TIM BAKER

Has anyone done mashup/musical Bob Ross? (or Tony Hart / Take Hart for UK viewers – I fortunately resisted the temptation to say ‘Have you worked out what it is yit?’). On Saturday night I live streamed on Twitch and Facebook painting a new abstract art piece called ‘Wow Well Done Good Job (Fuck The Tories) in four hours plus DJ Charles (my iPod) mixing on the decks. And there was absolutely zero Happy Little Trees – Clouds, maybe.

I decided on the stream which started as ‘Painting With Tim’ (not Nancy…) it should be called ‘Will It Paint?’ after Titus Jones ‘Will It Mash?’. Painting and mashups HAS been done before but actual painting, where Adriana of Bootie was painting her walls….but this is the first I’ve heard of people doing the Tony Hart/Bob Ross thing on Twitch plus music, especially not a mashup-based playlist.

I will do more of these…partly to get me back into painting, I upload it to YouTube as the Twitch VOD won’t be up for long, and who knows how long Facebook will keep that video up. I don’t mind things being muted for copyright, but sometimes they pull videos too…and sadly Restream only allows 2 streams now, not 3 as they did before, so I have to choose between FB and YouTube.

I was also live streaming into the Radio Clash Discord, not that anyone was watching….

And spoilers – here is the final work, it’s like my other abstract paintings really detailed, political and rude. And so detailed it really doesn’t work on the internet! And like all my previous acrylic mixed media paintings it’s self-critiquing and multiple layered (I don’t use text in a lot of my work, but I love the really odd stickers that parents ‘reward’ their kids with – so: WOW! GOOD JOB, WELL DONE, tick and a star etc is deeply sarcastic, the very act of painting getting ‘rewards’ like emojis and gamified star-ratings and likes themselves).

Also the way I use text is not only direct (like the statement ‘Fuck off Tories’ which isn’t ambiguous) but I like using text like ‘ Well Done’ and then painting over the Well or the Done to change the meaning – I aptly did the ‘Done’ one at the end for instance, and the Bootie style stickers I’ve had for ages – pirates, YARR! as they were live streaming at the same time. I almost called the piece ‘X Marks The Spot’ as the X symbol along with 6’s and 7’s became a thing during this piece, and the treasure and map are there too. But I already sort of called a piece that.

Also at one point it read 69 69 70 (reversed) 667 6 so it almost got called 667 – Neighbour of the Beast. Oh my title puns…the 6 shapes mostly became spirals though. A shape that haunts my work a lot, like the triangle and indeed the X/cross. Numbers also appear a lot in my big abstracts, I like the shapes, although they usually get turned into something else.

Check out the details in this Slideshow to ‘zoom in’ or indeed click on the image above and you can zoom in a bit on the lightbox popup.