Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. Reign supreme in your U-N-I-V-E-R-S-E with the sharpness.

High Noon (1952): Hayloft Sniper

Watercolor on 12” x 9” watercolor paper

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

I went into High Noon expecting a fairly standard cowboy movie, so I didn’t expect to see a masterpiece that I now consider my very favorite of the genre. I lean more towards the Spaghetti Westerns and have a general apathy towards the majority of the others in the category, mostly due to the stories and how they look so…Hollywood. John Ford’s were gorgeous but I’m not a John Wayne fan so yeah, I came in with low expectations.

The story is that Gary Cooper’s Will Kane has just gotten married and is retired from his time as Marshal. Immediately after the wedding word comes in that a murderous outlaw Frank Miller (really!) he had once arrested has now been freed and is coming back for revenge. Kane at first takes his wife Amy’s (played by the incomparable Grace Kelly) urging to leave town. But the new Marshal is a day away and Miller will be there in an hour and a half. Kane decides to stay and to try to rally the town to stand with him.

They don’t.

There’s a brilliant scene in the town’s chapel where the residents hem and haw, stuck with analysis paralysis, cowardice, and a lack of empathy. It’s Kane’s problem, not theirs. Maybe Miller will leave them alone, he only wants Kane, and so on. It rings as true today as it did 74 years ago. So Kane stands alone against MIller and his men.

The story plays out in real time, with regular shots of the clock to keep the tension high for when Miller’s train is due in (at noon, naturally). It creates suspense to the nth degree.

Plus, the whole movie has a visual depth to it, there’s a tactile and lived-in feel to every frame. It’s a visual masterpiece to the point that every frame can be hung on a wall as fine art. There’s an incredible use of positive and negative space in service to every shot having a fully realized foreground, mid-ground and background, all stacked atop one another.

Gary Cooper’s Marshal Kane is an archetypal hero, staying to do the right thing in the face of the high likelihood he’ll die. It’s like cowboys in the Garden of Gethsemane. When the system fails, when the government orphans you, when it seems like those around you won’t stand up, one person can still rise up to do the right thing.

Yeah, this story still resonates.

For the painting, I zeroed in on my very favorite shot from the movie when Gary Cooper’s Marshall Kane is up in the stables’ hayloft to get the drop on one of the gunmen (played by Lee Van Cleef!) because it’s such a gorgeous composition. The positive and negative space, the framing, all of it spoke to me but the bad guy being in the light and our good guy Kane up in the shadows is such a nice duality. I used a limited almost-primary color palette to play that up.

Next week: The complicated Tootsie! The movie’s complicated, but the painting is one of the very best I’ve ever done. I think so at least.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Timeless Toni Storm & Mina Shirakawa painting. Due to a likely higher demand there’ll be 75 of these prints.

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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Katy’s book Oldest Kansas City

I’d heard about A Place Both Wonderful and Strange by Scott Meslow on Dana Gould’s podcast and immediately queued it up in my audiobooks. I wouldn’t say I’m a Twin Peaks mega-fan, more a normal fan that enjoyed watching it and has fun theorizing what it was about.

(If you’re interested, my theory is that Laura didn’t exist at all and that she’s a construct of Audrey Horne’s fractured mind, and that what happened to Laura in Fire Walk With Me was actually done to Audrey. Instead of being murdered, she suffered a death of personality and lives in a life of delusions, creating the dream-like nature of the show. In Audrey’s final moment in The Return there’s the flash to her in an asylum, which is the only true representational moment in the whole series.)

Anyway! The book is a deep dive into the making of Twin Peaks, from its conception, to the production of the original series, Fire Walk With Me and on through the lead-up and production of The Return. There’s interviews with a lot of the principals, including co-creator Mark Frost, giving a lot of insights that haven’t been public before.

I’m mostly through Joe Country by Mick Herron, the first book in the Slow Horses series past where the show is. New ground for me with all of these fail spies! Several ghosts from the past reemerge in the book, all at the most inopportune times and the Usual Gang of Idiots have to bumble their way through another international catastrophe.

Daredevil: Born Again season two debuted this week and it’s…fine. Watchable but not stupendous. That seems unfair, right? I think the show suffers from being compared to the original Netflix show’s first season, much in the way that Daredevil comics are overshadowed in comparison to the Miller/ Janson/ Mazzucchelli run. Both offered something made great, with a voice and showing things we’ve never seen before. Any attempt to replicate that comes off as less than, even when done well. To my taste, the comics have a couple times found a new voice (Bendis/ Maleev and Waid/ Rivera/ Samnee) and I’d be interested to see something new with the show.

But again, it’s still a watchable show. Everyone’s putting in strong work and it shows on screen. But man, stop trying to replicate the hallway fight scene and show us a different approach.

Speaking of doing the same thing in a different way, Company Retreat is the new show from the people who made Jury Duty. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, one real person thinks they’re in a documentary about a real thing, but everyone else involved is an actor, kinda like The Truman Show but all done to celebrate the person instead of making them the butt of the joke. In the show, Anthony thinks he’s just started on as a temp for a hot sauce company that’s going to have a documentary shot of it during a company retreat. There’s increasingly hilarious moments, notably a product launch gone very wrong, all set up to allow Anthony the space to show joy and kindness.

