Gerald Thimbleton | Beige Canvas Quarterly
I have spent thirty-one years defending the integrity of oil paint. I have written eleven essays on the proper preparation of gesso. I once reduced a gallery curator to tears over an improperly stretched canvas. None of that prepared me for this.
Ralph Rumpelton has painted Bob Ross.
Let that settle.
The man who gave the world "happy little trees" — who democratized joy, who handed a brush to anyone who'd ever felt unworthy of beauty — has been rendered in what I can only describe as a fugue state by a retired person using Microsoft Paint. The eyes are white. The beard suggests a man who has been through something. The medallion is present, which I find both unnecessary and deeply correct.
And yet Google found it. Google — arbiter of our collective reality — looked at this and said: yes, this is Bob Ross. Not "possibly Bob Ross." Not "man with beard, artistic context." Bob Ross. Full stop.
I don't know what that says about Rumpelton. I don't know what it says about Google. I know what it says about the state of contemporary art criticism, and I have chosen, for the sake of my blood pressure, not to put it in writing.
— Gerald Thimbleton, Editor-in-Chief, Beige Canvas Quarterly
Long Live Ralph..........Be Dead or Alive.
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