Growing up I would occasionally come across
The Joy of Painting on our local PBS affiliate. The show featured a kindly afro'd watercolor painter named Bob Ross who, over the course of one 30 minute show, would turn a completely blank canvas into a beautiful nature scene. This may sound dull to the uninitiated, but those familiar with the show are, I'm sure, smiling already thinking about it. But why?
Because, quite simply put,
The Joy of Painting was hypnotic.
Bob Ross spoke in such gentle, soothing tones as he painted that you couldn't help but relax. Even the sounds of him painting were calming: The soft, rhythmic brush stroke across the canvas; the tappity-tappity of his easel when he stopped to beat a brush dry; even the scraping of his paint knife was somehow calming. I'm pretty sure if you could somehow bottle Bob Ross and distribute him as a muscle relaxer or sedative, you would corner the market. If we could sit the Israelis and the Hezbollah down and have them watch just one episode, I bet they'd stop fighting (and want to run out and buy a watercolor set).
In addition to being the most relaxing program I may have ever watched on television (note: do not operate heavy machinery within 1 hour of watching
The Joy of Painting), his method also fascinated me. Creative types intrigue me because I am very much an analytical and methodical individual. My brain thinks in terms of logical, rational steps, whereas artists tend to think much differently (or at least I suppose they do). Case in point, Bob Ross' painting method baffles me--it is very hard for me to comprehend, because (as is true with any artist) he seems to create something from nothing, as if by magic. He can make clouds, hills, and trees with a few seemingly arbitrary strokes of a brush. He doesn't construct them from the ground up, he just dabs a few times and they appear. My logical brain short-circuits when I see something like this. Every fiber of my being says that to draw, say, a tree, one would have to draw the trunk, and the branches, and then each of the leaves, and the roots, etc. It's very much reconstructing the object, as if from a blueprint. But that's not how he, or I assume most artists, work. The other thing that goes against my very instincts is how most of what he paints is covered up in the end. He will draw a lovely sky with fluffy clouds on the top half of his painting and cover the bottom half with a gentle body of water (all in a few strokes I might add). He will then proceed to layer on top of this hills, trees, grass, and sometimes buildings, most of which obscure all but a couple of small sections. I nearly have an embolism in the part of my brain that deals with efficiency watching all that work seemingly disappear. Yet it works for him, and clearly makes sense for an artist.
But I guess this is why I'm a programmer, not a painter. A painter, put in my professional shoes, would scoff at the strict conventions and step-by-step logic needed to program. They would ask, "Why can't I just tell the computer to draw a ball, and have it draw it?" And I would say, "Well, you have to tell it what a ball is, and what the shape looks like, and how to make that shape, and what color it should be, and how big it should be, etc." And the artist would say, "It doesn't matter." And I would say, "But it does." And the pirate would say, "Yarrr!" and, well, we wouldn't get very far.
Regardless, Bob Ross was the man. Sadly he passed away in 1995 of Lymphoma. But, as I found out recently, his memory lives on... on YouTube. I combed through the search results and linked to all the videos currently available there. Enjoy!
(
Update: as of March '07 these have been taken down at the request of Bob Ross Inc.)
13 comments
I'm not usually one to indulge in these things, but when it involves technology I eschew my standard objections to such base desires and wade into the plebeian pursuit of celebrity gossip.
