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What was wrong with Bob Ross?
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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Artschool dropout here. People have mixed feelings. On one hand, he taught a lot of people how to paint and (more importantly) not be afraid of paint. On the other, he didn't challenge himself and was doing the same thing over and over, creating a lot of kitsch and commercial art.
As far as I know, he never had any long-term projects or stuff done in private. This means he plateau'd and stayed at the same skill level his entire career. Compare that to people we consider masters, like Picasso or Rembrandt or Michaelangelo. They were constantly looking for new ways to challenge themselves and trying to unlearn everything they knew to create something new. We have a lot of discoveries because of it.
Picasso invented collage and expanded our knowledge of 2D design. Rembrandt created the building blocks for Impressionism and Expressionism, while uplifting printmaking into its own artistic medium. Michaelangelo went out and practically invented new colors. Bob Ross, by comparison, didn't do much other than show how to paint something quickly. And speed is something all artists get better at with practice.
Furthermore, some of my professors resented Ross for reinforcing realism as the only way of creating art, especially among normies. Ross didn't do this intentionally. It was just a side effect of making landscapes easy. Keep in mind, we're still in the Post-Modern era and a lot of my instructors were the Post-Modern rebels who suffered under their Modernist mentors. So for them, it's frustrating trying to move art forward and have people still cling to what was already done 75 years ago. Even more so when they know the Modernists before them did put a lot of labor into their work.
Using Picasso again as an example, he'd start by drawing something realistically. Then he'd draw it again, but with less detail. And again. And again. And again. He'd get an object down to having as little detail as possible while still being recognizable as what it was supposed to represent. Then he'd compose these drawing into a painting. For Guernica, his magnum opus, he spent an entire summer doing this. There's thousands of drawings for this one, single painting he did and it's a huge painting (like 10 feet by 15 or some shit).
Now imagine you're an art professor who knows this and some asshole wearing a Bob Ross shirt walks into your class and says "Picasso paints like shit."
(I was told not to wear my Bob Ross shirt again)
Not an art student or anything, but I remember an expo of Frida Kahlo and one of the walls were a picture of like a chair and a window and surrounding the picture there were dozens of documents relating to the paint itself, like napkin sketches, a mini version just in black and white, Frida's writings about the picture and so on. For me that I'm not an artist it showed me all the work behind that you never see, I always tough that painters just got inspired and painted in real time, when actually there's a lot of work behind the scenes.
I see this as the big problem. I don't think there is anything wrong with not seeking to significantly advance one's personal artistic skill or vision beyond a plateau, but Ross did contribute to the current orthodoxy of photorealism being the highest aspiration of an artist. Unintentionally of course, but the compound effect is there. As a hobbyist artist, I often struggle with trying to escape this mindset thanks to the prevailing cultural pressure that comes from corporate and profit driven motives to create, but I can't personally fault a Bob Ross type for enjoying remaining in certain niches (he certainly had more technical skill than I, so I figure I shouldn't judge on that aspect at least.)
Not every artist has the dedication or inclination to create works like Michelangelo or Picasso and that's alright IMO, but we hate to see something like this happen lol
I mostly do miniature painting and it's obnoxious that we're going through the motions of the last 500 years with no self-awareness as other miniature painters encounter problems we've already solved. There's this mindset of needing to make everything as realistic as possible and miniature painters are finding out that has limits. "Blanchitsu" or "grimdark" or "INQ28" or whatever you want to call it, is miniaturists just now figuring out Baroque and Expressionism...you know...the things that influenced John Blanche. Maybe we'll figure out Rococo and Mannerism were already a thing within the next 25 years lmao?
The major push behind it is the corporate and profit driven motivators. Hyper-realistic painting is what appeals to non-artists and the major events around miniature painting are catering to those people. Emperor forbid we see something cool entered into Crystal Brush or Golden Demon like this:
Or these:
Having to start learning from scratch as an atomized individual stuck behind tool & material prices, free time, isolation etc. sets makes that process of learning to represent one's imagination on the medium take so much longer and feel so much more stressful than it should.
It's actually funny; what you said is completely accurate - so many of the techniques that are artificially by medium, community, initial costs, are really just the same principles applied across mediums. The most recent progress I've made in improving my digital 2d technique were from applying painting methods I learned while mini painting
I had so much trouble with illumination, shadow, and reflectivity before trying different mediums and applying techniques both ways. Realism is absolutely fine to pursue, I just wish more people had the time & opportunity to express themselves without sacrifice & worry about precarity and the omnipresent pressure of profit motive 😔
Hate if you want but at least he isn't Thomas Kinkade
When Thomas Kinkade died, I swear to God there was a celebration in the staff lounge at the art department at my school LMAO
I'd never compare Bob Ross to Kinkade...Kinkade was truly a hack and the worst aspects of capitalism finding its way into art.