I just saw a full episode of his show. The fuck? I’m not a painter but I’ve seen my mom paint all my life.
This motherfucker just did in 15 minutes what would take her weeks. Like???
And he did it while talking, in clean fucking strokes. So fucking fast. I saw a literal masterpiece being created in fifteen minutes from nothing. From nothing. It was a blank fucking canvas, man.
I knew of Bob Ross, but I’d never actually seen him paint. Goddamn. How did actual artists react to him? Like, how do you not feel just thoroughly outclassed.
All while this mofo is saying how easy all that he’s doing is while I know for a fact how hard it is. Like, is he just gaslighting everyone?
I’m pro-Bob Ross because I think he helped demystify art for a lot of regular people who might have never gotten into it otherwise.
IMO one of the biggest problems with creative stuff in general is that people have this horrible idea that there are the talented and the untalented, and if you aren’t born special, you don’t get to do it and can’t ever be good at it.
In my view, having a popular mainstream figure break painting down as a learnable skill sort of helped bring it back to regular people.
I agree - I think individuals can have the potential to learn some things faster or take to them easier, but the larger part of improvement in the arts is practice rather than “talent”.
I’ve known people who struggle greatly with 3d visualization, and I personally have difficulty with perspective in 2d art; practice can help to a huge degree, along with some teaching & direction to tackle stuff that may be more fundamentally difficult to wrap one’s head around. “Demystify” is a good term for it.