8 1GT Tuesday July 21 2020 | the times

arts

C

ometh the hour,

cometh the mediocre

painter: Churchill in

1940, Bob Ross today.

Twenty-five years

after his death, the

big-haired American

art tutor is back,

teaching us how to knock up a

landscape in oils in 30 minutes with

just house painter’s bristles and all the

Zen in the universe.

For BBC Four, which since April has

nightly aired 30-year-old repeats of

The Joy of Painting, Ross has brought

nothing but joy. The other week his

art class was its second most watched

programme, bettering by more

than 100,000 viewers a big new

documentary about Beethoven. As a

token of its regard, the channel follows

tonight’s The Joy of Painting with a

2011 documentary, Bob Ross: the Happy

Painter, a celebration of the air force

sergeant turned paint whisperer who

has taught millions to paint (sort of)

and brought half-hours of wellbeing

to many more. This carpenter’s son

has been called God. So far,

immortality is going well for him.

Ross’s afro haircut was born of

poverty — a perm, he realised, would

reduce the necessity of frequenting a

barber’s shop — but, accompanied by

his beard, it became his logo, stencilled

How a TV art

tutor became a

cult star of Tiktok

Twenty-five years after his death, big-haired painter

Bob Ross is a hit again on BBC Four — and is being

impersonated on social media. Andrew Billen reports

Snowy Solitude

by Bob Ross

on to tins of oil paint that bore his

name. It was his manner of speaking,

not his look, that was his greatest

asset, however. Amid the hucksterism

of American TV, Ross spoke low and

with pauses from the sanctuary of

public service television. His favourite

word was “happy” and his second

favourite was “little”. When he

announced he was going to go “crazy”,

he meant he was about to paint a

bigger tree, but he always gave this a

“friend” in the form of another tree.

In his tiny black-curtained studio he

completed a snow scene as speedily as

Monet polished off a lily pond. The

strokes that produced a happy little

cloud, a meandering river or an icy

mountain peak were brisk and certain.

His painting technique was impressive

all the way up to the result, which was

always disappointing, but his middling

achievements were easily replicable by

those watching. One cannot imagine

anyone, however ham-fisted, asking

for a refund from one of the painting

courses taught by 3,000 registered

instructors from the US to Korea.

His famous fans ranged from Jane

Seymour to Marlon Brando and, to

judge from tonight’s documentary,

included a lot of country music

singers. In 1994 the American chat

show host Phil Donahue called him

the most famous painter in the history

Josiah Hughes

on Tiktok