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.
