Posts Tagged ‘Bob Ross’

America’s Favorite Television Artist Strikes Again

The Joy of Painting—a TV series hosted by American artist Bob Ross, on which he would conjure up Alaskan landscapes in just 27 minutes of airtime—ran for 403 episodes between 1983 and 1994. Eventually syndicated to almost 300 PBS stations nationwide, it attracted over 80 million daily viewers of varying ages and backgrounds. According to […]

“Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed”

On August 25th the Netflix premiered a new documentary about Bob Ross directed by Joshua Rofé. I was interviewed for it in January of 2020. My participation in the feature came out of a 2018 The New Criterion article I wrote about America’s greatest “television artist.” To read full article click on the image below. […]

Bob Ross and the art historical canon

If we take Henri Matisse’s famous assertion that art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue at face value, we might end up with something approaching the “happy [x]” philosophy of Bob Ross, whose message was perfectly suited for television—the medium which help to spread it. I discuss […]