Read Walter Pater on the Mona Lisa. One of the most famous pieces of 19th century art criticism. It was revered BEFORE it got stole.
https://madeleineemeraldthiele.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/walter-pater-on-leonardos-mona-lisa/
It’s worth noting that this was at least partly a calculated move on his part. He very clearly wanted to present a comfortable, relaxed image and his casual clothing added to that presentation. He also wanted relatively simple clothing that wouldn’t clash or detract from what was appearing on the canvas. Perhaps most importantly though, he wanted to keep the appearance of the show relatively timeless. Clothing colors and styles go in and out of fashion but faded denims and a simple shirt always look good.
A bunch of Gils in here today.
I’m sure art critics were aware of it, but the general public didn’t until the image was plastered all over the world’s newspapers when it was stolen. Note how references to it doubled at the time it was stolen in 1911. Wikipedia says it was "not widely known outside the art world and “By 1911, the painting was still not popular among the lay-public.”
JohnGalt of course your eye is drawn to it: it’s now the most recognizable painting in the world. And you’re not actually seeing the painting; you’re seeing Morse’s version of it. More important is the attitude of the painters in the painting. None are painting it, a sign they don’t see it as anything special.
So I’ve been thinking about this thread all day. It’s worth noting I’m an artist for a living (murals mostly).
While it’s true most contemporary artists HATED Ross and didn’t consider him or his productions “art” or “an artist,” a lot of them resented his success. Bill Alexander, his mentor, also resented his success, but happily appeared on the show. He’s been
[quoted]
(Bill Alexander (painter) - Wikipedia)as saying “[Bob] does wet on wet? I INVENTED wet on wet” (no he did not). He goes on to say “it’s not just that he betrayed me; it’s that he thinks he does it better.” Can you imagine someone thinking Bob Ross had a big ego? This only come after the success of the Joy of Painting, which Bob did for free.
Bob did that show FOR FREE!! He made his money through Bob Ross Inc which capitalized on the show’s success by selling “how to” instructional books. To that end, he did each painting from each show 3 times: Once as a rough reference that was stationed off camera during the show for him to refer to and copy. Then he did the live painting during the show. Then after the show he did a 2 hour demo of the painting, more polished, with a photographer clicking a pic every few steps to compile into his books.
He was known to shoot a whole series season in a few short days, clearing his schedule to teach classes (which is how he made his actual living). Imagine 13 episodes of paintings in 2 days. That’s 39 paintings in two days, counting the repaints.
Some people here ask if he painted other things, like people. His son is quoted as saying he never wanted to paint people. That he believed the nuance of expression in one’s face was too complicated to capture (at least not in a half hour). He was known to omit any presence of humanity from his paintings–“no chimneys on the cabins because that indicated a person was in there.”
I believe he achieved exactly what he aspired to do: teach art to everyone. Sure he used chintzy craft-painting methods, but look at what he could accomplish in 30 minutes. I can’t do it and I have a college degree in it.
I saw it mentioned online that he was NOT a landscape artist, he was NOTHING. “Just compare him to an old master’s landscape. LOOK AT THIS PAINTING BY CHURCH.” That’s fine–that’s an AMAZING painting.
…but show me what that painting looked like 30 minutes after the canvas was blank. Think it’d look as good as a finished Bob Ross? Of course it wouldn’t.
All this debate about “what is art” and “is it innovative” was put to bed by Warhol. Soup is art. Just soup. Not to mention conspicuous consumerism brought on by post-modernism, art worth a million bucks such as this stupid red square. I defy anyone to bullshit their way into aggrandizing a solid red square and pretending it means something worth a million bucks. No one sane would see a blood red painting and consider it worth millions without some backlogged lineage that somecrazyhow makes it worth a million bucks.
People are too hard on Bob. He didn’t parade around under the guise of something grander than he was the way Thomas Kinkade did, who did little more than sign a painting done by a series of minions. He also didn’t die in disgrace from alcohol poisoning the way Kinkade did.
I’ve found the replies in this thread very interesting and informative. Thanks to you all for your input so far! I’ve been chewing on them for quite a good part of the day. I look forward to additional thoughts.
My 8-year-old daughter and I both love watching his show, btw. I find his show to be even more of a work of art than his paintings. The show itself provokes emotions in viewers, and awe, and it’s got many unique elements that are recognizable across our culture. I can’t say the same for his paintings, even as they’re technically beautiful. My daughter watches Joy of Painting with her mouth open most of the time. I think the act of him painting, watching the scene unfold and listening to his patter, is what is the most interesting part of it all.
