{"id":4702,"date":"2023-09-10T14:29:06","date_gmt":"2023-09-10T21:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juliafriedman.org\/?p=4702"},"modified":"2023-09-10T14:42:54","modified_gmt":"2023-09-10T21:42:54","slug":"americas-television-artist-strikes-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juliafriedman.org\/?p=4702","title":{"rendered":"America’s Favorite Television Artist Strikes Again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Joy of Painting<\/em>\u2014a TV series hosted by American artist Bob Ross, on which he would conjure up Alaskan landscapes in just 27 minutes of airtime\u2014ran 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 research conducted by Bob Ross, Inc., only three percent of these viewers actually painted along with Ross. The rest just watched, mesmerized by the pioneer of autonomous sensory meridian response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ross\u2019s hushed, melodic tones, the gentle rasp of his brush against canvas, and the scraping of his palette knife combined to send the audience into a pleasurable stupor as enchanting snowy mountains or verdant bluffs appeared before them on a double primed 18\u201d x 24\u201d canvas. Ross succumbed to blood cancer in 1995 at the age of 52, but on what would have been his 73rd birthday, Twitch.tv streamed a nine-day marathon of his show to a viewership of five and a half million. This added a fresh cohort of Millennials and Zoomers to his audience, and together with over 450 million views of The Joy of Painting <\/em>on YouTube cemented his iconic status in 21st-century American culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With all this publicity, it was hardly a surprise when, in 2018, the Wall Street Journal <\/em>published an article titled, \u201cA Renaissance for Bob Ross: Fans want the \u2018Joy of Painting\u2019 Host to Have a Spot in Art History.\u201d<\/a>Ross\u2019s advocates maintain that he deserves to be recognized as more than the mere educator and \u201ctelevision artist\u201d he considered himself to be (at least according to the inscription on his tombstone). They see him as a canonical, prominent, and prolific landscape painter. I felt compelled to weigh in on this debate in a piece for the New Criterion<\/em><\/a>, where I pointed out that, since museums now routinely celebrate artists using criteria such as preferred identity or social stance, the exclusion of Ross\u2019s kitschy landscapes looked snobbish and disingenuous, if not outright discriminatory towards the middlebrow culture he personified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201chappy clouds\u201d and \u201chappy trees,\u201d about which Bob Ross murmured to his audience, were his way of demystifying painting. By bringing his workshop into the homes of his viewers, Ross liberated art from its elitist strongholds in museums and galleries. He boldly declared that \u201cthere is an artist hidden at the bottom of every single one of us\u201d and that he would strive to reveal that hidden artist. This mission resonated with America\u2019s populist spirit. Why shouldn\u2019t the paintings of Bob Ross grace the walls of American museums alongside the works of Tanya Agui\u00f1iga and Peter Bradley?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the question posed by filmmaker Joshua Rof\u00e9, the director of a 2021 feature-length Netflix documentary titled, Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed<\/em>. Rof\u00e9 had been wondering<\/a> why some American artists thrive in any given period. He selected Ross to represent the prototypical \u201980s artist over Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, or Keith Haring, who back then were omnipresent in the pages of the blue-chip Artforum <\/em>magazine. But although Rof\u00e9\u2019s documentary<\/a> began as an evaluation of what made Ross massively popular, it ended up as a constrained expos\u00e9 of Shakespearean-grade malevolence on the part of his business partners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Annette and Walt Kowalski\u2014the masterminds of what one of Ross\u2019s close friends John Thamm calls \u201cGrand Theft Bob\u201d\u2014have proved to be so litigious that, according to Rof\u00e9, five people slated to be interviewed for his film bailed out, for fear of being sued. The story, in all its splendid and detailed cruelty, was valiantly covered by the Daily Beast <\/em>in a comprehensive article, Sex, Deceit, and Scandal: The Ugly War Over Bob Ross\u2019 Ghost<\/a><\/em>, published four months before the release of Rof\u00e9\u2019s documentary. But for whatever reason, this remarkable essay disappeared under the radar, so in the run up to the film\u2019s premiere fans continued to speculate about precisely who had betrayed whom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before I read the Daily Beast <\/em>article, I expected that the story would be about Bob Ross betraying the original television painter Bill Alexander. Ross had studied under Alexander, then worked for him, and was even handed<\/a> \u201cthe almighty brush\u201d by his mentor on camera. When Ross\u2019s fortunes rose, however, the men became rivals\u2014as television painters and as promoters of lucrative art supplies\u2014 and their relationship soured. It probably did not help that, aside from adopting Alexander\u2019s technique, Ross virtually copied his mentor\u2019s entire line of materials. In a 1991 New York Times <\/em>profile<\/a>, Alexander\u2019s bitterness was evident: \u201cHe betrayed me … I trained him and he is copying me\u2014what bothers me is not just that he betrayed me, but that he thinks he can do it better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I spoke about this rift in an interview I gave for Rof\u00e9\u2019s Netflix documentary, but the Ross-Alexander quarrel did not turn out to be the focus of the film. As the filmmakers interviewed those who knew and worked with Ross, they soon realized that the shenanigans of Bob Ross, Inc. were so preposterous that this story had to take precedence over Ross\u2019s use of the alla prima <\/em>technique or his all-American appeal. The heartbreaking tale of Ross scrambling to rewrite his will and protect his intellectual property, while enduring debilitating rounds of chemo and radiation therapy, became the documentary\u2019s leitmotif. The plot involving Ross\u2019s rivalry with Alexander seemed trivial in comparison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pivot towards human drama also meant that