Captain Skinner’s Art Show

The late Bob Ross has become a pop culture icon of surprising staying power, and not just because of the drama involved with his estate. Along with contemporary cottagecore culture encouraging a return to simplicity, there’s something wholesome about a nice afro-wearing man painting calm, happy pictures while he rambles in an ASMR voice.

Art Show with Captain Skinner is marketed as “Bob Ross on LSD meets The Evil Dead… in Space.” That’s not wrong, but Ross is a product of his era so, along with Etch Studio, Oakland-based artist Skinner is making a bid to be the Ross of today. After five episodes of a 10-part YouTube series, Art Show with Captain Skinner has thrown its hat confidently into the ring as a manic, psychedelic Bob Ross presented with an Adult Swim aesthetic.

These five 15-20 minute episodes have a loose overarching story as suggested by the Star Wars-style opening crawl, but it’s a “story” in the same sense that Mystery Science Theater 3000 had a story. Someone or something has sent Skinner out into space to paint pictures for little obvious reason except to deliberately drive him insane from the lack of human interaction. It’s the same premise but played with legitimate psychosis and cruelty. When the fourth episode brings in another human character, an apparent aid to that episode’s topic of friendship, the cheerful surface layer hides a genuinely menacing subtext. But what else could we reasonably expect, when Skinner is painting a picture of an adorable cat with Kirby krackles and some sort of freakish alien rodent in its mouth?

Captain Skinner notes himself that he is not by any reasonable definition a “captain” of anything and hates his stupid hat. Well, the opinion on the hat tends to change at arbitrary moments. But this is all part and parcel of how Skinner really does seem to be slowly losing his mind. His creepy rambling stories about helmets and Morlocks are a necessary focus to distract him from the unsettling nature of his situation, a calm, but off-kilter brand that appears to designed to help him as much as us.

While this situation is, diagetically, just about how Skinner is trapped on a spaceship and forced to draw paintings for some alien audience, the more subtextual reading is that Skinner is, actually, a 47-year-old man who draws weird paintings to come to terms with his mortality. The fifth episode has an eerie fascination about babies where it’s genuinely hard to tell how much is weird for the sake of being weird or Skinner’s genuine id leaping out at us.

It definitely doesn’t help simplify matters that Skinner has lots of genuinely good advice for painting in the Bob Ross style. He seems capable of fixing any smudge, whether through acting fast or making it seem just another stylistic flourish to this episode’s extradimensional monstrosity of the canvas. That wizard has seen things. He ain’t right anymore.

This sense of existential angst is punctuated by various unsubtle editing tricks: Skinner’s words and appearance skip and repeat like a broken record; Skinner himself  slowly falls apart before our eyes, even if the paintings still look pretty good. Indeed, for all the deliberately weird stuff that’s going on in Art Show with Captain Skinner, Skinner really does present surprisingly useful advice for how to do a good job painting, just like Bob Ross. It’s the one part of the show that doesn’t look fake, and the drawings themselves feel especially genuine because of Skinner’s oddly personal stories, like childhood memories of watching The Time Machine (1960) and being frightened of the scene where the corpse of a Morlock rots away.

Like Maurice Sendak or Roald Dahl before him, Skinner remembers how frightening and scarring it is to be a child. This is what Skinner is teaching us throughout Art Show with Captain Skinner beyond how to make galactic art, is why such art resonates with us throughout our lives. The ability to experience this sort of visceral, existential fear is what makes up human.

Or maybe I’m just overthinking this silly YouTube outsider art show, which also features a perpetually drunken stop-motion animated space cowboy giving rude, vaguely helpful answers to Skinner’s random questions. You can take pretty much whatever you want from this kind of art, though, is kind of the whole point of it. About the only real complaint I have in regard to Art Show with Captain Skinner is that there’s too much swearing. Aside from the f-bombs, there’s surprisingly little in here that would be objectionable to children.

Kids these days might have more to learn from Skinner than you’d think. The closest vibe to any recent show I can think of is the zoomer hit The Amazing Digital Circus, of all things which also leans heavily into lingering existential fear in the style of Harlan Ellison despite the emphasis on visual gags. We were all kids once, and if we’re lucky, we’ll become old too. And maybe we’ll make some art on the way.