In the first place the BART system doesn’t include the trolley cars.
Now that I’ve got the killjoy business out of the way:
No, he would have been Thomas Kinkade…
point of order:
Robert Kincaid was the hunky National Geographic photographer from the novel (and subsequent musical) The Bridges of Madison County.
Thomas Kinkade was [del]Painter Spice[/del] the soi-disant Painter of Light.[sup]TM[/sup]
There’s a scene in Vonnegut’s Bluebeard* in which the dissatisfied wife of Abstract Expressionist Rabo Karabekian taunts her husband that he (along with the Abstract Expressionist friends he hangs out with) doesn’t actually have the technical skills to create representational art, and that’s why he falls back on such things as solid patches of color, with a contrasting-colored circle in the corner and calls it art. Karabekian’s response is to take a piece of charcoal and create portraits of their two sons on a slab of unpainted drywall in the kitchen.
Awestruck, Mrs. Karabekian asks why he doesn’t do that all the time. His answer is that “it’s just too fucking easy.”
A few pages later, she has decamped with both of their sons AND their portraits, which she removed from the drywall in the kitchen, using a hacksaw.
*It’s still in print, and has my full endorsement as a novel worth reading.
I would never denigrate Expressionist art - even a laymen like myself can see that that shit ain’t simple (also, I have a fondness for Miro). At the risk of sliding into cliche, I was referring to the more conceptual trends popularized over the past half-century or so.
Yeah, I know. 
Frankly, I’m surprised this nitpick took so long!
With regards to Ross vs creators of modern art, Ross is more of a lifelong session musician versus a one hit wonder. He didn’t make great art because he wasn’t trying to make great art. The one hit wonders were trying to make art but usually failing, but their total output was more because you only have to succeed once.
For every museum quality piece you see in a modern art wing there are probably a lot more that just aren’t up to that quality for many of the artists, and they certainly couldn’t make them in 30 minutes. (With the exception of Pollock I suspect, as every museum seems to have its own Pollock so there are probably lots to go around.)
You can’t fairly judge Bob Ross as an artist on the basis of what you saw on his show. The purpose of his show was instruction. He demonstrated basic techniques that could enable anyone to paint a convincing landscape. He was not there to show the world how great an artiste he was and blow viewers’ sox off.
Looks like a scene from Bambi. :eek:
I never watched Bob Ross…too old for his demographic but I watched Jon Nagy all the time as a kid. I think his show was only 15 minutes? I remember it being on before the Mighty Mouse cartoons on Saturday mornings.
Yeah, that is gibberish.
There is, in fact, a difference between science and engineering, which has to do with the goals of the two professions, and thus, how that knowledge is employed (or which branches of knowledge are learned).
Engineers start with a goal - something they want to build, and a set of specifications, parameters or characteristics they wish to achieve. They then look at the stuff they already know about, and figure out how to combine those things in order to get what they want. This may involve inventing something new.
Scientists start with a thing - something they observe, and try to determine the relevant characteristics about that. That is, they try to derive principles, laws, or relationships from something that is unknown or at least not fully known.
Consider the difference between computer science, and computer eningeering. The former takes an abstract typically logically defined notion of a “computer” and derives principles from that. For instance algorithmic complexity, the advantage of qbits, etc. They are not concerned with the difference in heat dissipation of 64GB memory modules, and often can do much of their work without any actual computer at all. In many ways actual computers get in the way of the science - the interest isn’t how a particular DELL computer runs a search algorithm, but how quickly the memory usage grows as the size of the problem approaches infinity (something that would never be realizable on any physical machine).
Computer engineers, however, are very concerned with the construction of actual computers, and thus make engineering trade-offs, e.g. power dissipation vs. signal delay on a bus, etc. These are factors typically ignored by computer scientists. Now you might argue knowing CS helps do CE and understanding CE can allow CS’s to build new kinds of machines to model or measure (for instance, processor in memory architectures, graph machines, etc.) that may not fit traditional von Neumann architectures. I’m not disagreeing with that. But the way they look at the world, the kinds of papers they will write and the contributions they make are different at a fairly fundamental level.
That some engineers may do some science in the course of their efforts, and many scientists do some engineering (to build tools, or even build a new thing they want to observe) of course can and will happen. But that doesn’t make the two titles interchangeable, nor the sets of knowledge that enable those approaches interchangeable.
Yeah, that seems about right. I do wonder if he had his “real” art somewhere and his show art was just for the show.
We can only *really *see what TurbanDude is painting, and it doesn’t even appear to be any of the paintings in front of him. So I think you’re reading way too much into that aspect of it.