There is no doubt in my mind as to what the best show that has ever been or ever will be on television, and that show is Bob Ross’s tour de force, one man variety revue The Joy of Painting, named as such, I surmise, because Bob realized just how strongly he resembled the grizzly dude in the charcoal drawings of the original 1972 printing of The Joy of Sex. Only Bob didn’t subtitle his show A Gourmet Guide to Phthalo Blue.
I used to tear pavement in a mad rush to get home from school on Mondays so that I could be settled in front of the TV with enough time for my heart rate to go down. (I can’t remember the exact timetables anymore, but let’s just say that the final bell would ring at 1:50 in the afternoon and Joy would come on at 2:00.) I intended to let Bob’s vocal cords gently lash the tension out of my-neck-my-back muscles for the full duration of the show. Which isn’t to say that the effect wasn’t the same even if I’d missed the first few minutes. It’s only to say that, well, The Joy of Sex doesn’t just start its preface shouting “orgasm, orgasm!” The art of demonstrating painting is a delicate, scientifically proven, publicly funded formula, and you can’t just rush such things. It takes twenty-three minutes, no less.
Which is probably why the show wasn’t subtitled A Gourmet Guide to Art, either. See, the legion of art snobs who had nothing but sneering contempt for Bob’s four seasons approach to painting missed the point entirely, and rushed to defend a medium that wasn’t even the craft in question. Bob Ross, a man who painted on canvas with (my God!) two-inch wall-painting brushes, was not an art superstar, he was a television superstar. His contribution to pop culture wasn’t the cumulative collection of canvases he left behind (though I could be wrong and maybe some curator with a slumming sense of humor once assembled a Bob Ross exhibit) but his rapport with his audience, using a direct medium to directly address receptive dilettante pupils and blissed out zoners alike. He chose the path Fred Rogers and Julia Child travelled before him but stripped away the extemporaneousness of actually being expected to apply the content of his show in any way further than carrying his benign, good-vibing positivity torch. Rogers was always showing you how you can show everyone in your neighborhood how much of a pussy you are, and Julia Child’s foggy mooing was diluted by the fact that she seemed to really expect you to, y’know, actually cook later that evening.
The first of three or four verbal cues that Bob would use to wrap up each show (like a masseuse or hypnotist gradually bringing you back to consciousness on a graduated incline) was “hope this gives you some ideas for things you can try out at home… I’m sure you can come up with much better ideas, this is just to start your imagination… I’d love to see what you come up with, so, if you have time, drop me a line… send me some pictures of what you come up with.” I can recall him actually flashing up viewer submissions two, maybe three times en toto, so I don’t think I’m off base in suggesting that most Bob Ross fans understood, as I do, that his legacy is more mysterious than DIY gurudom. He was a quiet renegade in a medium that now frequently cashes in on viewers living their vicarious dreams in contests like American Idol, a show which skates a thin, votefortheworst mentality in which the contestants must be impressive, but not so impressive that those text messaging at home can’t secretly fantasize themselves, under the right circumstances, holding their own against the competition. Bob Ross is the patron saint of acknowledging the line between appreciating an art form (i.e. a remarkably detailed, well defined TV persona) and actually being able to accomplish artistry. For every tired sneer of “those who can’t actually create, criticize,” there for the grace of us all goes the enduring cult of Bob Ross, a man who couldn’t even criticize a happy little fly for landing in his shit.
I don’t know why I didn’t record more episodes while I still could. I guess I figured that, since my PBS affiliate was continuing to run old episodes even after his death, it would be on the air forever, like old episodes of Sesame Street featuring Teeny Little Super Guy and the pinball playground-funk hit “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12.” Well nowadays Elmo pops and locks with Cirque de Soleil and Bob Ross reruns haven’t graced Minneapolis’s Channel 2 in years. All I’m left with is a few valence chunks of episodes that appear on VHS tapes labeled “can be taped over” between episodes of The X-Files, which my sister dutifully recorded every episode of before later buying every DVD box. Just about the longest segment I could even locate to post here appears on the last few minutes of a taped USA broadcast of The Shining. You don’t get to see the finished product (though, if memory serves, all he did was paint banks of snow along the horizon line so that the reflected trees looked like a pond), but you do get a solid eleven minutes of Bob Ross’s humble mumble.
Allow me to draw attention to just a couple one-liners; Bob Ross’s pith houses ancient wisdom.
“… when you’re at home and you have time, and don’t have a mean old director to come out and yell at you…”
Bob wasn’t just the beacon of sen-joo-al (as Clown Ministry Guy puts it, “a great word that often gets misused because it means ‘of the senses’”) complacency. There is a darksided element, an open-secret gravity to The Joy of Painting that surfaces every time Bob zealously “beats the devil out” of his two-inch brushes, and even informs the show’s set design — the complete black hole yin to Bess Motta’s gleaming-white wang. (I was hardly surprised when, within days of posting this video on YouTube, I got a request from someone who wanted me to hook them up with the original tape I got the clip from for a project he was working on related to Bob’s “middle-age crisis.”) I think I became fully aware of the fact that Bob understands the price of his ethos in my junior year of college. I was enrolled in a poetry writing class and my professor was a wiry-haired, tense powder keg of passive-agressive confusion like I’ve never seen. The tug-of-war between his outrageous power trips and his need to play “the sensitive new male” had left him jittery and neurotic. By that, I mean he’d stop in the middle of a sentence if you so much as whispered something to the kid sitting next to you. By that, I mean he’d sometimes stop three, four times before he’d finish a sentence. That’s how tightly his neck was twisted. On the second day of class, the first day having been completely devoted to poring over the reams of classroom rules and demonstrating “this isn’t coffee klatch, I mean business,” he wheeled in a television set wrapped in cellophane and pushed “play” on the VCR, upon which point the sound of Bob Ross’s voice hummed out from behind the cellophane like a mellow kazoo. I can’t remember now, but I think his point was that visuals are important, but a poet’s voice can paint without them…? What I learned at that moment, though, was that my teacher’s psychoanalyst had very likely prescribed, in lieu of fluffly little pills, a steady regiment of Bob Ross screenings for my psycho teacher’s nerves. And, because even that was evidently not working, I realized that there must be some secret hostility lurking behind each of Bob’s digressive swipes at his shadowy “mean old” director. In a general sense, the director’s function as a nemesis for Bob coincides with his crusade against negative energy. And sometimes, you’ve just got to let the mean old director call his petty, quibbling, hostile shots.
“It’s easy to put paint on the canvas, it’s a son of a gun to take it off.”
So true. You can’t undo what’s been done. Well, actually you can, it just involves a liberal douse of paint thinner. But still, a lesson for us all. And did you ever hear Julia Child addressing the fact that you can’t uncollapse a souffle?
But I’m sure you at home can find much better examples of Bob Ross’s philosophy in each reference to “happy little trees” and “three hairs and some air.” If you do, drop me a line. Send me some pictures. Til then, happy painting and God bless my friend.