Gamblin Artists Colors
Brushed with Greatness
By Shanna Germain, Portland Tribune


For the past 20 years, Robert Gamblin has spent his days turning liquid fat and crushed rock into something that's turning up on the walls of some of the most prestigious museums in the world: oil paint.

In the early 1980s, Gamblin was a struggling oil painter determined to make a living in the art world. Building on an interest he'd developed during his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, he started mixing paints in his garage. During the first year, he only made white. Once he thought he'd mastered the oil paint formula, he began expanding his palette.

"When I first started making paint, artists didn't know what was in the paint," Gamblin said. "It was curiosity: I wanted to know, How do you make something last a long time? Because when an artist steps away from the work, all that's left is the paint."

In 1986, Gamblin met his future wife and partner, Martha Bergman Gamblin, in New York. By 1987, they were ready to launch Gamblin Oil Paints. Since that first year, the company's sales have expanded from $35,000 to right around the $3 million mark.

"In the first year, we made 72 to 100 units a day," Bergman Gamblin said. "Now we do about 4,000 units a day."

The only American-based small oil paint manufacturer (the rest are in Europe), Gamblin combines pure oils with pigments and makes everything in small, quality controlled batches. Gamblin said the company sticks to the basics to make a high-quality product at an affordable cost.

"We are a paint-making machine and not much else," he said. "We cut out everything else. We have no sales department here. Our customers don't want a lot of spin. They want a good product."

All of the paint is still made at the company's Southeast Portland office and factory, under the watchful eyes of the Gamblins.

For each batch of paint, machines grind and roll the linseed oil and pigments. While machines do the bulk of the heavy work, much of the labeling and boxing is still done by hand. The Gamblins acknowledge that they take a hands-on approach to the paint making, always with a keen eye toward improving quality or increasing productivity.

"The thrill of what we do is seeing the paint," Bergman Gamblin said.

And with 87 colors of oil paints, plus oil painting mediums, grounds and sizes, picture varnish and solvents, Gamblin has become many oil painters' company of choice. Artists such as David Hockney, Wolf Kahn and Nathan Oliveira use Gamblin paints.

Henk Pander, an internationally known Dutch-born painter, uses Gamblin oil paints exclusively. He jokingly calls his work a Gamblin advertisement. "My paintings are all Gamblin paint in action," Pander said during an interview in his studio. "All these paintings around here, they're all painted with Gamblin paint. Every one of them."

Pander, who has known Gamblin since the early '80s, was one of a handful of local painters who tested early Gamblin products.

"When he started making paint in his garage, he would give me tubes of paint to test for him," Pander said. "I would call him up and tell him when something was wrong."

"Making paintings is such a private, personal thing to do," Pander said. "Knowing the people who hand-make the stuff I use every day has been really wonderful."

Conservation is at the core of everything the Gamblin company does, whether it be recycling products, devising safer paint mediums or creating long-lasting colors for future generations.

First, nothing is wasted. Leftover paints are remixed or sold at low cost to art students; wastes are reused and recycled. And even the paint pigment that's sucked into the dust extractor is turned into a usable product.

"We turn all the pigment in the dust extractor into a color called Torrit Gray, and we give away 5,000 tubes of it every year in honor of Earth Day," Bergman Gamblin said. "It's just another way for us to not throw anything away."

Gamblin also works to conserve paintings for their long-term survival. In conjunction with conservators and scientists at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Gamblin created the first new line of conservation colors in 100 years. Designed for retouching damaged areas of old artwork, the paints use new technology to duplicate the historic properties of paints.

Gamblin's conservation colors have been used in New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Guggenheim Museum. In 1999, Gamblin worked with the team that restored the "gold-leaf" ceiling of Radio City Music Hall.

"Some part of what we make here every day is going to be part of our cultural heritage 100 years down the road," Gamblin said.

He also works toward conserving the health of the painters themselves. Gamblin paints contain no lead, arsenic or mercury. And Gamblin created a mineral spirit-based medium that alleviates the need for turpentine in the studio.

Laura Ross-Paul, a figure painter and assistant professor of painting at Portland State University, has used Gamblin paints since their inception. She said part of their appeal - beyond quality - is the lack of caustic substances.

"Before, I used paint thinner and actually had some liver damage because of it, and it took me awhile to get detoxed out of it," Ross-Paul said. "Now that I use Gamblin's products, it's not a factor."

Together with Gamblin, Ross-Paul also helped the PSU art program transfer over to Gamblin's mineral spirit-based painting mediums, called Galkyd.

"I think most of the major art schools in America now pretty much exclusively use the Galkyd products," Ross-Paul said. "I think we'd have to close the painting department down at PSU if it wasn't for the availability of that medium."

But when it comes down to it, Pander said it's not really the people behind the paint. It's the quality of the product. "The proof is in the pudding. They just make really beautiful paint."

(reprinted by permission from Portland Tribune)

  
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Gamblin Artists Colors Co. PO Box 15009 Portland, OR 97293 USA
Telephone: 503.235.1945  Fax: 503.235.1946