Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. Life is hard, you know, so strike a pose on a Cadillac.

Study of a 1928 French Automobile Ensemble

Watercolor on 7” x 10” watercolor paper

Did this from a photo I took at the ‘Roaring’ exhibition at the St Louis Art Museum, about how the automobile affected French art, fashion and overall society. The same way that there was riding fashion for horses, the same applied to cars and they’re pretty stunning. The pattern almost reads as a road map, which became prevalent at the same time. It also had a fun Jack Kirby nature to it that drew me in. There’s a couple more of these I plan to do here and there.

Therapy helps.

Card subject to change.

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The first season of Ballard was kind of a mixed bag but I overall enjoyed it. It played a little too cute at times, feeling more like a broadcast TV procedural than the tone of the books. I get it, they’re trying to play to a broad audience, but it was a little distracting. That said, the overall mysteries that Renee Ballard and her cold case unit are working on, as well as the fleshing out and humanizing of those initially-cartoonish supporting characters made for an ultimately enjoyable watch.

I finished watching both seasons of Invasion the other morning, too. The first season is remarkably good and the second season is still good. I think it’s because season one is all about the mystery of the invasion and the aliens not really being seen that creates a solid setting for some remarkable character work. That said, they keep the aliens so very…alien. They look and move in bizarre ways with impossible geometries that keeps an air of mystery and unease for the human characters to play off of.

Katy and I watched Presumed Innocent as our evening show over the past week. It’s an adaptation of the book by Scott Turow that the Harrison Ford-starring movie was also based on. The show stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a very unlikeable character who has to defend his innocence in the slaying of his extra-marital partner. Like, Katy and I were constantly yelling, “F this guy!” at the TV, but also invested in him clearing himself of these charges. There’s a second season coming and I don’t exactly know how that’s going to work after how this first season ended but I’m here for it.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season three started off with two really good episodes. The first episode is a huge action set piece picking up from the season two cliffhanger finale, and the second episode is a surprisingly great spotlight on Spock. Like, if you’ve spent your whole life hoping to see Spock dance and have it not be hokey and instead both story- and character-driven, this is the one for you. And just WAIT until you hear the song he dances to. Plus it has a rad cameo that ties two characters together from the original series and Next Generation that didn’t feel ham-fisted as these sorts of references so often do.

The new season of the TCM podcast The Plot Thickens debuted this week, which will focus on the movie Cleopatra, at the time the biggest flop in Hollywood history. The host Ben Mankiewicz’s uncle Joe directed the movie, which creates an unusual access to inside information about it like Joe’s diaries and his daughter’s stories she heard from him. I’m a nerd for old Hollywood so I’m all over this kind of thing. A couple choice quotes are, “The family joke was that my grandpa Herman wrote the greatest movie of all time and my uncle Joe wrote the biggest bomb,” and “Joe had nineteen movie posters of the films he directed hanging in his house. He directed twenty.”

I had fun reading Action Comics: Phantoms by Mark Waid, Clayton Henry and Matt Herms. It’s a 12-issue arc where Superman investigates how Kryptonian prisoners are escaping the Phantom Zone, unveiling a menace that threatens all of space and time. As one does. Waid has a deep superhero knowledge and also knows how to craft a fun action-packed story and that works out perfectly here. Henry and Herms take turns with the art duties, with very different styles that work together in a complimentary way.

I also just want to say that Nancy by Olivia Jaimes is brilliant.

I’m struggling right now but I’m trying. Trying to appreciate joy as it happens. Sometimes it feels like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, but I’m trying.

I’ve been working on a very complicated and emotionally taxing acrylic painting over the past week (you can see a bit of it behind the cats above) that’s definitely in the ‘suffering for your art’ territory that I don’t often get into. It’s my first acrylic in several months and there’s been a learning curve getting back into that.

Overall, acrylic paintings are done wholly opposite from how watercolors are done. Acrylics are opaque so you work from dark to light, whereas watercolors are translucent and you work from light to dark. That alone calls for me to change my thinking on how I’ll tackle the piece, but I’ve gotten into lots of other techniques like glazing and indirect painting that are a hybrid of the two. Confusing! It took about three days to get back into the swing of it.

Plus this piece is a bit of social commentary that’s a difficult thing to look at and think about, something I don’t venture into with my art a lot. My Emotion Series paintings were difficult but they were about looking in at myself. This piece is about looking out at what I’m seeing and articulating a statement through a visual. Difficult on a technical level and kinda brutal on an emotional level. Hence the ‘suffering for my art’ sentiment.

That said, I’m in a place in my life and career that I can devote to making something like this. I still primarily like to just make pretty things but I like to challenge myself to do something with more depth. That’s the part of the artistic journey that’s wonderfully fulfilling. Thanks for being on this journey with me.

Love you more,Rob