In Conversation with Pete Cole of Gamblin

Pete Cole, president and owner of Gamblin, visited the Jackson’s Studio to share the story behind this US-based colour house. He discusses their environmentally-conscious approach to colourmaking, and the importance of listening to artists and art museums around the world to guide them in formulating their oil paints, varnishes, and mediums. He also talks about the great sense of pride they have in becoming a Certified B Corp, and why you’ll never see an acrylic range from Gamblin.

Contents – In Conversation with Pete Cole of Gamblin 

Gamblin was founded in 1980 by Robert Gamblin. Could you tell us about his journey in establishing the company?

Standing in the aisle at an art supplies store with a basket full of paints, artist Robert Gamblin, wondered how he was going to balance creating work, selling work, and part-time jobs, just to be able to continue painting, and he had a moment of clarity. It was a really formative moment for him as a colourmaker, and for us as a colour house.

The year was 1980, and shortly thereafter he began what is now Gamblin, in a one-car garage, about a mile from our present-day factory. In his first year, Robert got a used mill from another colour house, a bit of pigment, and he spent the entire year making only Titanium White, and probably just eating beans.

Over the next few years we moved to a two-car garage, then another two-car garage, and then to our first factory which was also co-located with a tea factory. Robert gradually expanded the palette; into all the earth colours, the colours of classical painting, the colours of Impressionist painting, all of the cadmiums, and then of course, the modern pigments. He really became known as the leading American colourmaker.

Robert has dedicated his life to oil painting and all aspects of it, helping artists find their own flow in oil painting. In the world of conservation, he reached out and built relationships with the National Gallery in the United States, the Getty, the Tate, and the National Gallery in London. Through these relationships, he came to be commissioned by the Smithsonian to make 150 colours for their records, using a mix of contemporary, historical, and almost prehistoric pigments that are no longer in use.

This work gave Robert a reach back through the entire 600-year history of oil painting. The romantic notion is that things were better back then and that the paints the old masters had were better. Some folks will tell you they’re making paint in that tradition, and it’s just not true. Robert learned that a lot of these pigments were quite terrible to work with and to paint with, impermanent, and not lightfast. So he resolved to build a colour house that was going to lead oil painting forward.

Could you tell us more about Robert’s lectures on paint and colour?

Robert Gamblin himself, and Gamblin as a colour house, have always tried to speak to artists. We’re painters too, we’re listening and we’re looking to take insights from painters’ studios and use them to guide our work as their colourmaker. Robert had an old Volvo which he drove around with his paints, to work with painting groups and art supply retailers, to really engage artists directly in their studio, out in the field plein air painting, selling some paint along the way, but mainly listening. Painting has been around for 600 years. There shouldn’t be secrets, we shouldn’t be stuffy about it, and we should make oil painting accessible to people, and help the next generation of artists to find their flow in oil painting.

Robert went to art school in the 1970s. During that time as he would say students were not fertile ground for hearing about technique and how things should be done properly. It was a period of Abstract Expressionism, throwing out of the rules, and a lot of that knowledge of making permanent paintings was lost. There have been a couple of generations of professors that don’t have that knowledge to pass on to students. Why does Phthalo Green tint and mix so differently than Viridian? Why is Naphthol Red so different than Cadmium Red? I’ve given demonstrations where people have come up to me and said “I learned more about colour in the last hour than I learned in my entire education in art school”.

How did you join Gamblin?

I come from a family of makers. My grandfather built ships for the Royal Navy on the River Clyde in Glasgow. We didn’t think of ourselves as creatives, we were just trying to make a living or, in the case of growing up in Maine, just trying to stay warm. I worked on old barns, old houses, and all sorts of old things, but I was always looking to make something that really mattered. One of the things I love about our work is that we spend time with people in the best part of their lives, the most important part of their lives. If you get something right, people remember. It’s an industry where people can take the long view, and I choose to take the long view.

I met Robert Gamblin and came to know Gamblin. In the early days, everything passed through Robert’s hands, quality control was real easy, but as we grew we needed to instil that in an organisation and build processes. I’ve been able to help with those kinds of things and I’ve done my best to keep the brand true to what got us started in the first place. It’s very meaningful work for me and I’ll be around for a long long time!

Can you describe the various roles within the company?

We’re a company of 29 people. We’re doing everything in Portland, all under one roof. If you’ve ever bought any of our paint in the last ten years, Mike, a third-generation oil painter, or Phil, another painter, mixed it. It passed through their hands. If you bought any of our ink, that was Chris. Chris is a printmaker and photographer, who makes all of our ink and he notices everything. In terms of quality, that’s Devon, who looks at every batch and medium, and tests everything before it’s released. Then we have a team that works in packaging and shipping. We’ve never had a better team of people. I’m so proud of how through all the things that have happened in Portland, and to all of our families over the years, they all look after each other. So we generally keep people for quite a long time and I’m proud of that. It tells me we must be doing a good job. The work is just incredibly meaningful to the people there, and to see what people do with our materials is one of the best parts of our work.

