Happy Bob Ross Watching

So yeah, I didn’t get to update when I said that I would. My apologies. Jamie lit a fire under my buns to do more around the house. My buddy Bradford Hines came over on Wednesday so we spent the day hanging by the pool and drinking. And we’re preparing for a party tonight with a dual celebration of milestone birthdays. We had a small gathering last Saturday playing Heroclix in Matt's honor. Matt turned 16 last Monday and Sam hit the fully legal age of 21 today. Sadly, Sam won’t be joining the Hellcats for Thirsty Thursday at Lowes Foods this week because he’s headed back to UNCW.

But I left off with Bob Ross and how we’ve gotten addicted to watching his painting shows on YouTube.

It’s a hypnotic and relaxing show. He made such great nature scenes and he made it seem incredibly easy to do. And that was the point, it was an instructional show.

I remember flipping channels and finding myself stopping to watch the shows on the local PBS affiliate. I thought it was amazing and felt like I could do it too. But I never tried painting his way. My experiment with oil painting didn’t really work out that well even with the teacher that I was taking lessons from. I found oil painting to be quite difficult and went back to pencil and charcoal. “Happy little accidents”, as Bob Ross would put it, were easier to correct with a gum eraser.

But did you ever realize that with all the natural scenes that Ross painted there’s no wildlife? Why is that?

There are trees that live there. There are happy little rocks just watching the water flow by. There are paths to fishing holes. There are barns and cabins in the middle of nowhere. But there are no birds, no happy little deer, no guy walking down the path to his fishing hole in the middle of nowhere, and no cows hanging close to the barn. All of the paintings that I have ever seen are devoid of life.

He painted trees for birds to hang out, but there are no birds. How difficult would it be to paint a few of those happy little birds watching it all from high above?

And why did he only do nature scenes?

I would have loved to have seen him paint something urban… A street scene with a junkie sleeping on a park bench. A happy little cop beating an unarmed man. A cute little mailbox for the pigeons to poop on. “Let’s paint in a storm drain where a happy little rat lives and sustains himself with tiny little nibbles of flesh from our sleeping junkie”.

Or maybe Ross could have added things in his nature paintings… “Let’s paint in a lifeless body floating in our river. Maybe he was a mob informant that got outed and was dumped up stream. It’s too bad that Antonio got caught wearing a wire for the Feds. Oh well, he’s feeding all our happy little fish that live in our river. Boy, if these rocks could talk.”

“Remember that hiker that got lost? Well, lets paint in a decomposing body right here next to the happy little tree. Let’s make a few branches for the vultures to sit as they digest our unfortunate little hiker. Maybe there’s a hungry little coyote just coming out of the woods to investigate the smell of possible food that’s wafting through the air.”

Those of the kinds of things that I would have like to have seen Ross tackle in his paintings.