Remembering Bob Ross

When winter comes to Michigan and the air is frosty and nippy outside but inside the house is comfy and warm there is one thing that is so special, that makes winter Winter that I just have to describe it here. It generates great memories of sitting with my wife and girls and watching one of the most gentle men in the universe make magic appear on his canvas.

I am talking about Bob Ross.

Wikipedia states:
Bob Norman Ross (born October 29, 1942 in Daytona Beach, Florida; died July 4, 1995) was an American painter and television presenter.
With his calm, patient nature, Ross came to prominence as the creator and host of The Joy of Painting, a long-running program on the Public Broadcasting System in the U.S. Ross died of lymphoma at the age of 52.

Bob Ross is best known as the host of the public television series The Joy of Painting, which ran from 1983 to 1995 and is still shown in reruns in many broadcast areas. During each half-hour segment, Ross would instruct viewers in the art of oil painting using a quick-study technique that kept colors to a minimum and broke paintings down into simple steps that anyone could follow.

He utilized the wet-on-wet oil painting technique, in which the painter continues adding paint on top of still wet paint rather than waiting a lengthy amount of time to allow each layer of paint to dry.[1] Combining this method with the use of large painting knives and fan brushes allowed Ross to paint trees, water, clouds and mountains in a matter of seconds.
In many episodes of Joy of Painting, he noted that one of his favorite parts of painting was cleaning the brush, specifically the act of drying off a brush, which he had dipped in cleaner, by rapping it against the easel frame. He would often smile and even laugh out loud regularly during this practice as he, in his words, "Beat the devil out of it". (I remember this part particualarly well as my family would laugh so hard when he cleaned his brushes)
After his death, Bob Ross Incorporated donated most of his paintings to charities and public television stations.

My family loved Bob Ross. We loved his soft voice and how he would constantly remind us that our painting was our little world and we could do with it what we liked. We could put a happy little tree here or build a little cabin there and, of course, we needed a door to get into our cabin.

I especially loved the winter paintings he would do and today I was fortunate enough to see a rerun on our local PBS station and I just had to sit down and experience the intense joy of watching this wonderful man make magic appear on the canvas and to once again listen to that soft voice remind us that this painting was our little world and we could do with it whatever we wanted.

for a half hour the scariness of the world was kept at bay by the memories of a great, great man doing what he loved to do.