Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed

Bob Ross is used to painting a landscape in 26 minutes,

slightly less than the length of an episode

in his popular television series.

The series is The Joy of Painting .

- - Hello, I'm Bob Ross.

If this is your first time with us,

then let me extend a personal invitation for you to get brushes and paint along

and spend a relaxing half hour enjoying some of nature's masterpieces.

I think each of us, sometime during our life,

has wanted to paint a picture.

I think there's an artist hidden in the bottom of every single one of us.

Here, we will try to show you how to bring that artist out.

When you paint like this for any length of time,

you begin seeing things in your painting.

When you see these things, take advantage of 'em.

Take advantage of 'em, use 'em. They're like... they're like gifts.

Use 'em.

- - That's why I paint.

It's because I can create the kind of world that I want,

and I can make this world as happy as I want it.

Shoot, if you want bad stuff, watch the news.

Who's this?

- Bob Ross! - This is Bob Ross!

This is the most famous painter in the history of the universe.

Here's the man who does so much magic in one half hour on PBS every week.

Bob Ross painted this.

- Is that fabulous? -

Yeah.

I'd like to introduce you today to my son, Steve.

- Steve, glad to have you with us. - Well, thanks, Dad.

I've been wantin' to get this story out for all of these years.

Yeah, long time.

There have been some hard days in the past, no doubt about that.

I tell you, the best mountain painter in this technique

is probably my son, Steve.

Boy, that rascal. Whew.

He can paint some mountains.

Maybe we'll get him on here before the series is over.

Of course, he never could tell anybody... anything about it.

He was always...

pretty quiet... about the whole thing.

It's gonna be difficult to get people to do interviews for this film.

There's no doubt in my mind.

What they did was shameful.

And people should know that.

They should know.

On this canvas, I have absolute and total power.

I can always escape to this piece of canvas

and create any illusion that I want.

And now, here's Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford.

Hi, everybody.

Hi, Reeg.

Hi, everybody. Nice to see ya. Tuesday, December 3rd, 1991.

I'm just looking over here at, uh, Bob Ross.

I thought, for a minute, Bob was gonna do our portrait.

Bob is looking at us, and he's painting a mountain. I dunno...

He does... He's famous for his landscapes, mostly, Reeg.

- Bob, do you do portraits? - Not very well.

I... I do mostly trees and bushes.

Yeah, you do a great bush and tree.

Just out of memory, huh, Bob?

Yeah, I lived in Alaska about 12 years, so a lot of my scenes come out of Alaska.

Whew.

- - How you feelin'?

Uh... tired.

Yeah, this all happened so long ago.

Really havin' to pry the memories outta my head.

My father started out

painting the old metal gold miners' pans with my mother.

When we met, he loved to paint.

He would paint sometimes till two in the morning,

and he had to be at work at eight.

Bob was in the Air Force.

He got orders for Alaska.

We got married.

And then, a few months later,

I got pregnant with Steve.

Bob loved the forest, the animals, the trees.

I mean, he loved it.

I look at a lot of nature.

And if painting teaches you nothing else,

it'll teach you to look at nature with different eyes.

Bob believed in doing something worthwhile,

something he enjoyed.

The biggest thing was his painting.

What is he doing now? He's starting a new painting?

He's gonna finish it...

Within 30 minutes, he'll finish a painting.

Is that the background? You do background first?

Yeah, we're gonna use this tiny two-inch brush

- to put in a happy little background. - Yeah.

He's a happy guy, that Bob, isn't he?

- I'll show you how to fix it. -

Just a happy guy. Hey, Bob.

We'll give you double scale if you let us cut your hair in February.

- -

The world is wondering if that's a perm.

- No? That's natural? - Well, you gonna tell my secret?

A lot of people spend an awful lot to get hair like that, and...

God gave that to you, right?

Well, God and my hairdresser did.

He was always a hair guy.

He loved messing around with different hairstyles,

as we can all see with his Afro on television.

The Afro was not real.

It was... a perm... a perm, and Bob liked to call that

"having his springs tightened" every few months.

And, of course, I remember him painting.

Every day, I would just have my jaw dropping open, you know,

looking at these beautiful works of art that just came outta nowhere.

Hi. Um... Do you wanna... Let's... let's start in the back.

- Yeah, sure. - We'll walk to the back.

Uh, show us the... old studio.

We'll go see where the joy really began.

- Let's check it out. -

My first meeting of Bob was 42 years ago.

He decided to take a painting class from me.

For the first assignment,

I just asked them to paint a picture of the thing that you love most.

Instantly, I knew he was an accomplished painter.

So, one thing that I definitely don't want to do

is... put forth the idea that I was Bob's teacher.

Many of the class would lay down their brushes

and come over to see what Bob was doing.

And you know, he loved an audience.

Always did.

My dad started off with traditional-style painting,

but he got tired of that.

My father was the type of man that, he would be on one project,

and in his mind,

he would be halfway through the next project

at the same time.

He had so many different plans

that those are the things he filled his head with,

rather than... uh, anything that was happening at the current time.

My parents, they had a pretty shaky relationship.

Eventually divorced.

We were livin' in Spokane, Washington, at that time.

Then he met Jane Zanardelli.

She had been base commander's secretary

on Air Force bases we lived on.

She was just head over heels for my father.

And he absolutely loved her to death.

But my father was always thinking about the next painting.

Hooray! That's what we have to do.

I have to put myself in that almighty bubble.

Bob saw a video done by William Alexander,

and he was very taken with what William was doing.

It almost made me angry the first time I saw Alexander on TV,

that he could do in a matter of minutes what took me days to do.

It got to be fast. Don't fiddle around for hours.

Too many details there.

People what don't paint,

they would think that guy works a whole year on that painting.

An oil painting can take days, months, even years to paint.

Bill Alexander accelerates everything with this wet-on-wet technique.

First, I put my almighty Magic White on.

He'll usually pre-prime a canvas with gesso, white, gray, or black.

Touch of Prussian blue.

See? Not too much paint.

And then he's putting oil paint on top of that.

The proper name for it is "alla prima," the first attempt.

It allows for certain things that you cannot achieve with dry paint.

In the mid-15th century,

it was used for hair

and certain fabrics,

just to give the effect of textures and movement.

The most famous instance, perhaps, of alla prima is Impressionism.

So, alla prima is a very, very, very old invention.

Bob said, "I really would like to meet this man."

He'd pretty much had enough of military life.

He just wanted to paint.

I knew a woman that would invite William Alexander

down to her studio for a workshop.

Bob and William hit it off nicely.

I saw Alexander on television,

and like millions of other people, I fell in love with him.

And it took me about a year to find him.

I studied with Bill, and when I retired from the military,

they offered me a position with Magic Art Company

as a traveling art instructor.

He was teaching classes up and down the East Coast,

selling paint and selling canvases and brushes,

which were always a big part of these programs.

I met Bob Ross at the Muncie Mall in 1982,

and he was in there doin' a painting demonstration.

I was fascinated by him 'cause I already painted.

We had so much in common that... we just became friends.

There was a white-haired lady there with him.

She was there to help sell paintings.

Later, I found out that that was Annette Kowalski.

I'd like to introduce you to my partner and longtime friend, Annette Kowalski.

- Annette, welcome to the show. - Thanks, Bob.

My father met the Kowalskis through Annette,

who came to take a painting class from Bill Alexander.

Annette had already been a good artist.

There was no classes available from him,

but she found out there was a protégé of Bill Alexander

named Bob Ross.

She was... looking for something,