On This Day
Bob Ross would have turned 84 today. Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, on 29 October 1942, the soft-voiced painter with the permed hair made 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting between 1983 and 1994. Three decades after his death in 1995, he is arguably more famous than ever.
The man behind the trees
Ross spent 20 years in the US Air Force, much of it in Alaska, whose snowy peaks and still lakes became his lifelong subject. As a master sergeant he was the one who had to shout, and he later said he promised himself never to raise his voice again. From German-born TV painter Bill Alexander he learned “wet-on-wet”: oil laid over still-wet oil, so a full landscape can be finished in under 30 minutes.
What the critics get right
The art world has a fair case against him. His paintings are formulaic: mountain, lake, cabin, and the inevitable “happy little trees”. A 2014 FiveThirtyEight count found trees in roughly nine of every ten works.
He was no innovator either. The technique was Alexander’s, and the business built around it, from paint kits to certified instructors, was relentless. When the Smithsonian acquired some of his work in 2019, it was as a piece of television history, not fine art. A 2021 Netflix documentary also showed how tightly his name was controlled by business partners after he died.
What the critics miss
Judging Ross as a gallery painter misses his real work. He was a teacher, and his true subject was confidence. “We don’t make mistakes, just happy accidents” was a lesson in how to learn, aimed squarely at people who had been told they had no talent.
He was also strikingly ungreedy with the art itself. He gave away most of the paintings made on the show and volunteered his time to public television, earning instead from workshops and supplies.
Indians know this argument well. In the 1890s, Raja Ravi Varma of Kilimanoor, Kerala, began printing oleographs of gods and goddesses at his press near Bombay, putting art into ordinary homes. Purists dismissed it as calendar art. Yet it shaped how a nation pictured its own myths, much as Ross shaped how millions of Americans pictured a landscape.
A generation of Indian children met their own Bob Ross in Rob of Pogo’s M.A.D., turning glue and old cardboard into something to be proud of. Today Ross’s episodes find a new audience on YouTube, watched in hostels and on late-night commutes as much for calm as for craft.
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