For All Mankind season 5 debuted on Friday, jumping us ahead again in this alternate timeline to the mid-2000’s. Things are rough on Earth and headed in a bad direction on Mars and the two seem further and further apart ideologically. A murder happens on Mars, which seems to be there to kick off where the new season’s story is going. Only the first episode has been released so far, which was to set up the new status quo but I’m in. It’s also fun to see Joel Kinnaman and Mirelle Enos in a show together again, after being introduced to both on The Fall (they were both on the Hanna show too). Enos has the ability to always look like she’s about to have a full breakdown at any moment, which knowing this show will likely pay off.

I like how science-heavy For All Mankind is, though it does just sort of handwave away the reality that colonizing Mars is actually impossible between a lack of an ionosphere and the heavily-irradiated dust that covers the planet. But hey, there’s a reason half of sci-fi is ‘fiction’ right?

After hearing so many people gush about The Rehearsal I made a point to watch it this week. Katy can’t handle Nathan Fielder’s innate awkwardness, which I think is the main reason we hadn’t watched it. Right from the moment in the first episode where the true concept of the series is revealed I was sucked in. Fielder and his team will create identical sets and hire actors to allow real people to, y’know, rehearse a situation that they’re unsure about. The overarching rehearsal of the first season is to help a woman decide if she wants to be a mother or not, and it keeps getting more and more meta as Fielder will create rehearsals for himself to help guide people through or to troubleshoot areas where he’s falling short.

The second season is all about helping co-pilots better assert themselves with their captains, trying to address a common theme in numerous real-world flight disasters. As with the first season, there’s an Inception effect as one rehearsal begets another begets another. It also has the single wildest final episode maybe of any show. I actually yelled when I saw it, my whole body tensed up, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I’ve had a couple swell folks email me over the past week to say nice things, which I appreciate. I’ve intentionally pulled myself out of the spotlight over the past couple years and that’s left me doing all of this in a bit of a vacuum. It happens!

But it got me thinking, if anyone wants to ask a question or share a thought related to what I talk about, it’d be fun to do that here. I’m reminded of the old letters columns in the backs of the comic books I read growing up. There’d be people writing in to talk about the comic but sometimes talking about even more. Books like Powers and The Maxx especially had great letters columns, that often became people corresponding with one another. It was beautiful.

Like, remember the pre-toxic internet? Using it to connect and share their truths and not using it to hurt each other? It was pretty nice, actually.

If that sounds interesting to you feel free to reply to this email with your thought or question. Any good vegetarian recipe you want to share, maybe? Just say it’s for the Letters Page and how you’d like your name displayed. Don’t worry, I won’t share your email address. I may not run everything I get, so don’t take it personally if I don’t. We’re still pals, you and me.

Three Egyptian busts, two Chinese lions, and a sketch that I’ll tell you more about in the next section. The bust and the lion are sculptures at the Nelson-Atkins Museum. I walked through before my last couple of volunteer shifts and snapped some reference photos of each from different angles. It’s fun finding different approaches for each, and a nice challenge as well to keep my creativity up. Which is, like, the whole point of these daily exercises.

There was a month last year where I applied for several residencies and got rejected for all of them. Can’t lie, it was a giant bummer. In hindsight, I can see that these opportunities are mostly for emerging artists and for academics on sabbatical, which I am neither of. But I was talking about my frustrations and sadness around the results in therapy and my therapist asked me what I was hoping to get from those experiences that I’m not getting now.

Great question!

I’ve had a lot of complicated emotions around my relationship with art and especially art as a career since I made my big career change a couple years ago (and honestly a couple years prior to that, which led to said change) and I’ve been reevaluating what I want that to be. I have a good professional situation at the moment that allows me a lot of freedom and time to explore, but I’ve struggled to find my voice and what it is that I’m trying to say with my work.

I haven’t found that yet but I think I’m asking the right questions of myself in the appropriate context, finally.

That said! I’m going to another retreat in the Tuscan countryside later this year and spending some time studying in Florence, Italy and then Paris. My time in Florence, as you know by now, had a profound effect on me two years ago and I felt like the time was right to do it again.

I’ll be studying with acrylics this time so I’m going to do some personal pieces leading up to the class so that I can get back in shape with that medium. Yesterday I started on the first one, initially doing the sketch above with watercolor to quickly work out some ideas of what I want it to be.

I’m infatuated with a technique called ‘indirect painting’ where I do a monochromatic underpainting first with just the tones. Then I add some glazes over that with flat color, then build up in a more traditional manner. It allows for those tones to come through the glazes, desaturating the color and cutting way down on mixing time. You can see it in the side-by-side above. I use a modified version of this with a lot of my watercolor work now, too.

Speaking of watercolor, my go-to for the underpainting stage is Payne’s Gray, normally a mix of ultramarine and black, that gives a lovely cool variation as I thin it out. I picked up a tube of it as an acrylic and experimented with that for the first time here to see how it performed and: Yup. Payne’s Gray all day.

I should be done with this by next Sunday’s newsletter, so I’ll share its further process with you there.

Bringing this story back around, I may not be able to get the external environment to lead me towards where I want to be but I can definitely, step by step, piece by piece, create that environment for myself and see where it leads me. That’s been true throughout my career and I need to trust it’ll continue to guide me.

Love you more,
Rob

PS: Trans rights are human rights. Abolish and prosecute ICE.