Behind The Lens: ART SHOW! WITH CAPTAIN SKINNER Premieres February 13 On YouTube & Substack

---

A PBS-style painting show spirals into cosmic absurdity when ART SHOW! WITH CAPTAIN SKINNER premieres Friday, February 13 on YouTube and Substack. Billed as “Bob Ross on LSD meets The Evil Dead… in space,” the ten-episode series blends tutorial-format art instruction with hyper-saturated gore, slapstick chaos, and existential sci-fi. New episodes roll out weekly beginning March 6, with each installment running approximately 15 minutes.

The show follows the unraveling production of a doomed educational program set in outer space. As Captain Skinner and his skeletal crew—including a stop-motion animated Space Cowboy—attempt to create a PBS-style art series, they are thwarted by meteor showers, intrusive thoughts, and the stark horror of an uncaring cosmos. What begins as a how-to painting format quickly mutates into something far stranger.

At its core, ART SHOW! is structured around real-time art creation. Each episode features Skinner completing a fully realized piece of artwork, grounding the surreal narrative in legitimate craft. The result is both instructional and destabilizing—an art show that honors tradition while detonating it.

Co-creator and star Skinner brings a résumé that spans Grammy-winning album artwork (including collaborations with High on Fire and Mastodon), commercial work for Adult Swim and Warner Brothers, festival hosting, murals, skateboards, comics, and designer toys. His aesthetic is instantly recognizable: psychedelic, grotesque, vibrant, and deliberately excessive.

Directing alongside him is Allen Cordell, an award-winning filmmaker known for visually ambitious music videos for Beach House, Dan Deacon, and Girl Talk, as well as the short film The Lizard Laughed. Cordell’s fixation on the strange and beautiful—layered with aggressive sound design and kinetic editing—drives the show’s cinematic intensity.

The project is produced by ETCH, the independent animation and production company led by Emmy and WGA Award-winner Philip Gelatt, alongside Will Battersby and Morgan Galen King. Known for dark, provocative storytelling across animation and genre filmmaking, ETCH continues its commitment to creator ownership and unconventional distribution models with this release.

While the format nods to The Joy of Painting, 'ART SHOW! WITH CAPTAIN SKINNER' deliberately fractures nostalgia. It replaces calm landscapes with hyper-phantasmagorical body horror and color-drenched chaos—less serenity, more sensory overload.

The series premieres February 13 on YouTube via @EtchFilm and on Substack, with weekly episodes launching March 6. Viewers can tune in and subscribe now to experience a painting show that refuses to behave.