R&I ~ Løki
Landscape painter and TV personality Bob Ross, with his glorious round perm and calming demeanour, appeared on The Phil Donahue Show back in 1994. “You say out loud: Your work will never hang in a museum,” Donahue, then the king of daytime talk – as anyone of a certain age will recall – yelled into his microphone, pointing his finger at Ross (whom he admired).
“Well, maybe it will,” replied Ross, evenly. And then, ever humble and well aware of his place in the art world hierarchy, Ross added, “well, probably not the Smithsonian.”
Ross was right about so much. “There’s nothing wrong with having a tree as a friend.” Or, another famous quote: “we don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.” But about the fate of his work, he has been posthumously proven wrong.
Bob Ross is having a moment. The Joy of Painting, his PBS show – where he taught what looks like a simple method of creating landscape oil paintings – still airs on public television across the U.S. Twenty-five years after his death, his shows have also become a sensation on the gaming platform Twitch, and on Netflix. There are documentaries about him. He has more than four million subscribers on YouTube.
In 2019, several of Ross’s works and personal items were acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Last year also marked the first gallery-curated solo exhibition of his work, in Purcellville, Virginia.
Now Canada is home to his second solo show. The Penticton Art Gallery, a tiny institution in an Okanagan beach town, has created an original exhibition, Bob Ross: Happy Little Accidents.
At the centre of the exhibition is an area set up to look like a 1980s TV room – loud patterned couch, clashing rug and other era-appropriate furnishings (borrowed from Habitat for Humanity) – with Bob Ross being broadcast from the very contemporary flat-screen.
Ross is certainly iconic, but his work is another matter. These landscapes are familiar, but hardly provocative or groundbreaking. They might be nice to look at (depending on your taste) but whether they belong in a museum – or even a small public art gallery – is another matter. Crawford acknowledges these might not be “great” paintings, but he pooh-poohs those who would pooh-pooh his show.
“Our challenge is to get people in the doors today. And I think the more we distance ourselves from the average person and make it inaccessible to people, what’s going to be our purpose of existence?” says Crawford, who has fielded calls about the show from across Canada and the U.S. “There’s a lot of people who love this. And who am I to tell somebody this isn’t a good painting? If it rocks your world, you come here and it brings you to tears? Fantastic.”
And if Bob Ross is “the cannabis of the art world” – the gateway drug to something more obscure – that’s great too, says Crawford.
This may also be an optimal time for simple pleasures, for pretty pictures that remind you of your childhood, that give you a break from the uncertainty all around us created by the pandemic and other difficult contemporary issues.
“It’s the perfect antidote for all the crap that’s going on in the world,” is how Crawford puts it.
“We need more stuff like this; we need more escapes and we need to have license so we can just tune out for a while and be happy. Why do we always have to look at art as morose? There’s enough misery in our lives.”
Sir Tainley
Article URL : https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/article-the-enduring-magic-of-bob-ross/