Painters Online Logo

Login/register

01778 395174

Now - what do you do?

Welcome to the forum.

Here you can discuss all things art with like-minded artists, join regular painting challenges, ask questions, buy and sell art materials and much more.

Make sure you sign in or register to join the discussions.

Hang on Studio Wall
Author
Message
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, NAPA

  • Prestige User
  • Reputation: 20301
  • Last active:
  • Posts: 7124
Posted
You see a young man on YouTube, painting in oils.  He's using Bob Ross paints, and Bob Ross techniques.  Normally, I'd say well - Ok - lovely: if this is the best you can do, well you carry on doing it.  But this, actually not so young man: he's been around for a while. is still wedded to bloody Bob and his ghastly paints and ghastlier methods - and you KNOW he'd be so much better if he'd just ditch the bloody lot.  What do you do?  I suspect the wise person does nothing - just accepts defeat, realizes that this method is at the limit of his comfort zone, does not try giving him the shock of saying 'this approach you've signed up to is total nonsense, for God's sake get out of it now' - and that's what I do, nine times out of ten, because it really doesn't make a lot of difference.  But - you find someone potentially capable - what do you do?  Try to liberate them from the Bob Ross cage?  Try to release them?  Just don't interfere?   Whatever you do, please don't tell me that Bob Ross and William Alexander before him did no harm: of course they did - huge, talent-sapping damage.  I probably just shouldn't intervene, but the painters those two buggers have removed from contention are legion - their fundamentally unsound methods actively trapped people, and still do, in techniques entirely inimical to any version of sound oil painting.  And - may I be frank? - I just loathe them for it; I really do.   I have to say I doubt that any doubts i may express will limit or reduce their adherence to these two old shockers' methods - once you've invested in their approach, and their materials, you're going to find it hard to renounce them (a bit like the Jehovah's Witnesses, and with a similar degree of lunatic loyalty).   But I mourn people who could have been real artists, yielding to this hogwash.   Let us, at least, not encourage them?  

Alan Bickley

  • Prestige User
  • Reputation: 9035
  • Last active:
  • Posts: 3414
Posted
In the majority of cases, I think that this is the limit of their artistic ambition. They aren’t (and have no interest) in advancing further, this is their comfort zone.  Watching Bob’s dreadful daily TV programmes is the height of their aspirations or ambition, they actually want to paint like Bob Ross... Difficult for many of us to understand, there’s a whole world of new exciting ideas and subjects to explore, realistic subjects, not fantasy island stuff, but they seem  blind to all of this!

Peter Davison

  • Forum Expert
  • Last active:
  • Posts: 533
Posted
Sometimes when another experiment has demonstrably failed i almost feel like reaching for the Bob Ross button, but then something drags me back!
Front page

Alan Green

  • Forum Expert
  • Last active:
  • Posts: 557
Posted
Do experiments really fail, or do they just give us an unexpected set of results? Keep on experimenting, in as radically mad scientist fashion as you can.
my profile pic10

Lewis Cooper

  • Prestige User
  • Reputation: 4090
  • Last active:
  • Posts: 1638
Posted
You're so right, Alan.  Most of my pictures start with a definite destination in mind, usually they arrive somewhere else.  It's a sort of Ryanair kind of painting.  I think I'll rename my art folder 'tales of the unexpected.'
IMG_6882

Paul (Dixie) Dean

  • Prestige User
  • Reputation: 13915
  • Last active:
  • Posts: 4537
Posted
And I thought it was only me that set off and it changed as I went along, pleased in in such good company Lew. I never looked at the paintings of the two artist mentioned, but I did last night, had a bloody awful night, but that was probably  to due to the heat.
profile

Tony Auffret

  • Forum Expert
  • Last active:
  • Posts: 494
Posted
As hobby painter, I can see the attraction of a formulaic approach that gives you a high chance of something that looks like a 'professional' painting.  Like it or not, Bob Ross was an artist/art teacher by profession, and of course there is always the added argument that 'it must be good, it's on the telly.'  What surprised me is that a Google image search for Ross or William Alexander paintings, reveals an incredibly narrow subject range.  I am not sure which is the most difficult to believe, that it's a limitation of the technique, or a limited vision by the artists.  Either way is seems to lead down a cul-de-sac.  Whereas it is easy to set aside painting by numbers, because you can get a reasonable result quite readily without the numbers, even if you only copy famous paintings, I can imagine the Ross method is harder to shake off.  If it is something that gives you a veneer of 'professional quality' and stepping outside of the Ross zone reveals you as a struggling amateur, then it must be difficult to resist stepping backwards rather than forwards.  Lost opportunity there may be, but there is no shame if it is your hobby and you enjoy it.  Luckily perhaps, I have never been tempted by the Bob Ross method, probably because if I ask myself the question 'would I want to have a Bob Ross style painting hanging on my wall?', the answer is a definite no!  (The same would apply to Thomas Kinkade).