Bob ross gay

Bob Ross, Populist Artist

Art and Culture

A Netflix documentary and a new motion picture about the beloved American TV painter explore a animation marked by widespread success and personal betrayal.

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The Joy of Painting—a TV series hosted by American painter Bob Ross, on which he would conjure up Alaskan landscapes in just 27 minutes of airtime—ran for 403 episodes between 1983 and 1994. Eventually syndicated to almost 300 PBS stations nationwide, it attracted over 80 million daily viewers of varying ages and backgrounds. According to research conducted by Bob Ross, Inc., only three percent of these viewers actually painted along with Ross. The rest just watched, mesmerized by the pioneer of autonomous sensory meridian response.

Ross’s hushed, melodic tones, the kind rasp of his brush against canvas, and the scraping of his palette knife combined to send the audience into a pleasurable stupor as enchanting snowy mountains or verdant bluffs appeared before them on a double primed 18” x 24” canvas. Ross succumbed to blood cancer in 1995 at the age of 52, but on what woul

Amongst the pantheon of notable public television personalities, Bob Ross easily ranks alongside the likes of Mr Rogers and Elmo as a star who is almost universally loved and valued by the public. Despite being famous the world over for his balmy, soothing demeanour, his demonstrate The Joy of Painting and his astounding ‘fro, we grasp surprisingly little about arguably one of the best famous artists in latest times.

This is partially because, for some reason, nobody ever really asked Bob Ross to perform any interviews and he only gave a handful of them over the course of his life. In truth, in one of the surprisingly several quotes from the man himself that don’t come from his show, he stated “I never turn down requests for interviews. I’m just rarely asked”. However, in another interview Ross gave with Egg Magazine, who specifically sought him out because they realised nobody knew anything about him, Ross sheepishly admitted that he liked to “stay hidden” adding that he was “sort of hard to find“. In fact, Ross was so rigid to find that PBS once ruined track of him, though it would seem few, if anybody, noticed, until Ross called to le

The Threads That Hold Us Together: A Conversation with Ross Gay

Montserrat Andrée Carty: So much of your work is about the link between joy and sorrow, and about connection. You've said when we know sorrow is not unique to us, we might be less likely to be overcome by that sorrow. I had this recent exposure at my MFA residency with a classmate of mine, we discovered that we shared the same trauma. And when we had this discovery, we laughed. I was thinking about this later because, of course, it wasn't funny, and it wasn't that we were laughing because it was funny, but I think perhaps it was sort of like this physical reaction to a lightness that we were not alone in our pain.

Ross Gay: Yes. I realize that experience of having my own devastation or sorrow or heartbreak, being made aware that my heartbreak is not unusual to me, that it is, in fact, common to others, at least someone else and probably lots of other people. That's kind of one of the things that I perceive is why joy is really interesting; the way I deliberate of it is a really interesting state or emotion or whatever you call it, because as far as I'm concerned, it implies or it understands or it carries with it the

Bob Ross

Bob Ross (1934-2003), along with Paul Bentley, founded San Francisco’s Bay Area Whistleblower on April 1, 1971. Bentley sold his interest in 1975. Ross put the highest professional standards for the newspaper and, by 1979, Mayor Dianne Feinstein was asking Ross and San Francisco Sentinel publisher Charles Lee Morris to investigate the municipality police department’s response to riots following the sentencing of Dan White for the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk. One of Ross’s most trying times was how to respond to the AIDS crisis beginning in the early 1980s: He decided in 1983 to extensively cover the story. That year, BAR reported that 40 percent of all persons with AIDS were members of minority groups, demolishing the notion of AIDS as a gay white disease. In 1984, as tensions emerged between health concerns and preserving a culture of sexual freedom (the latter supported by his editor, Paul Lorch), Ross sided with health regulations. Lorch left the newspaper. Today, BAR is one of the two oldest weekly LGBT newspapers in the United States, with a circulation of about 29,000. From 1985 until 1998, Ross also published 20 issues of Gay