Bob Ross, the very permed and often-bespectacled star of PBS' long-running and beloved The
Joy of Painting, is many things to many people.
In every episode of his show, he encouraged, enlightened, and brought joy to everyone who
watched.
Here are his most breathtaking paintings.
In the last episode of Season 11 of The Joy of Painting, Ross begins the show in a unique
way: with what looks like a completed work.
He usually starts off with a blank canvas, but the purpose of this particular installment,
aptly titled "Happy Accident," is to help viewers overcome an especially vexing problem
in painting: what to do when you've made an obvious error or when the painting itself
is just fatally flawed.
Ross had already made a name for himself for taking what appeared to be complete paintings
and adding black marks right down the center.
Of course, the slashes are soon trees that viewers have to admit make the perfect finishing
touches on the piece.
"Happy Accident" is this surprise maneuver on speed.
He takes his palette knife in hand and begins to strip paint from the canvas so as to take
that perfectly fine painting and destroy it.
Then he paints another scene in its place.
The re-do is a gorgeous creek scape, but perhaps even more important than the finished product
is the message Ross leaves us with at the end of the episode: no painting is a lost
cause, and do-overs are just fine, in art and in life.
Ross is most known for his paintings of mountain landscapes, happy trees, and waterfalls, but
he also paints one hell of a campfire.
Season 3, Episode 10 begins with a canvas covered in one of his signature colors, Alizarin
Crimson.
Then, with a one-inch brush dipped in Cadmium Yellow, he begins to create the outlines of
a fire using X-shaped strokes.
He makes the fire's heart a brilliant yellow and its ridges a darker red, blending and
blending and offering this invaluable piece of advice:
"You don't want to bring a dirty brush back to the center."
By the time Ross is finished with his campfire, it's surrounded with luminous shrubs and a
pond that reflects the fire's golden glow.
He can't resist, of course, grabbing some Van Dyke Brown and adding a big, strong tree
in the foreground.
"I love to paint trees.
They're one of the most fantastic things in nature to me."
Perhaps most alarming to many fans will be the man Ross sketches in at the end.
Human forms don't often make an appearance in Bob Ross paintings, but the man nevertheless
looks completely natural with his back up against a tree trunk.
As often as Ross focused on earthbound things like trees, rivers, and mountains, he was
just as excited to turn his attention to the heavens.
In the "Northern Lights" episode, he looks upward, and the painting he produces rivals
the awe-inspiring spectacle that is the aurora borealis.
Ross, a Florida native, joined the Air Force when he was 18 and was stationed in Alaska.
He wasn't happy in the military, but he loved Alaska's untamed beauty, which he honors in
this episode.
He begins with a dark canvas, then sketches in three bright arcs, and pulls the paint
up with a 1-inch brush.
The technique brings out the colors already on the canvas and soon Ross has recreated
a scene he was lucky enough to witness over and over again in the roughly dozen years
he spent in America's 49th state.
He's also included a looming mountain, crashing waves, and a rugged cabin ready for human
habitation.
He also takes a moment to posit that God was having a good day when he made Alaska.
We assume that God also must've had a blast when he made Bob Ross.
It only makes sense that the champion of painting-as-meditation would take on something as soothing as waterfalls.
One of Ross' best contributions to the genre is "Misty Waterfall" from Season 7.
The greatest appeal of this episode just might be how well it showcases the Bob Ross philosophy
of painting.
While he dots a blue sky with happy little clouds and lines the horizon with trees, he
mentions what his uncle told him about what you should do if you want to catch a rabbit.
"He said, well, he said, you can stand behind a tree and make a noise like a carrot.
When he comes by, you grab it."
Then Ross told his viewers that they need to think like a tree to give life to a glen
and think like water to create a good waterfall.
He also advises watching for mistakes that end up being assets.
Happy accidents, in other words.
The mist over the waterfall comes courtesy of pulling down on the edge of shrub-like
trees, which he blends together with soft but confident strokes.
Incidentally, Ross' casual demeanor was, according to his good friend and business manager Annette
Kowalski, very much an act.
He was, in fact, meticulous and exacting in his approach, creating three separate paintings
for each episode and also agonizing over his every word.
In the "Tropical Seascape" episode, Ross ventures out of his comfort zone, and into the tropics,
proving that Paul Gauguin didn't have exclusive rights to the sandy beach.
To help him keep a firm eye on the horizon, Ross starts off his seascape by dividing the
canvas with masking tape.
Then he proceeds with the top half, using a mixture of yellows and reds and blues to
create a pastel sunset befitting paradise.
Later, he focuses on the sea itself, creating impossibly perfect waves that crest just so
under a nodding palm.
Ross' technique for making waves is simple.
He first draws an outline of a wave, uses a 2-inch brush to fill in the color down below,
and then highlights each tiny peak using his palette knife.
He makes it look easy, but then again, he's making wave noises as he works, and he probably
hasn't been at the tiki bar all day.
As was often the case, Ross decided to devote the episode to the beauty of the beach to
satisfy his viewers.
They wanted him to go south, and he selflessly answered the call.