What makes Gamblin Artists Oil Paint different from other paints out there?

We offer the only palette of colours and range of mediums that are built around the needs of contemporary painters. What I mean by that in terms of colour, is that it’s a painter’s paint. Robert wants it to have the perfect texture and consistency for mark-making and to support the work of painting. Another aspect of the colour palette is that we were the first company to make a replacement for Lead White. We offer a Flake White replacement, and in general, we offer pigments that are true to historic working properties but safer, and more permanent.

We’re not just hitting Pantones, we’re developing each colour to its maximum. We’re using pigment and we’re using oil, but we’re also using history, science, emotion, and really putting everything we have into each batch.

Can you tell us about the process of making Gamblin paints?

I used to tell people that pigments are like elements on the periodic table. My daughter did a science project and pointed out to me that they actually are on the periodic table. Zinc is on the periodic table, and Titanium, Cadmium, and Cobalt. For a lot of colours we are working with very primary building blocks. It doesn’t get any smaller, and it doesn’t get any more raw, or any more real.

We’re trying to develop every colour to its maximum. Cadmium Red Light is a set of working properties; it’s a masstone, it’s a transparency, it’s a grind, it’s a feeling, and we have to get all of those right and to meet Robert’s vision. It is a bit of a painstaking process. Everything is adapted to each pigment, so mix times, mix speeds, mill time, and mill settings, to get the grind right. Some colours cooperate wonderfully, Ultramarine Blue is one of them. Other colours take quite a bit of work to develop into our expectation for what a colour should be.

One of the things I love about oil painting is working with flax oil, which of course comes from linseed, they’re one and the same. One plant gives us both the linseed oil that we make paint with and also the linen that we paint on. I love working with these natural, very raw, very authentic materials.

Matt Rafferty, Master Paintmaker

What are the particular qualities of the Radiant series of colours?

Robert Gamblin worked with his teacher Wolf Kahn on the Radiant colours. Wolf had never put two colours down in the same place on his palette. His palette’s a mess, his studio is a mess, but the work is amazing. His use of colour is amazing and obviously an enormous inspiration to Robert. Part of what he was trying to do with the Radiant colours was to create a palette of colours for Wolf, to support Wolf’s work. Essentially, they’re a palette of eight tints at value six on the Munsell Scale. With the exception of Ultramarine Blue, they’re all tints created using our Titanium Zinc White and a modern pigment. They’re very clean and consistent from batch to batch. Then you have the fabulous working properties of Titanium Zinc White to support mark-making, and to ease colour mixing.

They are incredibly useful in colour mixing. For example, if you had a red that you were working with, and you wanted to neutralise it a bit, you want to pull it toward the neutral colour space. If you mix that red with a green out of the tube, it’s quite dark in value, and you get this darker mixture on its way to black so you need to add white to figure out what you’re working with. With the Radiant colours, you could use Radiant Green or Radiant Turquoise to pull that red to the neutral core without making it darker in value. They’ve become some of our top-selling colours. They’re really useful tools.

 

The range also includes an incredible choice of whites. Why are there so many and what are the differences?

The white that an artist chooses really determines in large part how an oil painting is going to feel to them. What mark-making is going to feel like, how their colours are going to feel under the knife or brush, and sort of what possibilities they have. On the one hand, you have Titanium White, which pounds colour and beats it down like no other. On the other end of the spectrum, you have Zinc White, or our Mixing White in the 1980 range, which are much softer, and more transparent. I feel it’s really important to get the white right and we want to help artists to do that. Years ago, probably 80% of the white that was sold was Titanium White. It is on the more extreme end of the spectrum and for a lot of painters it’s not the best option. So we’ve tried to help artists to select and master the white that really best supports what they’re trying to do. My personal favourite is Titanium Zinc White. It’s whiter than Titanium White, more neutral, easier to work with, and just the perfect texture for mark-making and mixing, without having to use medium.

Gamblin Artist Flake White Replacement

What is the origin of the 1980 Oil Paint range?

The 1980 colours are our range of what one would call a student grade oil paint. We really resolved to make them different from how they’ve been made before. Back in 1980, the year Robert started Gamblin, the belief was that artists should really be able to paint freely. Artists should be able to use colour without hesitation, without reservation, and without worrying about how much money is on their palette. I told Bob, “The name is 1980”, and of course, for him, it took a minute. You know, it’s a number, we’re really going to name this a number? But we looked back at 1980, and it was an amazing year in the world of art. Basquiat and Warhol had a joint show together in New York. It just felt right.

