Born in 1948, in Lititz, David Brumbach was a student in the Warwick School District. He enjoyed walking and fishing in the nearby countryside and playing football. After his father died of a heart attack when Brumbach was twelve, he began to paint. He set up a studio in the basement of his home. “I loved painting in those days,” he said in a 1982 interview. “Painting was the best feeling in the world.”
Brumbach graduated from Warwick High in 1966, having his first art exhibit at the Lititz Public Library, featuring a series of humorous editorial cartoons for the Lititz Record-Express, and enrolled at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Upon graduation in 1970, Brumbach returned to Lancaster and was featured in his first local show at Stack’s Art Shop and Gallery the next year.
Throughout that decade, Brumbach won awards at art shows in Harrisburg, Allentown, and locally. He won first place in the first juried exhibition of Pennsylvania Society of Watercolor Painters. By 1976, he had quit his job selling art supplies and devoted all his time to painting.
During the early 1980s, Brumbach was exhibiting his abstract (“non-representational”) paintings and collages. Though his realistic pieces were more widely known, his abstract work also received a great deal of attention.
In 1985, Brumbach lost his left leg to diabetic complications. He came home from the hospital with an artificial leg and sketchbook full of painted and exaggerated faces. This sketchbook became the basis for a series of paintings that introduced many people to the artist’s abstract work. Simultaneously, Brumbach was creating more realistic pieces from his airy, windowed East Orange Street studio. However, during his last years, with his eyesight failing due to the diabetes, Brumbach concentrated more on his abstract pieces. Brumbach died in 1992, at the young age of 44.