Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. Taken by the sky.

Study of James Henry Haseltine’s ‘America Triumphant’

Watercolor on 7” x 10” watercolor paper

This piece was about playing around with color and technique for me. The statue itself is white marble so that freed me up to have fun with my palette choices. I hadn’t done much with the orange and green combo before and I think it has a lot of possibilities for me to dig into. I also used a flat brush for parts of this because of the unexpected mark making one can get from that.

Study of a Hemba Culture Male Ancestor Figure

Watercolor on 7” x 10” watercolor paper

This is a rather striking sculpture, both in its form and in that it’s wood with pigments. That component means that it’s a bit water damaged and faded in spots and that was really interesting for me to play with, both in the color choices and in the creation of textures.

It’s something I think about with a more global look at art: Not every area had access to stone or the materials to make the tools to carve stone. Nor did everywhere have access to all pigments necessary to make dyes or paints, so certain colors were either rare or wholly unavailable to artists. Because of that, so much art has been lost due to the passing of time or has been misunderstood because it’s being viewed from a modern and/or Eurocentric viewpoint.

Like, someone centuries ago in what’s now the Congo, with little to no access to so many things we take for granted now, MADE this with their hands and their imagination. That’s the coolest thing possible, right?

Thank you for the massive response to the new print on Thursday. I’m pretty disconnected from the world nowadays and have no idea if my work resonates with folks anymore. I’m off the big social media platforms and I don’t get much feedback anymore. But the sales data shows me that, yeah, there’s still an audience out there. The numbers don’t lie and neither do you.

You mean a lot to me, thank you.

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 started doing these little 4” x 6” warmup paintings, both to loosen myself up before starting work each day but also for the sake of simply having fun. Asking myself questions like what if I splash these colors here, or what if I switch up the order of colors I add, or what if I go for a vibe over a representation, fun stuff like that.

These experiments will over time inform my more finished works, leading me to apply what I’ve learned elsewhere. At least that’s the hope!

This year Katy and I started making a dedicated effort to check out different museums. It’s something that got unlocked in us last year in Florence, Italy and we’ve continued it since.

Here in Kansas City I go to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art about once a month. I also took in two of their special exhibitions, the wildlife paintings Survival of the Fittest and its current Mesoamerican collection Painted Worlds. I went on my own to the Toy & Miniature Museum’s exhibition of every Kenner Star Wars toy (this is RAD). Together we went to the National World War I Museum’s exhibition about Paris during WWI. A little outside of town in Wamego, KS for Katy’s birthday we went to the Oz Museum which was surprisingly delightful.

Earlier this year we went to Chicago and took in the Chicago Institute of Art. Well, about 2/3 of it, because that place is MASSIVE. I look forward to going back and spending more time with their Antiquities collection. We spent most of the day there and still didn’t see everything!

For my birthday we went to the St Louis Museum of Art, both for the museum as a whole and for their exhibition ‘Roaring’ about how the automobile influence art and culture in early 1900’s Paris. That one was surprisingly awesome and felt like walking through a documentary. The museum also has a gorgeous collection of German ‘Degenerate Art', the works and artists who were deemed a danger to Nazi culture. I DON’T KNOW WHY THAT SPEAKS TO ME RIGHT NOW. Their Impressionist collection is quite gorgeous, too.

I’ve really enjoyed these trips and I look forward to what we take in next year. Omaha’s and Minneapolis’ art museums are for sure on my checklist! And with Katy traveling more for work, hopefully that can get us out to New York, LA (I desperately want to see that Jack Kirby exhibition before it’s gone) or even Europe down the line. I wish I’d made time for this when I was traveling for work more often but I won’t make that mistake again.

Yesterday I finished listening to the audiobook for The Proving Ground by Michael Connelly. It’s the latest Lincoln Lawyer book, this time seeing Mickey Haller suing an AI company over a chatbot talking a kid into killing another kid. I view Connelly books as the literary version of easy listening, like there’s just enough there to have it on but no one’s confusing it with high art.

Having made it through all forty-ish of his books over the past few years and seeing how poorly so many of them have aged in regards to cutting edge technologies, I do wonder how funny some of this will sound in a few years. Like, I’m not an AI fan whatsoever. I’ve never intentionally used it and have no intentions to do so. I also have a deep resentment towards the slop they try to call art, viewing it as the dumpster juice of creativity. So, like, it was funnier seeing Harry Bosch trying to figure out how to send an email with an attachment is what I’m saying, I guess.

I finished reading Lovers and Haters by Gilbert Hernandez, a surrealistic story of Fritzi Ritz, a world-famous softcore actress and all of the bizarre people trying to glom onto her fame. These were the High Soft Lisp stories serialized over the past decade or so in Love and Rockets and it’s a…well, it’s an experience reading them all together. Gilbert is well-known for his absurdism both in his art and his writing and this might be his opus. There’s bizarre body modifications, a dude with two schlongs, an even-lower-budget Doctor Who, a mysterious sex cult, a ridiculous procession of people claiming to be Fritz’ offspring and…man, I don’t even know how to explain this thing. It’s definitely something, that’s for sure.

I’d been looking forward to reading Absolute Martian Manhunter volume one by Deniz Camp and Javier Rodriguez and it exceeded my expectations. It’s a fresh new take on the character, seeing him as possibly a non-corporeal being that merges with a human detective and they work together to solve crimes and stop an alien invasion. Maybe. Maybe it’s none of that. It’s an expressive psychedelic work that reminds me of Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earth by way of Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s JLA. Rodriguez’ art was what got me in the door on this as I’ve enjoyed his work for a while now. He has a big, bold cartoony style rooted in realism with a strong eye for design and composition and it works so perfectly with this story.

I also enjoyed Kid Maroon by Christopher Cantwell and Victor Santos quite a lot. It’s a lovely mix of Our Gang, Sin City, Dick Tracy and the human condition where a kid detective goes to the big city to solve big crimes and finds himself in over his underage head. It’s a meditation on both families of origin and families of choice and how both are necessary. Santos’ art is a gorgeous mix of influences like Chester Gould and Frank Miller but wholly its own thing and is the perfect pairing for this story.

This morning I read Partisan by Garth Ennis, Steve Epting and Jordie Bellaire and it’s pretty much perfect. A Russian mother of two young children is left to care for them when her husband joins the army to fight the Nazis. Soon enough she has to flee and finds herself part of a partisan militia and caught in conflicts between multiple factions, all to protect her children. I’m a huge fan of Ennis’ work in general and his war comics in particular, and Epting and Bellaire’s art is some career-best work making it all feel so real.

Here’s a fascinating PBS video on how cults use language to control their followers. There’s a lot in here about charismatic talkers, being in the in group or the out group and their own specialized language to separate their followers from the rest of the world. I’m also going to pay a lot of attention to the idea of ‘thought-terminating cliches’ like “Agree to disagree,” or “It is what it is,” which a lot of people in my personal life use.

So I’m clearly whatever the dude version of a Crazy Cat Lady is, but gosh I love these critters. They’re one of my no-asterisks joys, something that makes me feel good in a pure way.

I’ve had four cats as an adult. Monkey lived for 20 years, Korma was 16, and Kima and Tikka are rockin’ out with us now. I bring that up because of this foot stool that’s been next to my drawing table for the past 10 years or so, which we call The Pedestal. All four of the cats have laid on it next to me while I work and it’s a beautiful thing. There’s a continuity of love there that’s incredibly meaningful to me.

A couple weeks ago Tikka started laying on it occasionally and the first time he did, I admit to getting a little choked up. These cats, man. These cats.

Love you more,
Rob