Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Neil Raitt (British, b. 1986)
Emerald Waters (New Beverly), 2016
Oil on canvas
Collection of DePaul Art Museum, restricted gift of Northern Trust Purchase Prize and Dia Weil 2016.162
Popular television painter Bob Ross is partially to thank for the familiarity of the techniques and kitschy-auras found in Neil Raitt’s compositions of happy little trees and mountain-scapes. Formally trained at the Royal College of Art, Raitt credits Richard Prince, Minimalism, and t.v. viewers’ favorite 80s artist with influencing his work.
Often using Bob Ross’s commercial line of paints, Raitt transforms the Ross’s version of landscape painting by systematically repeating an image by hand over the entire canvas. Of this laborious technique, Raitt says, “the more the artist copies or the viewer looks at the same motif, the more it loses its meaning.” This hand-made repetition, familiar to Ross (who made three versions of the same painting during each filming) raises questions about the hierarchies of “high” versus “low” art. What is our rubric for fitting a work into one category or the other, and can these labels really exist independently of one another?