In the Renaissance, students took the master’s paint and added linseed oil and a bit of marble dust, and that is essentially what we are doing. We’re using the exact same pigments as in our artist-grade paints, with no dilution, and no swapping out of cheaper pigments. We use the exact same linseed oil, the same team of people making the paint, and the same equipment, but we’re adding a bit of marble dust. Marble dust is a colourless extender that maintains the proper texture of the paint. We also add a bit of linseed oil, which enables us to make them at a lower cost and pass on those savings to the artist.

Can you tell us about Gamblin’s range of conservation colours?

The conservation colours are really made for the work of museum conservators. This came out of Robert Gamblin’s work collaborations with conservators at the National Gallery, the Getty in Los Angeles, and other museums around the world. He had gained a reputation for wanting and figuring out how to make things better. What conservators wanted was colours for retouching oils that were true to historic colour. They needed transparency, so as not to paint over the artist’s mark, and not lose the texture of the mark. For example, Monet had very distinct mark-making that you need to preserve and conservators also wanted no shift in colour from wet to dry. And complete reversibility as well, so work could be undone and redone as approaches to conserving paintings changed, or as paintings change hands from one museum to another.

So, like anything great we’ve ever done, it came from really listening. Robert developed this palette of conservation colours that we continue to make today and there are very few major museums left that don’t use them in their work. It’s incredibly meaningful to us as colourmakers, and it’s probably one of the things Robert Gamblin is proudest of.

We get a lot of insights from conservation work that feeds into the development of colours for working artists. One of Van Gogh’s paintings of his bedroom was restored fairly extensively using our conservation colours and Robert went and met with the team and consulted on that project. You can see before and after pictures and they did an incredible job of preserving the artist’s hand and the integrity of the painting, while also bringing some of the colour back.

Our work with the Smithsonian has been ongoing. They look after all of the portraits of US presidents and first ladies, including Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Obama, to which we contributed a lot of materials.

A conservator working on Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom

Can you talk about your comprehensive choice of mediums?

Mediums, particularly mediums of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, have created all manner of problems for painters. Turpentine is quite awful to be around. You get real irritable real quick. You smell it and the problem is that the things you smell are the things that are evaporating the most rapidly. They are the things that are most aggressively trying to get into your lungs and your nervous system.

When I look back in the last 200 or so years, no one has done more for oil painting than Robert Gamblin with his contributions in the area of mediums, liberating artists from exposure to turpentine. I love seeing when younger painters have never seen it or been around it, and they’ve only used Gamsol.

What is the difference between Gamvar varnish and traditional varnishes?

If you’d asked me about Gamvar when I first came to Gamblin, we would say it’s a low molecular weight varnish with a refractive index similar to that of linseed oil. To which you might reply, “Could you repeat that in English?” The reality with Gamvar is that it is the easiest way to make your painting look better. It was developed by Robert by working with the Getty, the Tate, and our National Gallery in the US, and it is essentially a contemporary varnish. Gamvar is water-clear, and a really important difference is that it is much thinner than water. Often painters will varnish their painting and feel like it’s too bright, it’s too glossy. What the eye is seeing is that the thickness of the varnish has levelled out the texture of their painting, and it’s levelled out their brushwork, so rather than light bouncing off in different directions and being diffuse and natural, it’s bouncing off flat hot spots in the painting. With Gamvar you get a very natural-looking varnish. Your painting looks like it did when it was wet. You don’t get that sense that there’s something between you and the painting.

Gamvar Picture Varnish

What effect do oils and oil mediums have on the environment?

The environment is something that we thought about way before it was cool to do so. If you look at our range of mediums, you have the option of working with solvent-free mediums. Those are vegetable oils – safflower oil and soybean oil (otherwise known as edamame). These are things you eat, and they’re also known materials that artists have been working with for centuries.

If you want a responsible choice of a medium, we offer gels and fluids that are vegetable oils that can go down the drain, and go in the rubbish. Gamsol is meant to be a solution for those who want to use a solvent in their work, but the most responsible one possible. Gamsol can be reused over and over again. As your pigments settle in your brush cleaning jar you can pour it off and continue to reuse it.

How did the Reclaimed Colours come about?

