the times | Tuesday July 21 2020 1GT 9
arts
When
there is
a lot of
stress,
people
turn to
Bob Ross
of the universe (although in Britain
Rolf Harris would have pipped him
to the title). A year later he was dead,
killed by a terrible lymphoma that he
first suffered as a young man. Bob
Ross Inc, which by then sold not just
paints and videos, but board games
and happy little dolls of the man
himself, nevertheless endured. Its
owners, a former CIA man called Walt
Kowalski and his wife, Annette (who
discovered Ross on a painting class
and mortgaged their house to start a
business with him), wisely decided not
to replace their star turn, but to keep
licensing his reruns.
In 2005 YouTube started showing
The Joy of Painting, picking from a
back catalogue of 403 episodes made
between 1983 and 1994. Some have
been viewed by tens of millions. A
decade on, Twitch, an online site
designed for video-gamers, decided it
wanted to encourage people to stream
art on an associated platform. Over
eight days it ran a back-to-back Joy of
Painting marathon that attracted five
million views. Bob Ross marathons
now happen every weekend on
Twitch. They have bestowed on Ross
followers who were still to be born
when he died in 1995.
An even younger crowd views him
on Tiktok, or rather they watch an
impudent youngster in a wig called
Josiah Hughes impersonate him (as if
we all haven’t done that). Last year the
house containing Ross’s old broadcast
studio became a Bob Ross museum.
A Bob Ross 5km race in Michigan
attracted 20,000 entrants in a week.
and stuff like that. I was interested in
people’s experiences.”
Not many of Ross’s followers, it is
true, will have experienced the Alaska
that Ross painted after being posted
there as a young air force medical
records technician. There is no doubt,
however, that Ross engaged with a
landscape so alien to him, a native
Floridian. He was a lover of nature
and of wildlife. For a while he would
report to viewers on the progress of
a squirrel called Peapod that he had
adopted as a pet. By all accounts he
liked people too, and people liked him.
What is interesting, perhaps, is what
his paintings excluded. Squirrels, for
a start, and all other fauna. As far as
is known, he painted a person into a
picture only once, the small silhouette
of a cowboy resting against a tree by
a campfire. Huts occur frequently, but
are always abandoned; on a recently
shown programme he speculated,
humorously one hopes, that an owner
of one of them might have grown tipsy
and drowned in the nearby river. His
interest was in mountains, seas, rivers
and botanically unidentifiable trees.
He anthropomorphised landscapes
even more than Wordsworth in The
Prelude. Read into his unpopulated
landscapes what you must, but the
possibility is that he simply painted
what most easily he could. People are
harder to capture than cumulonimbus.
Since, according to the
documentary, only 3 per cent of his
viewers ever lift a brush, it may be
more rewarding to speculate on what
so many love about his work. It offers,
of course, the consolations of eternity,
of majestic panoramas that will outlive
us, but his deserted landscapes are also
places of safety. This is partly because
they are free of predators, humans
included, but also because they have
the potential to be created by us, the
artist. In an episode of the Channel 4
sitcom Peep Show Mark (David
Mitchell), in search of romantic advice,
switches to The Joy of Painting to seek
a sign from Ross. His flatmate Jeremy
(Robert Webb) agrees: “Let God
decide.” A painter, like God, can, after
all, move mountains.
Let us admit, then, that many like
the paintings, but surely all love his
process, which means loving the man.
He is our Henry David Thoreau, a
self-exile from society who retires to
the woods to discover the “essential
facts of life” (his original plan was to
present The Joy of Painting from a
mocked-up wooden cabin). He is our
inner child’s Fred Rogers, public
service television’s gifted infant-
wrangler, who told us how to handle
our “mad” (Ross said we must “beat
the Devil” out of our overloaded paint
brushes). He is our Pangloss, who
insisted that on a canvas there are no
mistakes, “only happy accidents”.
A happy life, though? His first
marriage ended in divorce, his second
in his spouse’s death. He suffered
prolonged ill health, including a heart
attack, and was killed by blood cancer
at 52. Yet he gave nothing of this away,
painting the best of all possible worlds,
forests where no Covid stalked.
He was above all the kindest of
therapists, a former drill sergeant who,
tired of shouting, determined to speak
softly for the rest of his days. He said
that on air he talked to just one
person, “and I’m really crazy about
that person”. Millions were, and
remain, crazy about him back. It is
a happy little transference. Does it
matter what we say about Bob Ross’s
art? His patter was all.camera before later claiming, as Ross’s
fame eclipsed his, that he had been
plagiarised. That was surely the wrong
word. Alexander’s technique was all
about copying, not originality.
There are now so many paintings
that could plausibly have been
painted by Ross that Bob Ross Inc
authenticates them not by studying
the brushstrokes, but by scrutinising
the signature. We shall not, however,
see Fiona Bruce pursue an alleged Bob
Ross’s true provenance on Fake or
Fortune? Paintings in Ross’s “style” sell
on eBay for £10, whereas real ones go
for between $8,000 and $10,000.
The ignorant say that they do not
know much about art, but they know
what they like. The informed know
what they hate. Gordon Highmoor, a
respected Northumbrian artist and for
many years a WEA painting tutor, is
among the latter.
“Bob Ross was absolutely formulaic,”
he tells me. “He does the same thing
every night. My wife watches it and
she is fascinated by the way he paints,
but I can’t stand it. I think he is
colour-blind, for a start, and he can’t
do perspective, for another thing.
All he does is the happy tree in the
foreground and the happy mountain
in the background. It is absolute tosh.”
So it is not the way Highmoor
taught art? “No. I used to know some
of the Ashington pitmen painters and
I liked the way that [their teacher]
Robert Lyon went about it. He got
them to paint their own experiences.
He wasn’t bothered about doing
exercises on how to hold your brushAn exhibition of his work opened in
Virginia. And then came the Covid-
pandemic, for which Ross has become
the still, low voice of calm.
Sarah Strohl, who works with Walt,
Annette and their daughter Joan at
Bob Ross Inc’s HQ in Virginia, tells me
that traffic to their company’s site has
greatly increased. People are ordering
DVDs and buying painting kits, then
emailing or instagramming their
resulting paintings. “When there is a
lot of stress, people turn to Bob Ross,”
Strohl says. “People are stuck at home,
and one great thing you can do in
your house, which is also a way of
stepping away from all the stress of the
world, is to paint a happy world where
nothing bad is going on.”
On the Donahue programme the
overimpressed host pushed Ross to say
that his achievements might one day
hang in a museum. He conceded that
some might, but “probably not the
Smithsonian”. (He was wrong: the
museum acquired some last year.) He
made no claims for his work. “It is not
traditional art and it is not fine art and
I don’t try to tell anyone it is,” he said.
What he was selling was a method.
It requires the artist to paint wet
paint on to wet paint on a canvas
primed with white. Alla prima, as
this is called, is not new. Van Eyck
partly employed it in The Arnolfini
Portrait and it was used alfresco by
impressionists such as Monet. Ross’s
inspiration, however, was simply
another PBS tutor, a German called
Bill Alexander, who literally handed
over the baton (well, brush) to him onThe Joy of Painting ,
Mon-Fri, 7.30pm,
BBC Four. Bob Ross:
The Happy Painter ,
tonight, 8pm, BBC FourBBC/APT WORLDWIDE/BOB ROSS INC; @JOSIAHHUGHES TIKTOKThe real
Bob Ross