rights, the horrors of a civilization dependent upon slavery and the egregious misogyny a woman had to endure. It’s the human aspect of all of this through the main character’s eyes, finding their emotional truths, that makes the show so watchable even when the situations are horrifying.

Over the past several weeks Katy and I watched Black Bird, getting in about an episode per week. It’s a heavy show plus it gave us something between the end of Smoke and the start of the new season of The Morning Show. It’s a miniseries created by my favorite novelist Dennis Lehane and starring Taron Egerton alongside Paul Walter Hauser, where Egerton’s character is trying to work off his drug sentence by going undercover in prison to get Hauser’s character to admit he’s a serial killer. Hauser, who I know mostly for comedic role (and pro wrestling, I guess) is straight up terrifying here. Katy and I both felt like it resembled Robin Williams in One Hour Photo or Insomnia with how chilling a performance it is.

I’m mostly through the audiobook for Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly. It’s both a Lincoln Lawyer and a Harry Bosch book as they work together to investigate and free people who have been wrongfully convicted. It’s set against a backdrop of Harry going through some experimental chemo therapy for leukemia while also working against his very ingrained authoritarian views. It’s some deftly nuanced dualities at work about loyalty to a system that wasn’t loyal in return.

I’ve started in on True-Man: The Maximortal by Rick Veitch, finishing the first volume the other day. It’s a dramatic satire of post-war American society, looking at what would happen if a Superman-type figure broke through to the real world and how those in power would manipulate him to their own ends. What makes this interesting is Veitch’s abilities as a writer and artist to keep it from being too heavy-handed. The characters and their adventures are thrilling and not overshadowed by the commentary, which is often not the case with stories like these.

I’ve been looking forward to The Power Fantasy volume two by Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard and jumped right on it when it came in. It’s another ‘superheroes in the real world’ except none of them are heroes, they’re people with world-threatening powers looking only after their own interests. It’s done as a metaphor for nuclear superpowers except in this reality sometimes there’s no talking someone down from the brink.

I finished reading The ‘Nam Omnibus by Doug Murray, Michael Golden, Wayne Vansant and friends a few days ago, too. A couple weeks ago I gushed about Golden’s art for you, and that was all I’d ever read of the series. This omnibus collects all of writer Murray’s run with both Golden and then Vansant. It’s a fascinating take on the Vietnam War, all from the soldier’s perspective and with it playing out in real time where each issue is set one month after the preceding issue. This cuts out a lot of the politics and the editorializing and instead speaks to the experiences of the men in the situation just trying to survive, based on Murray’s own time there. Not all of it has aged well which is a little tough to get through but overall this is one of the best books Marvel has made to my taste.

Merriam-Webster defines ‘fascism’ as:

“A populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”

FYI.

A quiet week for me, mostly using self-care tools to manage myself. It’s tough, right? It’s tough but I’m working at it.

What else? We’re looking at a week of rain hopefully as the temperatures gradually go down, so on Thursday I sowed some grass seed and covered it with straw. Naturally the constant rain that was forecast hasn’t quite materialized but I love watering so that’s okay. I’ve read that Fall is the best time to grow grass as they love cooler air and warmer soil for rooting. I had a sizable dead area take hold this year after losing a tree in a storm last year and the grass not being used to that much direct sun. It happens.

Other than some peppers coming in that’s about it outside of painting. That’s enough right now.

Love you more,
Rob