The Joy of Painting

[Shit Good Nose]

Painting with Bob Ross Is An Absolute Nightmare - This Is Why

Following A Bob Ross Painting Tutorial

I think both of those vids go some way to proving Bob's theory that everyone has an inherent ability to paint.  I remember in the very very early days of YouTube (when it mostly consisted of spoof Jaws trailers, that vid of the office worker going mental and destroying his [massive] PC, and adverts for small independent businesses in America) there was a Take Hart Gallery style compilation of the results of non-painters' attempts to follow a Joy Of Painting tutorial, and most of them would be described by a casual observer as "absolutely fine".  Which, coming from people who have zero experience or knowledge of painting and a belief that they have no painting talent, is pretty fucking good.

[daf]

They showed a couple of early ones from series 2 - and it was interesting to see how fiddly he was back then - dabbing away with a fine brush.

He wisely dumped all that - as there's no way you can 'contol' the actual paint strokes of the viewer - everyone will come up with something different - usually messy crap.

His genius was to make every stage into a series of idiot-proof 'potato prints' using specific brushes and textures of paint - so that as long as you followed the basic moves with the specific brushes (fan brush upwards = clumps of grass), you really couldn't go wrong (provided you used his 'liquid white' special sauce, of course!)

I bet Leonardo da Vinci wishes he had thought of that 'pull down and across' method for water reflections - so simple and yet so effective!

[Twit 2]

He's got a stupid round smiley face, stupid beard, stupid round hair, he's like a brown sun shininng through a bush. Only painting I want him to teach me is a painting of his face getting glassed. Cunt.

[gilbertharding]

You might know the North Kent beauty spot and mega-Mall Bluewater, and if you do, you might be familiar with the habit I suspect most people have of always using the same car park, and the same entrance. The entrance we always seem to use is the one which takes you past Pizza Express, and Waterstones.

Anyway, right next to the toilets which are located conveniently close to this entrance, there used to be a gallery outlet of the renowned American artist Thomas Kinkade (1958-2012), the self-styled Painter of Light.

Almost every time we visited the shopping centre, I would find myself with a few minutes to kill standing outside the toilets waiting for my wife to come out, and I would examine the works of Thomas Kinkade, and ponder who on God's pure earth would spend between £500 and £5000 on such utter shit, especially considering they'd bought it from a shopping mall. Of course, they also sold calendars, place-mats, coasters, etc...

His works then chiefly consisted of large oil-on-canvas renderings of quintessentially American subjects - log and stone cabins in woodland wildernesses, or busy small towns in New England, or lighthouses. He later branched into Disney themed landscapes, and I see from his website https://thomaskinkade.com/the-art/  that they now do Star Wars themed paintings.

Once, thinking the gallery was unattended, I ventured inside, but found myself cornered by the single staff member, who had merely been in the store cupboard, rather than entirely absent. Forced by her questioning to admit I was fascinated (possibly not in the way she imagined) by the paintings, she proceeded to deliver a lecture on the skill and vision of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light. The pièce de résistance of the seminar was when she explained that his paintings (actually mostly prints, later touched up with paint, either by Kinkade or a minion) were actually improved by being seen in a half light. She dimmed the gallery lights, to demonstrate that certain areas - highlights, such as the light from a window - visibly glowed faintly in the gloaming. This sounds much more effective than it was in reality.

I tried to appear impressed, made my excuses and left.

Seemingly there are many blogs which seem to say that because people (many people) like Thomas Kinkade pictures, they must be right, and the critics wrong, somehow. This one, for instance: http://sfaq.us/2015/03/on-the-despised-art-of-thomas-kinkade/.

I prefer this one: https://www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/whats-so-bad-about-thomas-kinkade especially as it's from an unlikely source. Or this: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/06/thomas-kinkades-cottage-fantasy.

One critic noted that the orange-yellow light which streams from the cottage windows together with the plume of smoke from the chimney could just as easily represent a house fire...

Anyway - the same feeling of queasiness overtakes me when looking at Bob Ross's ouevre. The purple skies, the acid green trees, the limpid waters - what lurks beneath? What horrors are in those woods? Where is everyone? Why is the fucking sky fucking purple?

[Shit Good Nose]

I get what you're saying - and the two have been inextricably loosely linked in my mind since I became aware of both of them - BUT there are cavernous differences.

With Kinkade you're buying "his" (i.e. a computer and printer's work touched up, as you say, by a minion) work for a fuckload of money, even if it is just a straight 100% print, and buying into the (supposed) hard work and intricacy of that work.

With Bob Ross you're paying a few dollars for basic tools (and he always said you didn't have to use his branded stuff, just get whatever was close) and then he's going to show you the basics of how to paint in his style and have it finished in half an hour, all the while saying it can be as easy as you make it and any mistakes you make aren't mistakes but happy uniqueness (or whatever it was he called it). 

Kinkade was also fraudulent with his business dealings, at best a sexual harasser at worst a rapist, an alcoholic drug fiend who regularly went for a drive whilst under the influence of both, and an all around general cunt.  Bob was (as far as anyone knows) just a nice guy who died from cancer when he was still relatively young.

[imitationleather]

It's got a very haunting quality.

[gilbertharding]

I get what you're saying - and the two have been inextricably loosely linked in my mind since I became aware of both of them - BUT there are cavernous differences.

With Kinkade you're buying "his" (i.e. a computer and printer's work touched up, as you say, by a minion) work for a fuckload of money, even if it is just a straight 100% print, and buying into the (supposed) hard work and intricacy of that work.

With Bob Ross you're paying a few dollars for basic tools (and he always said you didn't have to use his branded stuff, just get whatever was close) and then he's going to show you the basics of how to paint in his style and have it finished in half an hour, all the while saying it can be as easy as you make it and any mistakes you make aren't mistakes but happy uniqueness (or whatever it was he called it). 

Kinkade was also fraudulent with his business dealings, at best a sexual harasser at worst a rapist, an alcoholic drug fiend who regularly went for a drive whilst under the influence of both, and an all around general cunt.  Bob was (as far as anyone knows) just a nice guy who died from cancer when he was still relatively young.

That's good to know. I'm glad to know they weren't comparable as people - but as you say, I was only associating the two on a superficial level, comparing the results of the work.

There are others, of course (artists with massive popular appeal whose work was critically disparaged - who maybe nurse chips on their shoulders as a result) - Jack Vettriano. Rolf Harris. Tracey Emin.

At school in A Level Art class someone coined 'Rolf' to mean to draw something without properly looking, or from (defective) memory - "Oh, I just Rolfed that quickly." There's a definite 'Rolfness' about Ross and Kinkade.

Whereabouts do you park at Bluewater then?

[gilbertharding]

It's got a very haunting quality.

Here's one of his 'Moments before the house was well ablaze' portraits:

[Inspector Norse]

When working in a school a few years ago I somehow got myself assigned to teach my tutor class a short Art History course. The final project was to do a presentation and appreciation of a famous artist, which would go towards the students' overall Art grade. They had to look at the artist's life but also do an in-depth analysis of one of their works, of their style, and of their influence and legacy.

Most of them chose the likes of Picasso, van Gogh, Rembrandt, Warhol, the big names that 15-year-olds know a little bit about.

One guy chose Bob Ross.

I gave him a D.