Sunday Painter
Remembering Bob Ross, 1942 – 1995
by Beverly Cambron, Muncie, Indiana
His Life | July 1995 | How I Started | My Supply List | What He Taught Me | My Painting Log
Hello, and welcome to my little corner of the Internet!
My name is Beverly Cambron. I'm 58 years old, and I was the secretary in the front office of
Cardinal Ridge Elementary School here in Muncie for twenty-nine years until I retired in June of
1998. Since 1985 I have spent nearly every Sunday afternoon in front of the television with an easel,
a palette and a two-inch brush, painting along with Bob Ross. As of last Sunday I have finished
211 paintings. Some of them are pretty good! Some of them are in the garage facing the wall.
My son Jason set up this computer for me last Christmas and said, Mom, you should make a page about
your paintings. So I did, and it turned into a page about Bob, because you can't talk about one
without the other. If you painted along with him too, I hope you'll write and tell me. I'd love to
know I'm not the only one with titanium white on her kitchen curtains.
His Life
Bob Ross was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, on October 29, 1942. His father was a carpenter, and
Bob worked with him as a young man. That is how he lost the tip of one finger, which you would never
notice on the show unless somebody told you, and now I've told you, so you'll look.
He joined the Air Force at eighteen and stayed twenty years. Much of that time he was stationed in
Alaska, and that is where he saw the mountains and the snow and the big evergreens that ended up in
nearly every picture he ever painted. He rose to master sergeant. He took a painting class while he was
up there and started painting in his spare time, and he sold some of his little landscapes to tourists.
The way of painting he became famous for is called wet-on-wet. You paint into paint that is still wet,
instead of letting each layer dry, so you can finish a whole picture in one sitting. He learned it from a
painter named Bill Alexander, who had his own painting show on public television, and for a while Bob
taught classes for him. When he left the Air Force in 1981 he set out to teach it on his own.
The Joy of Painting started on PBS in January of 1983. Most of it was taped right here in Muncie,
at our public television station. (I must have driven past that building a hundred times. I never once went
in, and I'm sorry now that I didn't.) He made 403 half-hour programs, and the last new ones were made in
1994. Every one of them starts with a blank white canvas and ends with a finished painting, in less time
than it takes to bake a cake.
Everybody remembers the hair. The way I heard it, he got the permanent to save money on haircuts, and
then it became so much a part of how people knew him that he was stuck with it. He also loved animals and
took in hurt and orphaned ones, and sometimes a little squirrel he was raising rode along in his shirt
pocket on the show. My grandkids liked those episodes best of all.
July 1995
Bob Ross died of lymphoma on the Fourth of July, 1995, in Orlando. He was 52 years old.
He kept his illness private, and I didn't know he had been sick. I heard it on the radio, in the
kitchen, one morning that July, a few days after he passed. I remember I set the coffeepot down and
just stood there. My husband Ron came in and asked what was wrong, and I said, Bob died, and Ron, who
has heard me talk about Bob Ross every Sunday for ten years, knew exactly who I meant.
That Sunday I set up the easel the same as always and I couldn't paint. I didn't paint for the rest of
July. In August my granddaughter Sydney, who was three, climbed up on the stool and asked when we were
going to make the mountains again, and so we did. It's number 155 in my log. It isn't very good, and
it's one of my favorites.
Our station still shows his programs on Sunday afternoons, and I still paint along. It's a funny thing
to learn from somebody who isn't here anymore. But I suppose that's true of every book in the library.
How I Started
For Christmas of 1984 my daughter Wanda gave me a starter set of oil paints and a canvas, because I
had been saying for two years that I could do that. My first painting was in January of 1985. It was
supposed to be a mountain lake. It looked like somebody had spilled a casserole. I painted along every
Sunday anyway, and around number 9 a tree came out looking like a tree, and I was hooked.
At first I couldn't keep up with him. He'd say he was going to put in a little bush and I would still be
on the sky. So I started taping the program on the VCR, and I paint along with the tape and push pause
when I fall behind. Ron calls it the Bob Ross Pause Button. It's worn out on two VCRs.
In 1993 I took a weekend class from Priscilla Charley, a certified Ross instructor, in the classroom at the
back of a craft store over in Anderson. Ten of us in aprons, each with an easel. She showed me how to load
the knife properly (I'd been doing it wrong for eight years!) and how to make a mountain that looks like it
has snow on it instead of frosting. I painted a winter cabin on the Saturday and a seascape on the Sunday.
They're numbers 117 and 118, and they're hanging in my sister Phyllis's front room.
My Supply List
People ask me what they need to start. This is what's on my card table:
| Liquid white |
A thin white you roll onto the canvas first, very thin, so the colors slide and blend.
This is the whole secret of wet-on-wet. Without it you're just painting. |
| Titanium white |
The thick white, for clouds, snow and highlights. I go through it faster than anything.
Buy the big tube. |
| Phthalo blue |
A very strong blue. A little dab will turn a whole pile of white into sky. Too much and
everything on the canvas turns blue, including you. |
| The other colors |
His palette had thirteen. The ones I use most are Prussian blue, sap green, Van Dyke
brown, alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre and midnight black. |
| The two-inch brush |
For skies, water, and almost everything else. You'll wonder how something so big can
paint something so small. |
| The fan brush |
For evergreens, grass and the little ripples on the water. When you get the knack of a
tree with the fan brush, you'll paint them everywhere. |
| The knife |
A painting knife, not a kitchen knife! For mountains, rocks, cabins and fence posts.
Load it with a little roll of paint along the edge and barely touch the canvas. |
| Also |
An easel, odorless thinner, a coffee can with a screen in the bottom for cleaning
brushes, paper towels, a liner brush for the little branches and your signature, and 18-by-24 canvases.
And old clothes. I mean it. |
About cleaning brushes: you swish the brush in the thinner, then you whack it against the leg of the
easel to knock the thinner out. Bob always grinned when he did that part, and I do too. Ron had to put
an old shower curtain behind my easel after the first year.
What He Taught Me
I won't try to write down how Bob said things. Nobody could say them like him. But here are the ideas
I've carried around for fourteen years, in my own words.
About mistakes. He didn't believe in them. If something went where you didn't mean it to, that
was just something that happened, and your job was to decide what it was going to become. A smudge
in the sky could be a bird. A blob by the lake could be a bush. A whole wrong mountain could be fog. I
was a school secretary for twenty-nine years, and I wish I had heard that idea when I was twenty.
About trees. He never left a tree standing all by itself for long. He thought a tree alone looked
lonesome, so before he was done there would be another one beside it. I do the same thing now, every
time. Ron says my paintings look like a family reunion.
About whose painting it is. He always made it clear you could move the tree, leave out the
cabin, or put the mountain somewhere else. It was your canvas, and you got to decide. For somebody who
spent her working life doing what the principal and the school board and the parents needed, that was
a very big thing to hear on a Sunday afternoon.
About talent. He believed anybody could paint. What people call a gift, he thought, is mostly
just wanting to do something and sticking with it long enough. I am living proof. Look at number 1 in
my log, and then look at number 211.
About being gentle. He was soft-spoken on every program, every time. I read once that he'd
had enough hollering in the service to last him. I don't know if that's so. But I know that half an hour
of somebody being kind to you through the television every week does something good to a person.
My Painting Log: all 211, and who has them
Other Painters
If oils aren't your cup of tea, Iris Coleman, a retired art teacher, has a lovely page of weekly
watercolor lessons for beginners: Watercolor Wednesdays. Watercolor is
a whole different animal (you can't scrape it off and start over!), but she explains it so plainly
that I'm tempted.
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