Bob Ross: An Obituary

UNTIL HE DIED ON THE FOURTH OF JULY AT the age of 52, the most famous artist on the face of the earth, and I use the word artist loosely, may well have been Bob Ross. His name doesn't ring a bell? Don't panic; you're not going to find him in the standard reference books. You'd do better to go channel-surfing on your television, which for the last dozen years was Ross's domain. He was the bearded, fuzzy-haired host of "The Joy of Painting," the public television series on which he gently guided couch potatoes through the intricacies of painting a landscape in 26 minutes.

Speaking in an anodyne voice much like the one police officers use to coax jumpers off ledges, Ross encouraged viewers to paint "happy little clouds" and insisted that anyone who followed his simple instructions could succeed. He provided art's version of "A Better Body in 30 Days." Each week, millions of viewers, from Akron to Ankara, from Harrisburg to Hong Kong, tuned in -- a whopping 97 percent, according to Ross's calculation, just to hear his voice. His laid-back on-screen image belied his off-screen drive as a businessman. He wrote popular books with easy-to-follow recipes for painting snowcapped mountains and lakeside vistas. He designed courses to train instructors, hundreds of whom have spread across the country, preaching the gospel according to Bob. He even marketed his own line of art supplies, with his smiling face emblazoned on each tube of paint.

Far be it from me to cast a dark little cloud over Ross. I'm just struck by the whole Ross phenomenon, which seems so quintessentially American, notwithstanding his global appeal. Perhaps there's nothing more American about him than the fact that at the end he became an icon for Generation X-ers. Following in the unlikely footsteps of Tony Bennett, he achieved cultlike status after starring in a series of promotional spots for MTV. Ross was so unhip that he became hip.

He was a throwback. His show consisted, basically, of one camera trained on him or his canvas the whole time. The approach was calculatedly homespun, like his voice. In that sense, it was the very antithesis of MTV, and it tapped into a nostalgia for the cozy can-doism of America in the 1950's. The 50's, after all, were the heydey of Grandma Moses and the paint-by-numbers craze. Ross updated both, with his treacly pictures of a mythical frontier and his do-it-yourself technique.

Of course, he also promised instant gratification, which wasn't so different, ultimately, from what MTV offers. Give him half an hour, and he could teach you to paint a picture. He was said to have completed 30,000 of them himself, which by my calculation comes to an average of almost two a day for every day of his life. Or put another way: all alone, Ross could have decorated virtually every pizzeria in America. In any event, his reported productivity represented another bygone American ideal, namely the Yankee work ethic.

Ross's pictures were thickly painted, garish landscapes that conformed to age-old formulas about balanced composition: trees on one side, mountain on the other, moonlit lake in the middle. He didn't paint people -- because they might spoil his unspoiled vistas or because they were too difficult to do, I can't say which was more the case. In any event, his landscapes were resolutely American, chock-full of fruited plains and purple mountains' majesty.
Whether Ross actually invented the technique of instant art is a matter of debate: his archrival on television, the Bavarian-born William Alexander, was also his teacher, and Alexander has claimed that Ross stole the fabled wet-on-wet technique from him. I leave it to Ross's biographers to sort out this sordid affair. I only want to point out that Ross's life was a Horatio Alger story in that he was a drop-out, a carpenter's son, from Daytona Beach, Fla., who made good after hitting upon a scheme to market himself.

Americans have always viewed art as therapeutic. From the beginning we have believed that it should be uplifting, that it's either good for us or no good at all. Which is an insupportable notion, if you think about it. But it's the populist doctrine that Ross championed all the way to the bank. His feel-goodism rang true to millions who watched his show, and who, like him, probably distrusted abstraction as something that foreigners sneaked into the country, which in a sense it was. Ross said, "If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is," an odd remark coming from someone who made his fortune explaining to millions of viewers each week precisely what he was painting. Still, I know what he meant.

Ross will live on, through reruns. I don't foresee a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art any time in the near future. But you never know, considering the recent fashion for thrift-shop and outsider art. Given his wealth and popularity, you can't call Ross an outsider, exactly, but he certainly wasn't an insider. He was somewhere in the middle. As in Middle America.