Painter and Founder of Gamblin Artists Colors - Robert Gamblin
My first mentor was David Foster at the University of Oregon in the late 1960’s. Dave was a student at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, and his mentor was Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Dave taught that image making was a medium of communication, which implied the important points of having something to say in a manner that can be understood.
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For post-graduate work I studied for a year at the San Francisco Art Institute. While most SFAI painting students at that time were neo-expressionistic studio painters, I saw the beauty in Golden Gate Park and began a lifelong relationship with landscape painting. Next came a year in Europe visiting the major art capitals to see for myself the foundations of art in history.
My next mentor was Wolf Kahn. Wolf was a student of the abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann. From Wolf I learned how to take a leap from describing a landscape into painting a personal form of the landscape based on color and emotion, describing how it felt to be in a landscape rather than how it looked.
Around 1980, I was looking for work as close to painting as possible and started making oil colors. That was the founding of Gamblin Artists Colors, an international brand of oil painting and printmaking materials. I traveled the country for the following 35 years to educate a generation of American painters about their materials and made a major contribution to the practice of painting through the development of materials that have made oil painting safer than ever before.
