I just saw a full episode of his show. The fuck? I’m not a painter but I’ve seen my mom paint all my life.
This motherfucker just did in 15 minutes what would take her weeks. Like???
And he did it while talking, in clean fucking strokes. So fucking fast. I saw a literal masterpiece being created in fifteen minutes from nothing. From nothing. It was a blank fucking canvas, man.
I knew of Bob Ross, but I’d never actually seen him paint. Goddamn. How did actual artists react to him? Like, how do you not feel just thoroughly outclassed.
All while this mofo is saying how easy all that he’s doing is while I know for a fact how hard it is. Like, is he just gaslighting everyone?
Bob Ross is the perfect Sunday painter.
No real hate from me though, I don't think he had many pretentions about being Avant garde or whatever, he just liked making his simple, pretty, little paintings and that was enough. However if someone was interested in learning about art, I would recommend Ross last even when it comes to landscape painting.
A side note, but Ross has a very underexamined view of landscape as a subject. These are postcards, but not much else. They do not engage with the history or problematics of landscape/painting, something which many art critics have written about even from a Marxist standpoint. It is art without history, which is not very interesting in the long run.
"Here's a happy little tree performing a happy little dialectical analysis on the bourgeois character of this happy little cloud exerting its state-sanctioned monopoly on violence over the top of this happy little proletarian mountaintop..."
I'd watch this