Photo by Cynthia Larsen

Watercolorist wanted to be a weather forecaster

By Ed Goldman

David Lobenberg, the highly talented watercolor artist and college instructor who gives popular painting workshops around the world, has said he was “born drawing.”  

I’m sure that’s an exaggeration–unless the doctor who delivered him 79 years ago handed him a pencil after spanking him. No, I think he must have been at least a week old before he started producing his magical portraits in ink and wash, some of which you can see on his website.

“The weird thing is, I wanted to be a weatherman,” he tells me during a very crowded, very noisy lunch hour at Cafe Bernardo, a nearby bistro for both of us (we both live in the condo community of Campus Commons). Lobenberg went so far as to serve as a volunteer weather observer for the United States Climatological Service.  

I mention that most of us who observe the weather don’t get paid for it, either. “Yeah,” he says, wisely ignoring my wisecrack though allowing a quicksilver grin to break through his bearded, professorial mien, “but I was serious about this. Then I went to college and failed my courses in Integral Calculus and Quantum Mechanical Physics. I’m not sure any of the TV meteorologists I watch know any of this stuff, either. But they were required courses.”

So he majored in fine art and earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree at UCLA. He met his wife of 45 years, Cheryl Jean, in Southern California, where she was working for Architectural Digest’s ad department. They ended up working as business partners in their own graphics design studio and in “the latter part of the 1990s,” Lobenberg began his watercolor career in earnest.   

You’ll see within today’s column a portrait Lobenberg painted of himself and one he painted of me. His is accurate and as vibrant as he is. Mine is wonderfully aspirational: I wish I still looked as radiant as Lobenberg rendered me.

That was a key in discovering his secret sauce as a painter: He works almost exclusively from photographs, which may not always be totally contemporary, getting more nuances and shades out of watercolor than I’d thought possible. He’s also a brilliant landscape artist, who’s enjoyed commissions from the United States Air Force, the Amgen Tour Of California, the Sacramento Kings and River Cats (two of our town’s professional teams), the IMAX and SureWest corporations and former MLB players such as pitcher Barry Zito (Oakland A’s, SF Giants) and outfielder Nick Swisher (A’s, Chicago White Sox, NY Yankees, Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves).

Some years, his work seems absolutely ubiquitous, gracing the covers of magazines, newspapers, posters and other “collaterals,” as we used to call various printed materials. The traits that seem to define his style, at least for me, are joy and color.

The first may have to do with his portraits and landscapes having a celebratory aspect to them—for the subjects and for Lobenberg’s sheer love of making art. The second comes down to my utter surprise that he’s able to project such vitality and use such primary hues in a medium I’ve long considered unforgivable.

In a moment of shoptalk, I tell him how, when I’ve tried to do watercolor backgrounds for my own drawings, the colors run far too easily and uncontrollably because of that key element: water. He smiles. “You know, I sometimes add water as I’m doing a painting,” he says. “Sometimes, the more the better.” Show-off.

While Lobenberg is frequently commissioned to create portraits of CEOs, he’s just as home painting sports figures and family members. Another source of income (and enjoyment, it appears) are Lobenberg’s regular art retreats, sometimes local, often national and exotic. When we sit down for this interview, he’s just returned from conducting one in an island resort an hour (by air) from Mexico City.