About

In 1980, 10 years after going to art school, Robert Gamblin founded Gamblin Artist Colors, a company serving contemporary artists with oil colors and painting mediums. Nine years in, the brand had achieved a very good reputation in art circles.

Robert’s work as a paint maker came to the attention of CAL Smithsonian, Washington DC. who invited him to bid on a job to make 138 paints. The lab identified 40 historical pigments they wanted made into colors to then test and write a paper describing best processes to approach cleaning those colors.

Robert saw this as an opportunity to deepen his knowledge of pigments and binders.

He flew to Washington D.C. from Portland Oregon to meet with Marion Mecklenburg and Charlie Tumosa, the scientists at the Smithsonian. He told them he was passionate about making oil colors, was the best person to do the work, and that he would make the colors in the spirit of a colorman working in the 1700’s. His bid was accepted.

By that time, Robert knew that the deep knowledge of materials had left the artist’s studio when color making left the studio. He acquired that knowledge from years of working at the mill making the 100 colors of the contemporary artist’s palette.

CAL Smithsonian provided the pigments and oils. All the pigments were ground into cold pressed linseed oil, but a few were made in five additional oils: acid refined linseed, walnut, poppy, stand, and sun thickened.

Verdigris, gamboge, realgar, smalt, azurite, lapis were some of the pigments. Until that time Robert had only read about these colors.

Verdigris was a real surprise. The story in pigment handbooks was that it was so chemically unstable that it was difficult to paint with, requiring it to be used in isolation of other materials and the environment. It did not seem worth the trouble. But upon making the color he understood why it had been in use since antiquity. Verdigris was beautiful, a revelation, intense, transparent, unique among all the pigments. He surmised it must have been the “Phthalo Green” of preindustrial revolution pigments. It was the color of an emerald.

Not only did the project give Robert a powerful connection to the past, the project also revealed to him the world of art conservation. He wondered, if CAL Smithsonian is working on these projects, what are other labs working on?

This is the fork in the road that leads directly to the beginnings of GCC. Robert started visiting other conservation studios. First was the conservation department at the National Gallery in D.C. There he met the Chief of Conservation Ross Merrill, Jay Kruger, conservator for modern paintings, and René de la Rie who was head of the science department.

René gave Robert copies of his department’s recently published paper studying low molecular weight modern resins that might be good substitutes for natural resins. Robert understood the value of a stable replacement for natural resins, and he requested permission from the National Gallery to allow Gamblin Artists Colors to make a version of René’s published formula for a varnish based on Regalrez® 1094. This became the product Gamvar®, which has perhaps become the most popular artist’s picture varnish in America today.