One of my underlying themes for 2024 was this strong existential questioning about whether I should give up. The phrase is intentionally ambiguous and may reflect things both minor and severe. While I’ve had long periods of being sad, a lot of my feelings stemmed from this worry that I was reaching the end of my career potential. Having turned 35, I’m realizing that the first half of this decade was experiencing a pandemic before spending the rest of it trying to break free of the emotional baggage it carried. There’s concern that I haven’t achieved anything worth mentioning and, while this website contradicts the entire thesis, is something in the back of my head as I try to determine whether creative passion is worth pursuing without guaranteed financial stability. For as much as it’s keeping me sane, will “assimilating” in a sense give me better opportunities to live life?
It's a loaded prompt and one that I’m trying not to act irrationally on. Writing is in my DNA. I have been doing it since I was a child and probably will until I die. However, it’s hard to not get caught up in the “It would’ve happened by now” logic. If anything, it’s grown harder to “assimilate” as a writer due to my increasing disinterest in doing filler work. I need art to be reflective of something personal and meaningful. Given how much time I’ve spent studying “dead internet theory” and contemplating the downfall of generations under the banner of A.I. services like Chat GPT, it’s hard to determine what the artist has to offer a future that is wishing to downsize the field most reliant on human singularity. I’ve long accepted that writing is a crowded field and it’s as much luck as it is craft, but when you remove the human and watch people reshare gifs of A.I. generated images that they deem goofy, it’s making me realize how much we took for granted early YouTube days where you could appreciate shitposts because somebody had to put in the effort to make a three minute gag of pure stupidity. It was poorly made, but at least it was human.
To avoid making this the larger text of the piece, I will get the subtext out of the way. While I have had a lengthy period of questioning what creative projects I wanted to pursue, there are things now in the works that will hopefully be out in a few years. There’s nothing more fulfilling than pulling out a notebook and scribbling the first ideas down, unsure where everything goes. It feels like the galaxy being formed and you’re just staring at the cosmos jumbled together in a box. However, the feeling of thinking you’ve said everything you’ve needed to say is horrifying. To have writer’s block this early in my life bothered me and I had to rediscover how to get moving again…
The real star of 2024 has been PlutoTV. Given that I grew up in the Mid-2000s on the cable format, I forgot how much I missed the spontaneity of just putting something on without concern of the binge model. I have avoided watching A LOT of series because my mind shifts to a completionist mentality where I can’t invest in something unless I get from start to finish. It’s the downfall of places like Netflix and Hulu which promote a “watch next” model that becomes intimidating with older shows. PlutoTV meanwhile scratches that itch where I’m able to jump in and have to deal with wherever we are. While there’s the tragedy of knowing you won’t always see where the series goes, it revitalizes the necessity of paying attention.
Somewhere in the muck was The Joy of Painting. My experience with Bob Ross is almost nonexistent. To me, he was that happy-go-lucky man with an afro and a canvas. I remember there was a movie where Owen Wilson played him, but it convinced me that maybe he was uncool, or somebody worth making fun of. He never struck me as a figure that I needed to pay attention to despite having a fondness for public access figures like Mister Rogers, Huell Howser, and Bill Nye. You come to realize that their appeal transcends any sense of irony because they were genuine. They weren’t exploiting a system to get popular. They were passionate about doing wat they loved because they believed in sharing information and craft.
Ross was a byproduct of this mentality. While I have been able to walk into a Target and find plushies of Ross or “how to paint” books, he comes across as a humble figure who is there more for support. He worked at a paint store in Muncie, Indiana where he made most of his money. Given his prolific output, it’s surprising how little he’s profited on the actual episodes. I get the sense that he’s first and foremost an artist because he loves putting a brush to canvas and experimenting with landscapes.
The closest that The Joy of Painting comes to feeling “corporate” is the predictability of his subjects. With limited exception of the few dozen episodes I’ve seen this year, he has an affinity for nature settings. You’ll see him paint a tree in the final five minutes. He’ll add small eclecticism to the fields though rarely add any larger sense of nature. There’s no animals to speak of. I’m sure there’s audiences who find it attractive, but in a time where I’ve fallen in love with artists like Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, I’d love to see something richer going on. Then again, does Ross even care about cityscapes? Maybe it’s my job to take what he’s taught me and evolve my own style.
