Bob Ross Fridays – July 25 (The Essay)

This week, in addition to the mountain tutorial video posted below, I’m throwing in something extra.

The following is an excerpt from my second book, Quitting Cold Stone (And Other Struggles). It’s an essay on Bob himself – discussing his history, his philosophy, and why I love the man behind The Joy of Painting. I thought it would be good to give a little background on my obsession, for those that don’t know. Anyway:

 

Turn off your phone.

Slip into some comfy clothes, take the lights down low, and grab a glass of wine, scotch, or something equally alcoholic satisfying. Get away from the noises of life, isolate yourself for a minute, and come away with me. Allow yourself to be swept up into the magical world of one of the great masters:

Bob Ross.

A painter, a visionary, an afro. The “Happy Trees” man, as you may know him, has been underappreciated since the time his television program first went on air in 1983. Yes, he has reached cult status for his hairstyle and calmingly idiosyncratic way of describing nature, and has made his way on to t-shirts, painting supplies, and YouTube auto-tune remixes. These things are good, but Robert Norman Ross deserves to be appreciated in a different light, for he is a beautiful soul and a brilliant artist.

“The Joy of Painting,” Bob’s TV show, was aired on PBS for more than a decade straight. For 403 total episodes, he walked us through his simple process for creating beautiful nature paintings, and somehow made us believe that we could do it too. Using his now-famous “wet-on-wet” technique, Ross would make fantastic little paintings in under a half an hour, usually featuring happy little mountains, ponds, and clouds.

He was encouraging as he was calming. Always using a limited palette – so that it would be easy for us to paint along with him – Ross assured us that it was our world, and that there were “no rules here.” He never wanted us to copy or trace, but to take what was inside of us and put it on canvas. “Anyone can paint,” Bob would say, dispelling the perceived need for formal training or God-given talent. “I believe that we all have a picture inside of us.” And always more important than what he said was how he said it.

And oh, how he said it. The single greatest thing about Bob Ross was the mesmerizing way he spoke and walked us through the process. Barely above a whisper, his gentle voice guided us across the canvas, always reassuring us that we can do it. “This is your world,” he’d say, “you can do anything you want to. So maybe, over here, there lives a happy little bush.” Calmly and quietly, he would mix Pthalo Green with the least little touch of Van Dyke Brown on his palette, and tap the canvas creating a perfect row of bushes or trees or rocks, almost effortlessly. “Just tap it,” he’d say in a hushed tone. “There. There.”

While his simple painting style is amazing in its own right – usually starting with a few seemingly unconnected blotches of color, and turning into a beautiful mountain scene, always in about 26 minutes – the vast majority of viewers (some 80 million per week in the show’s prime) had no interest in learning how to paint. No, we watched simply because we were drawn to Bob and his enchantingly positive ways. Inviting Bob Ross into your home meant 30 minutes without politics, war, or hate. He had little use for these things, and you never really got the idea he thought about them that much. No, Bob just wanted to paint. “I believe,” he’d tell us, “every day is a good day when you paint.” And so he did.

***

Robert Norman Ross was born in Orlando, Florida in 1942. After graduating high school, he enlisted in the United States Air Force and was shipped to Alaska. This was the first time he ever saw mountains, snow, and pine trees, which all became staples of his work. He had little free time, so he developed his quick painting style out of necessity.

“I used to go home at lunch and do a couple while I had my sandwich,” Ross told the Orlando Sentinel in an interview before his death. “I’d take them back that afternoon and sell them.”

Soon, he was seeing more money from painting than he was from his Air Force paycheck. Ross started to see it as a viable career option when he left the military. Because he’d had about enough of the Air Force, anyway; he didn’t like being mean.

“I was the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work,” Ross said in the same interview. “The job requires you to be a mean, tough person. And I was fed up with it. I promised myself that if I ever got away from it, it wasn’t going to be that way anymore.”

For anyone who’s ever seen “The Joy of Painting,” picturing Bob Ross screaming is almost impossible. But unlike the unsubstantiated urban myth of PBS’s Mister Rogers duty as a Marine sniper, Ross’ military career was very real and spanned 20 years. So when he finally retired in 1981, he vowed to never raise his voice in anger again. He began teaching art for a national art supply company, and within a year began his own art business. It lost $20,000 in the first 12 months.

Undaunted, Bob took his talents to television. Initially nobody would give him a look (could’ve been the hair), but eventually a public TV station in Falls Church, Virginia, gave him a pilot. Once the show started airing, PBS stations around the country rushed to pick up “The Joy” as well. They had seen the light, and the America public would soon follow.

A year later Bob found his permanent home at a tiny PBS affiliate in Muncie, Indiana. The station promised him complete creative freedom and made good on its word, as Ross recorded every show there for the next 12 years. It was an extremely simple operation – always the same three-camera shoot on a black background, Bob always wearing jeans, an open-collared button-down, and that delightfully bushy afro – but the genius was in the simplicity. Just a blank canvas, a dozen or so paints, and Bob’s hypnotic voice to take us through the creation of another beautiful painting. Repeated some 400 times, it left a legacy of happy little clouds, mountains, trees, and comatose human beings. It is to this day the most calming show in television history.

Bob got the formula down so well that eventually he and his crew could pound out a whole series – 13 shows – in just over two days. He always insisted there were no edits.

“The Joy of Painting” was technically an instruction show, but the reason it wasn’t usually viewed as such is because it lacked a whole lot of…well, instruction. Sure, we got to see the painting happen from start to finish, but watching a seasoned painter paint is like watching the hands of an accomplished guitarist; even if I can see what he’s doing, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to do it anytime soon. But Bob did always say, “All you have to do is practice,” which I suppose is true. He’d occasionally give out some vague instructions like “follow your angles” when painting mountains, whatever the hell that meant. But most of the time, it was just us watching him paint, and him assuring us “you can do it.”

And really, that’s all we wanted. I didn’t want to learn how to paint and neither did most other viewers, and that’s why we didn’t give a damn that he never told us why he combined Alizarin Crimson and Titanium White to make a big ol’ boulder. We just watched him mix whatever paints he chose, and it always turned out perfect. If, of course, we were awake at the end of the show.

Bob Ross died of lymphoma in 1995. He was 52, but his soul was much older. His art has been criticized for its simplicity, and for being “childish” or “reductionist,” and Bob was always the first to admit that none of his paintings would hang in the Smithsonian. But he didn’t care; he loved painting, and firmly believed it would “bring a lot of good thoughts to your heart.” And he just wanted to share that with us. The man was completely without pretense, and in a world of turned-up noses and white wine, I think that’s something we needed, and still need. Bob showed us that art is not just for “artists,” and we can do anything we want to. “Believe that you can do it,” he would say, “because you can do it.”

Bob wanted us to believe in ourselves, and to think happy thoughts. These are the same elementary concepts we learned when we were children, but were somewhere along the way convinced to toss by the wayside due to their “impractical” or “unrealistic” nature. But why? Why can’t we fill ourselves with child-like belief? What harm does it cause? We’ve had the irrational exuberance beaten out of us over time, and as adults we’re supposed to only entertain “normal” ideas. But normal is boring, and it is – by definition – not special. Bob was special, and he knew you could be too. I, for one, choose to believe him.

Any motivational speaker will tell you that most success comes not from physical or intellectual superiority, but from winning the battle in your own head; self-confidence, mental toughness, and resilience. Bob taught us the same thing, but he just made it more fun. “There are no limits here,” he’d often say. And he believed it. Why can’t we?