The Mr. Rogers Of Painting

Sunday, October 9th, 2016

The Mr. Rogers Of Painting popularized “wet on wet” oil painting:

The only public record of any tumult in Ross’ life is in his relationship with the man who taught him to paint, William Alexander. Alexander, who had his own PBS show, The Magic Of Oil Painting, claimed to be the originator of wet-on-wet oil painting, the technique Ross used on Joy Of Painting.

Classical oil painting is a time-consuming process of building up slow-drying glazes to produce a luminescent effect. If a layer is insufficiently dry, colors blend and become muddy. The wet-on-wet technique speeds this process up considerably by controlling the mixing of colors on the canvas so highlights and shadows are created with a quick series of gestures. Once mastered, it becomes easy to whip out a competent, representational image in a very short amount of time.

Bob Ross Painting

Alexander never got over what he felt was Ross’ theft. Without speaking to whether Ross unfairly took credit, it’s fair to say that it’s not the method of paint application that caused Ross to surpass his former mentor in popularity. Watching Alexander highlights just how much Ross’ personality benefits his show. Not simply with his widely quoted peacenik platitudes (as endearing as those are) but also in the rhythm he folds into his tutorials. Ross maintains a smooth, unbroken cadence as he shifts between instructions on brush placement or color mixture to a completely unrelated observation about the epileptic squirrel he’s rehabilitating. Each comment punctuated by the rhythmic pat of the brush or scraping of the palette knife against the canvas becomes almost musical.

Ross’ teacher didn’t have nearly the same on-camera ease. He spoke distractedly in a thick German accent and contemplated how artists suffering from a surplus of imagination led to acts like Van Gogh slicing off his own ear. A host who muses on self-mutilation in a brusque Teutonic inflection just won’t find the same level of enthusiasm among public television viewers as the softcore hippiedom of Bob Ross.

Comments

  1. Borepatch says:

    I used to watch (and quite liked) Alexander’s show. Oddly, I never watched Ross. The Hippy-Dippy stuff was a real turn off.

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