Our original reclaimed colour was our Torrit Grey. We have a massive system to pull pigment dust away from our paint makers. We capture that and rather than toss it, we make it into paint. It’s different every year, but it’s generally grey, and it puts pigments where they belong, which is on an artists’ palette, rather than in a rubbish bin

John Sabra and his team contacted us about their work. They are a team of artists and engineers from Ohio University that figured out a way to pull iron oxide pigments out of polluted rivers. This is an area of the USA that hasn’t had much environmental regulation so a ton of stuff ended up in the water, making the water uninhabitable. They started out with buckets, waders, and rubber boots, capturing these iron oxides by pulling them out of the water system and converting them into pigment. They’ve seen aquatic life return to streams that were essentially dead, so it’s really amazing. It is small scale, but they’re getting better at it, and they contacted us with the idea that we make paint with the pigment. There are some really lovely colours; Iron Violet, Brown Ochre, and red. We’re able to offer these colours, a couple of which will probably make it into our palette permanently. We called them ‘limited edition’ colours because we weren’t sure about how consistent the supply would be, but it’s been fantastic. We give 30% of our sales back to support and reinvest in their efforts.

Capturing Iron Oxides at Bat Gate Weir, Ohio

What does it mean to be a Certified B Corporation?

When you’re trying to do the right thing, there are lots of folks who will tell you what the right thing to do is, and not all of them are right. Some of our brother and sister companies had become Certified Benefit Corporations, or B Corps as they’re referred to. And we looked at it, and it’s actually very helpful if you’re trying to do the right thing for the environment, your community, for your customers. We really felt that for us, it was a logical extension of who we are to try to achieve that higher standard. We also felt like it was what our artists would expect of us.

Pete Cole and Robert Gamblin

What was the design process behind your range of palette knives?

Artists really do value a tool that is the right tool for the job. You see this in other fields, whether it’s applying makeup or other tools, so it inspired us to think differently and to question things that had never been questioned. We started out with our Gamvar brush. We looked around and no one had really made a brush for varnishing. We got asked all the time “What do you recommend?” and we used to recommend one from Europe until they stopped making it. So we were like, “Okay, we’re in the brush business now.” And so we developed a brush that is simply just the right tool for the job. When you apply Gamvar, you want to apply it as thinly as possible. Every other brush overloads and carries too much varnish. It’s just not designed for the job.

I’m not aware of any major innovations in palette knives in several hundred years. There are more shapes, different shapes, different things, but they’re pretty much the same. So we set out to make something more thoughtful, more sustainable, and more joyful. We partnered with a manufacturer, and we developed a one-piece blade so there’s no weld to break. We developed a finish that doesn’t flake. We also developed a handle made of FSC-certified wood that’s shaped to the hand so it feels good, and one of our goals was to make palette knives that artists can’t keep their hands off.

 

Can you tell us about your range of printmaking inks?

Printmaking isn’t something that we get asked about a lot but Robert has friends who are printmakers, dissatisfied with their materials. So, in his spare time, he began working with them, listening to their needs, and refining inks for printmakers. Of course, like our paint, these are all linseed oil-based inks, and we offer a range of block printing inks, etching inks, and more recently, a lithography ink. I think what Robert really focused on in our colours was making paint for go, not for show. We’re making paint to support that working artist, and in printmaking, Robert really chose to focus on the edition printmaker. He really wanted to create workhorse black colours that would do the work of edition printmaking better than any other ink.

If you’re a block printer, Portland Intense Black, named after our town, is a fantastic workhorse blackfor block printing, and we have a range of Portland Black etching inks that are used by some of the major presses in the USA and Australia. They are consistent from the top to the bottom of the tin. We found that lithographers had the same problem where they couldn’t get a good lithography ink and so we did it. It’s so stiff that when we put the initial batch of ink on the mill, it stopped the mill!

Chris Howell, Master Paint and Ink Maker

What does the future hold for Gambin?

It’s our life’s work to move and to lead oil painting into the future. We will stay very focused, and continue to innovate and lead in oils. We’re working on a new range of colours that we’re really trying to approach differently. Again, putting the working artists at the centre, looking to innovate, and face the future while respecting the past. You’ll see those things from us, and you’ll see us continue to try to do the right thing as best we can.

Oil painting has been declared dead numerous times. Photography came about and people said, “Well, that’s kind of it for painting. We can just take pictures now.” And of course, painting kept growing. Then, video came out and people said, “Now that’s really it. The kids just want to shoot video. No one cares.” And now it’s like, “Hey, good luck with that Super 8 video that you shot, or that Betamax or that VHS that’s fairly impermanent and challenging to work with now.” So I see oil painting continuing to grow. I look at the work that’s being created in oil right now and I think it’s incredible. I also look at what matters to young painters and they want natural, safe, and powerful materials. There’s nothing more authentic, natural, and enduring than oils. For younger painters, we’ve got a lot to offer and we fit in terms of values and materials. I love the fact that artists today have never had more access to colour space, or more colours to work with. So really, we’re living in the best time there’s ever been to be a painter.