Avalanche

The Joy of Painting was an American television programme hosted by painter Bob Ross, which ran from 1983 until 1994. In each episode, Ross taught techniques for landscape oil painting, completing a painting in each session. A total of 403 half-hour episodes were produced over thirty-one seasons. Avalanche is a work by Neil Raitt, an artist who retools gestures from Ross’s instructional show to create surfaces of endlessly repeated motif. Oscillating between landscape and abstract pattern, Avalanche’s snowy peaks conjure the digital generative modes of algorithm, fractal curve and linear system, but exist in tension with such ideas through their meticulous analogue execution –accomplished by hand, with a palette-knife. Ross’s gentle TV show embedded him in the pop culture psyche through calming, anaesthetic repetition: Raitt’s examines the impulse of replication with a sharply contemporary eye. The dramatic alpine scene, associated as much with German Romanticism as with Ross’s creations, becomes an infinite synthetic field of colour and form that takes on its own sublimity. Ultimately, Raitt’s work avers that the joy of painting is still very much alive.