For as much as I could spend the rest of this essay complaining about Bob Ross’ limitations, I think it’s to ignore my greater point. I’m never going to be a painter. I’m not sitting there with my Van Dyke Brown painting an orchard. I could only imagine how much more difficult it was to follow along in the 80s when there was limited ability to pause and fill in the gaps. His calm demeanor may seem laughable, but it’s the type of zen mentality you need to get in the zone. I’m sure some artists can wallop globs at their board and make truly profound works, but for Ross he’s the embodiment of an artist whose show may be repetitive, but it’s far from simple.
The Joy of Painting is one of the greatest stories I’ve seen about the creative process. There are layers to understanding what he’s doing over the course of a half hour. As someone with my own struggles to create in 2024, I put on an episode and find myself slowly reassembling my confidence and remembering why I make art in the first place.
We start with a blank canvas. In theory, our process starts even earlier as we sit around thinking up ideas. However, it’s when you get that blank surface that you find the aspirations starting to fly. Maybe it will take time to know what you’ll fill it with, but there comes a point where you step forward and begin to mold your work into something greater. Like how you mix paint and use different brushes to alter thickness, writing looks like gibberish at first. There’s a good chance there will be mistakes but, as Ross would say, those are “happy accidents” that give our art personality. Like his different tubes of paint, I bring my own experiences and technique to a paragraph, doing what I can to shape the larger narrative. Paragraph 1 could be like the Ross’ skyline. Paragraph 2 could be the mountain range underneath. At some point different things blend with the existing materials, creating definition that makes you see the full picture better. By the end, The Joy of Painting has taken a universal tool to create something personal to Ross. While it takes me longer to produce literature, there is still that dedication to experimentation and taking risks on the odd corners, doing everything to allow your personal perspective to inform that paragraph until it becomes its own breathtaking picture. Maybe it won’t be my best work, but at some point you have to step back and let the public judge it. That’s how The Joy of Painting ends. You are surprised at human ingenuity. Like writing, anyone can paint. What makes Ross special is that it’s made by him.
Is he my favorite painter? Not even close. However, I admire his accessibility. Whereas I could probably go to any community college and probably get a more nuanced lecture on how to make the art that interests me, listening to Ross is like a conversation with your friend. He’s not there to give you a pass/fail grade. He won’t point at your rocks and say that they’re too jagged. Instead he treats painting as a hobby, a personal passion that is unique to everyone. Not everyone is going to draw a Bob Ross work and have any larger success. This is about honing your craft and getting in tune with your personal instincts. That is why Ross is often seen during a lengthy portion of painting discussing what interests him about art. He’s even discussed his love of nature and how he had a pet alligator who bit him. Given his calm demeanor, the self-acceptance of such an alarming detail adds small touches of humor. He’s not trying to be funny, but there is warmth and personality to what he chooses to share. There’s not this sense of oversharing that celebrities will nowadays. However, he’s still capable of making you understand what drives him on an insular level. You see his creative process and begin to think that maybe you can take your own odd experiences and channel it into something that matters. You can hang your finished The Joy of Painting work on your wall or just compare it to last week. Whatever you do, Ross is encouraging you to find a small sense of accomplishment.
I understand that Bob Ross is an odd figure to mention as being relevant in 2024. Few media personalities have meant much to me lately as someone whose desire to create art is struggling between what it means to me and the larger public. At some point you need to risk vulnerability and just create. We all start with a blank canvas, and it’s our job to figure out what to fill it with. The great metatextual narrative in The Joy of Painting is that no two artists are alike. We may borrow the same inspiration, but I’ll never produce a Bob Ross painting. It’ll always be something that reveals something personal. Maybe it’s something that I saw on a walk that afternoon or issues that had been bugging me for a few days. Every life is unique and makes me eager to know if anyone watched The Joy of Painting like some read “The French Chef” and tried to make their version of a public access icon’s work. Is there a “Bob & Bobby” somewhere waiting for a movie adaptation? I don’t know that it would be as fun, but I love how much Ross makes me want to create art.
If there’s any relevance to mine from all of this, it’s that our reliance on A.I. technology is going to greatly impact our enjoyment of creation. A computer has no feeling. It has no originality. While a human interpreting the output of the digital landscape can create art, the wires themselves will never produce something as subversive and multi-layered as The Joy of Painting. It’s not just the landscape. It’s how he created it. It’s the stories he shared along the way. It’s the times that you questioned his process because it looked like swaths of nonsensical colors. To me, seeing how a creator comes to create is more meaningful than immediate gratification. If we let the soulless powers fill social media with bots and prompts, then we are doomed to lose our larger cultural integrity. We need to take a few lessons from Bob Ross and just embrace our happy accidents. It’s how we grow and make the world a lot more interesting. Let us realize that before it’s too late.
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