Netflix Exposes the Dark Side of Bob Ross’ ‘Joy of Painting’ Empire
https://news.yahoo.com/netflix-exposes-dark-side-bob-073857675.html
shareWhy the hell should he have a business empire!
He was a terrible painter, really, his real value to the world was as a sort of... pleasant human white noise machine.
In a world where someone can throw their own feces on a wall and have art critics raving about it, I'd say Bob Ross was a great painter.
shareEven if people really have been sneaking stuff out of chimp cages at the zoo and putting it in art galleries, that doesn't make Ross a good painter!
He never pretended to be good, he just wanted to encourage other people to paint.
HE MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN A MASTER ARTIST...BUT THE DUDE WAS AN EXCELLENT PAINTER,AND TEACHER...BEYOND THAT, THE WORK HE DID WITH ANIMALS AND ANIMAL RESCUES WAS AMAZING...A GREAT HUMAN BEING.
shareHe wasn't trying to produce good paintings on his show... or at least I hope he wasn't!
But his whole schtick was about encouraging other people to paint and to show them some easy techniques that could get them started. Bad slapdash paintings actually got his point across better than a good painting, if he'd slapped out anything genuinely amazing in his allotted half hour, people would have thought they'd never be able to do that and given up on the idea of painting.
He may not have been an artistic genius but he helped a lot of people learn to paint, and furthermore I think his work was of great therapeutic value. He was important to a lot of people and, from what I've seen, I think it was more for the fact that he felt like a friend to them than because he taught them some painting techniques.
In any case, it sounds like you haven't watched the documentary. If the film is an honest film, then his business partners screwed him over and then they screwed his son over. Oh, and they also fucked other artists who had shows on TV that they felt were competition.