Netflix, and paint

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/06/2016 (3632 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In what seems like an inspired bit of counterprogramming to the unrelenting horror show of current events, Bob Ross, the world’s most comforting artist, is currently streaming on Netflix.

We can all just relax now, at least for 27 minutes at a time, as the encouraging, optimistic, mellow-voiced landscape painter does his thing.

Ross’s The Joy of Painting ran on PBS from 1983 to 1994 and has lived on through YouTube. Netflix is now showing the wonderfully binge-worthy Beauty Is Everywhere (1991), which is similar to The Joy of Painting. Basically, all the shows are similar. That’s part of their supremely soothing appeal.

On a super-low-budget set, the frizz-haired painter completes a landscape — Autumn Stream or Silent Forest or Tranquil Dawn — in under half an hour. While deftly sketching in “happy clouds” and “almighty mountains,” Ross keeps up a lulling commentary, combining handy painting tips (“trees cover up a multitude of sins”) with cheering chat.

It’s a simple formula, and one that went on to develop a cult following, even after Ross’s death in 1995. There are good reasons for Ross’s lasting popularity and fervent, far-ranging fan base. Here are a few:

SERENITY NOW: The Joy of Painting and Beauty Is Everywhere are ostensibly “instructional television programs,” but only a small fraction of Ross’s audience actually paints along with him.

Billed as a friend to amateur artists, Ross is also a pal to the anxious and lonely, to insomniacs and shut-ins and bored after-school teens. With his reassuring, repetitive, quiet manner, he connects directly, even intimately to his at-home audience. Ross is like Mr. Rogers for grown-ups.

He is also, as comedian Patton Oswalt puts it, “a human Quaalude.” Many of Ross’s followers admit to using the show as a sleep aid, and this is no slight on its star. It’s not that Ross is boring. He’s just endlessly relaxing. There’s something hypnotic in the quality of his speech, in its slow pace and gentle cadences.

HAPPY TALK: Ross’s medium is comforting, as is his message, which boils down to a sincere and democratic belief in the power of creativity. While Ross gets busy with a two-inch brush and some Van Dyke brown, he also sneaks in bits of homespun philosophy. “We don’t make mistakes,” he assures viewers. “We just have happy accidents.”

“Any way you want it to be, that’s just right,” as Ross says.

“Every day is a good day when you paint.”

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS: Ross loves nature. (“God was having a good day when he made Alaska. Beautiful!”) But he never paints from nature, or even from photographs of nature.

Ross creates his own little universes right out of his head. “Remember that this is your world,” he tells his viewers as he shooshes on some Cadmium yellow. “In your world you can create anything that you desire.”

There’s something liberating in that notion, and it’s a freedom he passes on to his viewers: “If you don’t like it, you can change it.”

FAN SERVICE: The relationship between Ross and his early audience prefigured Internet fan culture. Even back in the snail-mail era of the 1980s, he developed a tight relationship with his viewers, encouraging them to write in and share achievements and frustrations.

He possessed a Warhol-like sense of how to build a brand, starting with recognizable hair. Though he reportedly hated his bushy brown ’fro, he kept it, knowing it was an instantly recognizable Bob Ross trademark.

Ross also understood that one’s work can take on a life beyond one’s control. He once made a gently self-mocking promo ad for MTV, and he would probably be fine with the ways his art and life have been used by hipster ironists, YouTube remixers and meme makers.

Along with social media shout-outs — Ross has a Twitter account, despite having been dead for more than 10 years — Ross has attracted serious scrutiny. The data wonks at Fivethirtyeight used some “happy spreadsheets” to do a statistical analysis of 380 of Ross’s landscapes. (Among the results: He doesn’t like painting people. He does like painting trees.) His legacy is also analyzed in Happy Clouds, Happy Trees: The Bob Ross Phenomenon, a 2014 academic work that uses contemporary art and social theory to explore the whole Joy of Painting experience.

BEYOND IRONY: Whatever the source, you get the feeling all these Ross references are anchored in real affection.

His sweet, soporific presence, his can-do approach to creativity, his hopeful, helpful attitude, his pure joy in what he’s doing — they all feel completely genuine.

The 25 episodes of Beauty Is Everywhere streaming on Netflix are spoofable, maybe, but ultimately snark-proof. Really, how can you not love a guy whose idea of “getting crazy” involves getting out the big brush and the Sap green for some wild tree-painting action?

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

watch?v=oh5p5f5_-7A