Storytime: Scene of the Crime

To begin with, this is going to sound like a commercial for Gamblin Paints, but I assure you it isn’t. They just happened to be the hero of this story.

Those who follow me know, that before I was a portrait painter, I was trying my damndest to be a full-time landscape painter. I was working at a soul-crushing day job as an in-house Creative Director at a Fortune 500 financial firm, and spending weekends sharpening my plein air painting skills and competing in annual painting competitions in hopes of finding an exit.

So on one particular weekend, I made the 3-hour journey from Baltimore down to the picturesque town of Snow Hill on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I was dropping off some paintings and picking up others from Bishop’s Stock Gallery and taking advantage of some nice weather to go painting with some of the local artists, Scott Yeager and the late Ron Lambert.   

We hit a misty cornfield in the morning and in the afternoon we headed down one of the long marsh bordered roads to paint some wetlands. There are dozens of such roads that lead out to abandoned boat houses, sunken piers, and rarely used boat launches.

This one was George Island Landing Road. It winds slowly through a half-mile of marsh before you reach the landing’s parking lot. The goal was to paint the marsh, but with no shoulder we followed each other’s cars and parked in the lot, to walk back up the road to set up our field easels. 

The afternoon light was perfect as it skipped off the ribbons of water, that separated the patches of reeds. We settled into the work for the next couple of hours to beat the change of light and complete the paintings. When we were done, my companions packed up and carried their gear the quarter-mile back to the parking lot. I decided to just leave my easel on the side of the road with my backpack and pick them up on the way back up the road. The road was so desolate, I had no fear of anything happening. That was a big mistake…

We all three drove back to the same bend in the road where we were painting, but there was no sign of my easel, my painting, or my backpack. In the 5 minutes that it took to return the gear was gone. There was no trace, but no cars or people either. Shock started to set in. I stepped out of the car to survey the spot where I know I was painting, I talked to Scott and Ron through their car windows and they stepped out to try to solve the puzzle. There wasn’t wind or strange tide or even a miscalculation of where the gear had been. Besides the high grass, and some trees further up the road, you could see miles in every direction. 

I paced up and down a bit until I was convinced that it was all gone. My painting, Julien French easel, my French companion palette. And, in my backpack was my Coolpix digital camera, brushes, all of my paints, and all the clips, towels, palette knives, hand soap, and dozens of other things needed to have a completely portable studio. The loss was starting to wash over me. Scott spotted a house down the road, which had a clear view of the road, and thought we should see if anyone was home, who might have seen what happened.

An elderly woman came to the door. When asked, she said that a red pickup truck had made a u-turn and a passenger jumped out and threw everything in the back. She thought it was theirs, but she thought it seemed off.

We headed back towards the town of Stockton driving around to see if we could find a red pickup, but too much time had passed and they were long gone.

The only thing left to do was to head back to Bishop’s Stock Gallery and file a police report. The opioid crisis was in its early throws and was hitting this part of the Eastern Shore hard, and petty crime was ramped to support the locals’ habits. The police officer was not surprised.

This all happened at a critical juncture for me. I had been hitting wall after wall in my attempts to successfully launch my art career, but not getting much traction. The loss of all my equipment made it feel so much more like a very expensive hobby than a true business. The cost of replacing all that I had lost, was putting me in a financial and emotional hole for the year.

I got on eBay to replace the camera with a similar used one. I had enough beat-up brushes and a spare easel to make due. But the paints. I had just purchased a new set of large tubes of Gamblin Artist Oils. 

I had met Robert Gamblin, the company founder and owner of Gamblin a couple of times, and it occurred to me to send him an email and ask him if it were possible to repurchase the paints at cost. He said that I should contact Pete Cole, the President of the company, and give him a list of the colors that I lost. I did, and shortly after, I received a package, with the paints I had listed with a couple of tubes of Torrit Gray, some bottles of medium with a nice note saying that they were sorry for my loss and the replacement paints were complimentary, and he thanked me for being a Gamblin customer.

That was such an amazing gesture, and it meant so much for me at the time given my business struggles. It also was a brilliant bit of marketing, because I have been a loyal Gamblin user ever since.

I now never let my gear out of my site.

The painting shown is not the one painted that day since any photos taken of it would have been on the camera that was also taken.

If you would like to hear more of my stories as an artist, please let me know in the comments below or if you came from Instagram in the comments of the IG post. Thanks.