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Bob Ross’s Mantras Tame Cthulhu
The secret of Ross’s cult status as a painter of “happy” landscapes
Bob Ross is an unlikely cult hero. His wet-on-wet art techniques democratized the painting of nature, and his calming voice pioneered the ASMR industry.
But is there a hidden reason for his iconic status?
I first saw some of Bob Ross’s series of tutorials, “The Joy of Painting,” on PBS in the 1990s, or possibly as early as the late ‘80s. I remember taping them on VHS.
On the surface, what struck most viewers was the combination of his soothing voice, his folksy mannerisms, and the speed and simplicity of his painting. He wanted the oil painting of landscapes to be fun and easy, so anyone could do it. As he said repeatedly in his long series, he lived for a time in Alaska and Florida, and as a child, he cared for injured animals, including snakes, alligators, and squirrels. Ross was a nature lover.
Yet what comes across in his tutorials isn’t so much nature itself, but his reassuring stereotypes of trees, bushes, mountains, streams, and so on. Several factors combine to produce the Bob Ross effect.
There’s the fact that he didn’t paint from photographs or life in the show, so the viewer rarely, if ever, sees nature itself in the tutorials, aside from…
