How I Started

I never painted a thing in my life until I was sixty years old. I don't mean I wasn't any good at it. I mean I never tried. I ran a lathe for thirty-eight years at a gear plant on the east side of town, and in that work you hold a part to a ten-thousandth of an inch or you throw it in the scrap bin. Pictures were for other people.

I retired in the winter of 1993. My wife Jo gave me about three weeks before she said I was going to wear a groove in the kitchen floor. One Saturday afternoon I was turning the dial looking for a ball game, and I landed on Channel 49, our public station here, and there was a fellow with a big head of curly hair painting a mountain lake. I watched him do the whole thing, sky, mountains, trees, water, in less than half an hour. I thought it was some kind of trick. The next Saturday I watched again to see how the trick worked. By the third Saturday I was taking notes.

For my sixtieth birthday that March, Jo and our daughter went together and bought me a set of paints, three brushes, a palette knife and a canvas. I built an easel out of two-by-fours on my workbench, because that's what I know how to do, and I set it up in the garage between the Buick and the lawn mower. I put the VCR on a timer to tape the program so I could pause it and back it up. My first painting was a mountain lake. Jo said it looked like a sand pile next to a puddle. She was right. I painted another one the next week.

That was six and a half years ago. I have finished 212 paintings since, and I still paint in the garage. In the winter I run a space heater, well away from the thinner, and leave the door cracked. Jo says the garage has smelled like paint thinner since 1993 and the Buick smells like it too.

Remembering Him

His name was Bob Ross, and the program was The Joy of Painting. It ran on public television from 1983 to 1994, and from the second season on it was taped twenty minutes up the road in Muncie at WIPB, Channel 49, which is Ball State's station. For years they taped it in one of the old Ball family houses, and later over on the Ball State campus. For the last ten years I worked at the plant, the best-known painter on television was making his pictures twenty minutes from my house and I had no idea. I never met him. I wish I had, just to shake his hand.

Here is what I know about him, and I have tried to stick to what I know.

Fifty-two. When I heard it on the news I went out to the garage and sat on my stool in front of a blank canvas for an hour and didn't paint a thing. He was nearly ten years younger than me, and he'd given me the best hobby of my life without ever knowing my name. I have close to a hundred of the programs on tape, and I still watch one before I start a painting. It's a strange thing to learn something every week from a man who isn't here anymore, but I suppose that's true of every book I ever read, too.

What He Taught Me

That a man can learn something new at sixty. This is the big one. I'd have bet money against it.

Wet-on-wet. In the old way of oil painting, you let each layer dry before the next, and a picture takes weeks. In wet-on-wet you work into wet paint the whole time, and the colors blend right there on the canvas, and you can finish a painting in one sitting. For a man who likes to see a job through before supper, that is the right method.

To loosen up. I spent thirty-eight years working to tolerances. A tree doesn't have tolerances. My first year, I painted every evergreen like I was cutting threads on a bolt, all the branches even. He would make a tree in about ten seconds with one brush, and it looked more like a tree than mine did. It took me a year to stop measuring.

That you can fix it. On a lathe, a mistake is a mistake. On a wet canvas you can scrape it off with the knife and paint right over it, or turn it into something else. I made a rock out of a smudge once and Jo said it was the best rock in the picture.

To be kind to beginners. He talked to the camera like he was talking to one person at a time, calm and easy, never in a hurry. I try to teach my class the same way. More about that below.

Supplies

Here is the palette he used, which is the one I use too. Thirteen colors. That's all he needed, and that's all you need.

And the rest of the kit:

• Liquid white. A thin white paint you brush on over the whole canvas with the two-inch brush before you start, so everything stays wet and blends. This is the secret to the whole method. Use a little. A thin coat. Thinner than that.
• A two-inch brush. For skies, water and almost everything big.
• A one-inch brush. For bushes and smaller trees.
• A fan brush. For evergreens, grass, and waves.
• A liner brush. Long, thin bristles for branches, grass blades, and signing your name.
• Palette knives. For mountains, rocks, cabins and highlights.
• Canvas. Pre-stretched, 18 by 24 inches.
• Odorless thinner, a coffee can to clean brushes in, and more paper towels than you'd believe.
• A good sturdy easel. I built mine. If you want the plans, write to me and I'll draw them up for you. That part I know how to do.
• A palette. I use a piece of Plexiglas from the hardware store, about two feet by a foot and a half, with the edges sanded.

The Basic Strokes

This is how I teach it to my class, in my words, not his. Watch the program and you'll see all of these a hundred times.

The 212

As of this week I have finished 212 paintings. I keep a list in a spiral notebook on the workbench, with the number, the title, the date and where it went. Here's how they break down:

Where are they? About forty are hanging in our house, which Jo says is about thirty too many. Our daughter and both of our sons have a wall full apiece. Nine are hanging at the senior center. Our church auctions a few every fall. A good number went to people who said "I like that one" and didn't expect me to take them seriously. And the worst ones I painted over. I won't say how many.

I know a painting page ought to have paintings on it. I'm sorry there aren't any here yet. I took pictures of my favorites this summer and the film is still at the drugstore, and my granddaughter Lindsay, who is fourteen now and set up this whole page for me two years ago, says she'll scan the prints on the scanner at her school as soon as they come back. When she does, they'll go right here.

In the meantime, you can read the titles of my first fifty, which is a little like looking at somebody's report cards.

My Class at the Senior Center

Two years ago the director of the senior center saw one of my paintings at the church auction and asked if I'd show a few people how. Now I teach a class there every Tuesday morning from nine to noon. Eight people at a time, sometimes ten, the oldest eighty-three. Everybody finishes a painting in one morning. That's the beauty of wet-on-wet.

I'm not any kind of official teacher, and I tell everybody that the first day. I'm just a fellow who learned off the television and wants to pass it on. I don't charge anything. People buy their own canvas and paint, and we've worked out a way to share the brushes so nobody has to spend much to try it.

My rules for the class:

1. Nobody says "I can't." You can. I did, at sixty.
2. No apologizing for your painting. Ever.
3. Thin coat of liquid white. Thinner than that.
4. Everybody signs their painting, even the ones they don't like.
5. Clean your brushes before you go, and knock them inside the wastebasket.

Every Tuesday somebody walks out the door holding a picture they didn't believe they could make. I've done a lot of honest work in my life, but that may be the best of it, and I owe it to a man I never met.

If you'd rather try watercolor, Iris Coleman, a retired art teacher, gives weekly watercolor lessons for beginners on her page. And if you'd like to paint outside in oils, the way I keep meaning to, Robert Sutton keeps a plein air painting diary of his landscapes, wind and all. Both are right here on our street. And over on the next street, Beverly Cambron, a retired school secretary in Muncie, keeps Sunday Painter: Remembering Bob Ross, her own page about him and The Joy of Painting.