attention was diverted from Ross\u2019s actual achievement of using the populist platform of television to democratize painting. He took one of the most complex and time-intensive activities known to man and made it appear simple and accessible. But tales of personal misdeeds make for more compelling entertainment. Given the amount of real-life drama around Ross, even the best-intentioned documentary treatment of his story is prone to focus on that drama at the expense of any other narrative. And if it is not the storytellers who succumb to the temptation of foregrounding human drama, the audience might misconstrue what they see on the screen as an ideological struggle du jour<\/em>. This is unfortunately what happened with the latest cinematic depiction of the iconic painter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In April 2023, writer-director Brit McAdams took another stab at the Bob Ross story in a film called Paint<\/em><\/a><\/em>, which stars Owen Wilson as Carl Nargle, a Vermont- based TV painter modelled on Ross. <\/em>McAdams\u2019s film was panned by critics and received equally poor audience ratings. The New York Times <\/em>described it as \u201ca comedically inert parody of male privilege,\u201d while others decided that Nargle was a \u201ctechnology-averse sexual predator\u201d and a \u201csmooth operator,\u201d guilty of \u201ctoxic male delusion\u201d and \u201ctoxic self-deluded male myopia.\u201d The public, meanwhile, was displeased by the film\u2019s slow pace and its various \u201cmistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personally, I found Paint <\/em>to be thought-provoking and funny, but a full understanding and appreciation of the film requires knowledge of both the art- world in-jokes and obscure facts about Bob Ross\u2019s biography. That inevitably shrank the target audience down to the same size commanded by scholarly monographs\u2014in the hundreds at best. Denizens of the professional art world might enjoy the philistinism of the film\u2019s museum director, but these insiders are not Bob Ross aficionados and are likely to miss out on the Ross trivia that makes the film such a delight. Ross\u2019s fans, on the other hand, have disliked the artistic liberties McAdams took with the facts of Ross\u2019s life and were not receptive to the comic callousness of an emerging painter toadying up to an established older colleague while backstabbing him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those familiar with the details of Bob Ross\u2019s life will see that, beyond the physical likeness and the mannerisms aped by Wilson, Nargle is equally revered by the elderly, the middle-aged, and the young. His admirers include the residents of a retirement home, a young man who tells Nargle that he has been \u201cgoing to a special place\u201d with him since he was nine, and a couple of slack-jawed barflies who gawp at Nargle\u2019s show on the television set mounted above the liquor shelf. This is a neat detail, since Ross first encountered Bill Alexander\u2019s TV painting lessons in an Alaskan bar. Bob Ross was himself such a barfly who took seriously Alexander\u2019s promise that anyone could become a painter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nargle\u2019s van seems to be another nod to Alexander, who drove a Volkswagen van that functioned as his home, studio, and gallery. He used its picture windows to display his paintings and had \u201cThe Old Master Painter from the Faraway Hills\u201d inscribed on the side of the vehicle. In the film, the vanity plate on Nargle\u2019s van reads, \u201cPAINTR.\u201d Ambrosia, the young woman who swoops in to supplant Nargle on his TV program spot, has \u201cPAINTER\u201d on her license plate, and Nargle mocks her for including the final \u201cE,\u201d explaining that a real artist would never spell such things out in that way. This seems to be a joke at the expense of the real Ross, a hotrod enthusiast who drove a silver 1969 Corvette with a vanity plate that simply read, \u201cBOB ROSS.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is just one of the ways in which Paint <\/em>turns the Bob Ross\/Bill Alexander drama inside out. While Nargle is most obviously (if loosely) based on Ross, McAdams has incorporated elements of Bill Alexander\u2019s story so that his protagonist ends up being a composite of the two men. Nargle is the one who ends up being pushed aside by his young prot\u00e9g\u00e9, as Ambrosia credits him with inspiring her to paint but believes she can do it better. So, in this version of the story, Nargle is Bill Alexander to Ambrosia\u2019s Bob Ross.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The theme of betrayal is prominent in the film, and despite lashings of comic relief, there is a lingering sadness. When Nargle\u2019s television gig is finally terminated, he is assured that it is not because he is old, but the truth is that someone younger and more telegenic has filled his place. Even his 4,274 paintings of Mt. Mansfield are unwanted. The parochial yet pompous art historian Dr. Bradford Lenihan, director of the local art museum, informs Nargle: \u201cSadly, we just had the walls painted. And that\u2019s something we are showing off too. The beauty of the museum itself.\u201d His demeaning suggestion is to donate the paintings to Motel 6 or the Red Roof Inn. To add insult to injury, on the way out of the museum Nargle spots a bad painting by Ambrosia. Out with the old, in with the new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nargle\u2019s paintings at last become valuable after most of them are destroyed in a studio fire, and the artist himself is presumed dead. Posthumously, he suddenly regains his early popularity and people line up to see his work once more. The museum scrambles to acquire a painting, and the PBS station director has to dumpster dive to retrieve one he had discarded. Now in hiding, Nargle looks for ways to paint while remaining anonymous. Patient viewers who sit through the credits of Paint <\/em>are rewarded with a clever resolution\u2014Nargle becomes \u201cBlanksy,\u201d swapping his dinky easel landscapes for gigantic, surreptitiously painted barn- wall stencil murals. (This witty denouement has a real-life point of reference: in 2021, the artist known as Banksy created a Bob Ross-narrated process video titled Create Escape<\/a><\/em>, <\/em>the subject of which was Oscar Wilde escaping from Reading Gaol.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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