Blooper went all Bob Ross and painted during a game

Mascots are there to enthrall and amuse the crowd with their harmless pranks and energetic antics. But what are they to do when there is no one in attendance other than cardboard cutouts?

Some get all introspective and sit alone in the park:

But the Braves' Blooper went another route: He decided to paint some happy little clouds.

During the Braves' 7-2 loss to the Mets on Monday night, Blooper threw on a wig and got out the canvas and paint and went all Bob Ross. He may not be the most accomplished draftsmen, but hey, you try painting in detail with fuzzy fingers the size of Italian sausages.

Of course, there is a kind of beautiful outsider art look to the piece, with the tri-color purple sky denoting a feeling of anxiety or an oncoming storm. (Or, perhaps someone who is just listening to Phoebe Bridger's new album too much.)

But that's just my layman's perspective. We wanted to see how the more art-literate felt about the piece, so we reached out to those in the know. One Washington D.C.-based art curator who asked to remain anonymous said in a message, "It's actually pretty radical from a compositional standpoint. I mean, he’s really playing with the canon of landscape painting, subverting some of the traditions in relation to using the horizon as a grounding element."

Which, yes, you can certainly say that Blooper's decision to lay everything out in such a way is a choice:

"Sure [Blooper is] riffing on Bob Ross, but the experimentation in both color and tone of the sky reminds me of The Godfather of early British plein air painting, the one and only John Constable," he continued, making sure to point out how Blooper's piece and the skies of another famed British painter, J.M.W. Turner, have so much in common.

The similarities are startling:

Erin M. Piñon, a doctoral candidate in Princeton’s department of Art and Archaeology, and a specialist in medieval and early modern Armenian manuscripts and book historian, looks at Blooper's work in a different light.

"I think this looming skyscape that he’s giving us is apocalyptic," Piñon told MLB.com in a video chat. "We have a sun ablaze next to this dark horizon. And then he has this weird clearing on the bank of the river. Is he commenting on human intervention?

"We shouldn’t conflate the Bob Ross style of landscape, either. Instead, we should connect it with the Hudson River Valley school, which is the picturesque."

But it's not just what Blooper's done on the canvas that is interesting. No, it's the fact that he is painting for this new audience at all that she finds so intriguing.

"Blooper is having to perform for his fans and the fans of the Braves in a new way," Piñon said. "What Blooper is doing is he’s activating another type of visual. He’s creating a sensual -- of the senses -- experience to baseball. [He] is not jumping around, he's not engaging the fans. He’s touching on something that places us with the land. This is not Citi Field. We’re in Atlanta, baby. He wants us to ground us in place, to remind us of place."

Of course, the dancing is just a bonus:

While we wait for the years in the future when the art museums look upon Blooper's work with the proper critical respect and hang his masterpieces alongside Da Vinci and Picasso, it is quite clear that Blooper is the renaissance mascot. After all, he spent his quarantine teaching math to kids while they were out of school. Hopefully he didn't teach them his ... unique ... method of accounting and bank fraud, though.