King of kitsch’s tragic legacy
Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed is a documentary tribute to the fluffy-haired, softly spoken painter – and an investigation into how his name and likeness have been exploited since his death.
That’s why I paint. Because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. This is the only place I have any power
Watching TV’s most famous artist paint for the first time, you may think you are watching a sarcastic parody. Bob Ross’s appearance is so goofy and his voice so gentle and welcoming, surely nobody could be that sweet?
Ross, with his Afro, a honeyed voice and beaming disposition, became famous in the 1980s for his half-hour instructional television show, The Joy of Painting, which was broadcast around the world.
Within the space of each half-hour episode, he’d make a landscape oil painting, all the while giving a running commentary of tips, relaxing mantras and words of encouragement. Whether you paint along or not, it is undeniably calming to watch and listen as he creates an epic range of misty snowcapped mountains or a sunrise on a clear morning over a lush meadow.
Ross died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1995 – but he has since been revived for a second life, online.
His eccentric loveliness has been embraced by Gen Zs, turning him into one of the “mostmemed” people on the internet.
He has a massive fan base, so when Netflix announced the release of the documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed there was a fair bit of panic. Could Bob Ross, of all people, have done anything worthy of such a damning title?
Fans expected a Netflix true crime-style documentary that would “bust this story wide open”. Yet another beloved icon would be disgraced before our eyes and force us to re-evaluate the morality of man. Netflix gladly played into this, with a trailer saying: “We want to show you the trailer for Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed, but we can’t. Find out why.”
The documentary came out on 25 August, and we did find out why – it was because of fear of legal action, a concern that surely could have been circumvented with clever editing.
The documentary’s trailer, just like its title, was a marketing mislead. Bob Ross fans can be reassured that they will still love him to bits after watching it, though they may come to pity him.
The first half of the film celebrates Ross and runs through his career with the same heart-warming (and slightly tedious) feeling he exuded. The second half gives an ominous sense of the escalating corruption of his legacy, with the last quarter being a dry legal battle for the rights to the Ross name.
The betrayal and greed referred to in the title is that of Annette and Walt Kowalski, the couple who have handled the business side of the Bob Ross brand since his TV show first aired.
Annette was a student of Ross’s back when he was just a dude giving painting classes. At the time, Annette was depressed, but Ross’s charisma brought her back from the brink. A quote early in the film foreshadows her intentions: “I don’t know what you’ve got, but we have to bottle it and sell it.”
Ross’s true talent was as an art therapist. Let’s not beat around that bushy hair – Ross was a king of kitsch. He used a wet-on-wet oil painting technique known as alla prima (“at first attempt”) that accelerated the process and allowed him to do in minutes what other oil painters perfect over days.
It’s noteworthy that, despite interviewing several art historians, director Joshua Rofé never inquires after the merit of Ross’s work as “fine art”. Ross’s inclusive philosophy that anyone could be a painter opposed this kind of critical approach to art. He maintained that anyone could paint and referred to mistakes as “happy accidents”.
His stream of consciousness of unfiltered optimism and calming motivation helped a lot of people. According to his son, Steve, who acts as the main storyteller in the film, the Bob you see on TV is a pretty accurate depiction of the real him, but he did play it up a smidge for the camera.
His Afro was a perm that he would get done every few months to accentuate his already softly spoken and cuddly yet largerthan-life persona.
The title The Joy of Painting was not incidental; it was an allusion to The Joy of Sex, a famous sex manual of the early 1970s. Ross sought out this sensual connotation as a way to attract a female audience. He developed his soothing “liquid tranquiliser” whisper for similar reasons. He was apparently also quite the flirt, and an unlikely sex icon.
Celebrity personalities such as Ross, who are loved primarily for the quality of their perceived character, are often portrayed as one-dimensional, unhuman paragons of goodness. The documentary does an adequate job of acknowledging Ross’s flaws and quirks (there aren’t many, though he may have had an affair with Annette Kowalski). What is affected strongly, however, is our perception of some of his romantic discourses on freedom in The Joy of Painting.
On discovering how the Kowalskis took advantage of Ross, some of the things he says seem almost like a cry for help: “That’s why I paint. Because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. This is the only place I have any power.”
Just as McDonald’s makes a lot of its money from property rather than food, Bob Ross Incorporated made a lot of its money from paint supplies and merchandise, not just the TV series. The Kowalskis squeezed the dollars out of Ross while he was alive but the real tragedy is how they corrupted his legacy after his death.
When he got sick, the Kowalskis realised that when Ross went, so would their business, so they formulated ways to profit off him once he was gone. The film explains that they committed industrial espionage and managed to pressure his family into selling the rights to his name and likeness.
They also made sure that Annette Kowalski remained the only official authenticator of Bob Ross art, opening the door for forgery. The nature of Ross’s art is such that it is fairly easy to emulate – the whole premise of his show was to teach people to paint the way he does. Ross made tens of thousands of paintings in his lifetime, and the Kowalskis have the rights to any and all that exist.
Rofé’s decision to treat Ross’s story like a crime drama is a controversial one. It is still a tribute to Ross, splashed with painted stills to fill in storytelling gaps and colourful footage of the kind of scenes that he loved to paint; but the intention is clearly to bring the public eye to how he’s been exploited.
It’s insane that, contrary to Ross’s dying wish, his son hasn’t seen a penny of the profits of his brand since his death, but it is also tragic for such a sweet man to be remembered as a well-meaning artist who got taken for a ride.
Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed is available in South Africa on Netflix. Contact This Week We’re Watching via tevya@dailymaverick.co.za.