Rob Schamberger, over the years, has become famous for paintings of professional wrestlers, ranging from names like Harley Race and Jerry Lawler to Cora Jade and Charlotte Flair. Rob, in his journey, has been fortunate enough to build a relationship with WWE as his work has been featured on their shop and YouTube channel many times.
It is through his connection with WWE that Rob was able to paint what he considers to be his most meaningful work, a painting of The Ultimate Warrior and Connor Michalek, the young man who was the first recipient of the warrior award and the namesake of the Connor’s Cure Foundation, which was started by Stephanie McMahon and Triple H.
During a recent appearance on the Wrestling Winedown podcast, Rob spoke about why that painting will be hard to top.
However, Rob also spoke about the overall importance of the body of work he has built rather than any particular painting.
“Oh, boy, the cop-out answer [to what his favorite painting is] is whatever the latest one is,” he began. "I'm of the mindset that it's not about the individual piece. It's about the body of work that I'm making. there's a story I've heard attributed to Picasso, but it could be anyone the this woman's walking through a park and sees an artist sitting at a bench sketching. As she gets closer, she recognizes that it's Pablo Picasso. She says, ‘Oh my gosh, could you draw my portrait?’ He said, ‘Sure.’ He stares at her for a minute or two makes a few lines on the paper, hands it to her and it's a spot-on likeness and she's like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is incredible,’ and he said that'll be $500. She's like, ‘But it only took you a few lines. It only took a few minutes,’ and he said ‘No. It took me my whole life.’
“The thing there is like, it's a skill that we develop and everything that we do we learn from what went wrong, what went right, what happened accidentally that we could repeat in the desired way,” he continued. “So, every painting I make is informed by everyone that I've done before it, so when I look at older work, all I see is how I could do it significantly better now. So that's one less fun answer.”
He then went on to talk about the painting of Connor and how there is a much more emotional connection to that piece of work.
“The more emotional answer is, I did a painting of Ultimate Warrior with Connor The Crusher that I gave to To the Michalek family at Hall of Fame after Connor was honored with the inaugural Warrior Award. I'm not going to do anything that's going to top that, as far as emotional importance, I don't think ever. There's so much talk within about pro wrestling that like, you know, real or fiction, or whatever. That was a genuine, real human moment, and I don't know that I'll ever top that.”
You can check out Rob's work on Twitter and on his website as well.
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