There are a million ways to begin an episode of a painting show, and Bob Ross, for all
his cozy predictability, was not averse to taking chances.
In "Trapper's Cabin," he chose to open with a shot of himself cradling two baby birds
in his hands.
He informs the audience that the birds are week-old swifts that have just gotten their
feathers.
Then he tenderly transfers them to a nest set up next to his easel and starts painting.
"I absolutely adore these little characters.
They're so cute."
There are also a million ways to paint a house, and Ross was famous for being able to paint
a cabin in just a few strokes.
In this episode, having filled in a beautiful and layered background, he goes to work on
an outbuilding for the ages.
For cabins, Ross often employed the same knife he used for his mountains, and this episode
is no exception.
He rolls some browns and whites up on the knife and, with a feather-light touch, unfurls
the cabin's weathered walls and roof.
Then he adds some red to the roof, inviting his fans to get crazy, and we're sure they
gladly accepted that invitation.
In some ways, Bob Ross was like the U.S. Postal Service of mountains: He painted them in rain
and heat and snow and gloom of night.
He liked to claim that his son, Steve, painted better mountains than he did, but in Season
6's "Arctic Beauty," it's clear that no one could make a mountain quite like Bob Ross.
He understood that mountains presented many challenges to his inexperienced viewers, like
how to invest a 2-D mountain with the proper majesty and how to give a painting proper
perspective so that the mountains don't take over the entire composition.
These are questions he answers in "Arctic Beauty," by starting with a black canvas and
painting in the sky first.
When he does get around to adding the mountains, he uses his tried and true technique of rolling
a mix of paints onto his palette knife and unrolling that mix right onto the canvas.
As with Ross' ponds and cabins and trees and waves, his mountains look effortless.
They're also breathtaking and realistic and only part of a much larger composition that
includes a meadow and a cascading stream.
Ross invites his audience to go wild with their mountains, adding whatever detail makes
them happy, but he also advises they use the right tool for the job.
In the final episode of the first season of The Joy of Painting, Ross invited his son,
Steve, to come on the show and ask him a series of questions fans had sent in during that
inaugural year.
The first star of the show is Bob's beard: it's '80s shaggy and magnificent.
Second billing goes to his and Steve's matching glasses.
With gold frames and progression lenses, they're the pinnacle of handsome dork dad.
And it must also be mentioned that Steve looks to be about 15 or 16 and more than a little
reluctant to serve as his father's guinea pig.
One of the major charms of this episode is the series of audience questions Steve poses
to his father.
"The first question is, what is Magic White?"
Bob responds that Magic White is a very thin, white, oil-based paint that stays wet on the
canvas for extended periods of time.
Other questions involve how to choose the best brushes.
"When you purchase a brush, get one that is natural bristle.
Do not let 'em sell you a nylon brush.
It won't work.
It cuts paint."
And whether it's okay to wash brushes in turpentine:
“'Turpentine'?
Several things are wrong."
These are all great, nitty-gritty pieces of advice for any aspiring Ross acolyte.
The painting created during this episode is beautiful, but the real draw is watching the
Ross father-son bond play out right before our eyes.
Fans often wrote to Ross or approached him in public, asking him to create certain scenes
or make use of particular techniques so that they might be able to do the same at home.
In Season 2, Episode 4, of The Joy of Painting, Ross went above and beyond, painting a wintry
scene in whites and grays to show a colorblind viewer that a person's ability, or inability,
to see color need not determine their destiny as a painter.
It should also be noted that Ross is showing a decent amount of chest in this episode and
that he's also wearing a gold medallion of some sort.
As for the painting itself, Ross mixes up some blue and brown to make the gray, and
the only other color he allows himself to use in this show is white.
You might think this would be boring, but you'd be wrong.
With gray on his brush, he swirls in some clouds, blends them, and then moves onto a
range of mountains.
He gives the mountains some company in the form of happy trees, a misty stream, and a
small, pleasantly weathered house.
The theme of this episode is "almighty."
Ross paints in almighty mountains and an almighty river and almighty trees, all the while reinforcing
the idea that everyone has estimable talents, regardless of whether they see the entire
rainbow.
Bob Ross was a very private person.
While he did share a lot with his viewers over the years, he also kept careful guard
over his personal life and, for the most part, he stayed out of the spotlight.
Fans did know that he lived in Alaska for a time, served in the military, adopted a
number of orphaned animals, and had a son.
But what they might not have realized is that he was struggling with the illness of his
second wife during the show's 23rd season, and that he likely filmed this episode, "Mountain
Ridge Lake," shortly after her diagnosis.
Ross often said that one rule of painting is that you can't have the light without the
dark.
That proved to be incredibly poignant in this episode when it appears that he is channeling
his grief and putting his heart right on the canvas.
Setting aside his trademark self-deprecation, the resulting painting is a stunning summer
scene of soaring mountains and a gorgeous, reflective lake inviting you to jump in, swim,
and stay a while.
The most heart-breaking and telling line of the entire segment is when Ross indirectly
addresses his heartbreak, assuring viewers:
"You know, it's like in life, you gotta have a little sadness once in a while so you know
when the good times come.
I'm waiting on the good times now."
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