Let's Find Out - (Pt. 2b) The Complete Life of Bob: A Bob Ross Deep Dive: Part 2 | Biography, Soft-spoken, ASMR

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

This is part 2b of my 3-part Bob Ross Deep Dive series: Part 1: His Legacy https://youtu.be/xrqTnUO5Mfc Part 2A and 2B: this audio (broken in two for the podcast audio) Part 3A: The Philosophy of Bob Ross: Ancient History and Modern Leisure Part 3B: The Philosophy of Bob Ross: Industrial to Digital Revolution Let's dive deep into Bob Ross's humble Florida roots, learn about his interests, his friends, mentors, and family, and follow him to Alaska where he cultivated a joy that he'd eventually share with the world. Let's find out what made Bob Ross into the mysteriously placid man who's still winning us over nearly 30 years after his death. A special thank you to all my Patreon supporters over the past few months while I've been diving into this cultural figure who's impacted what I do so profoundly. I hope this series is worth it. -Rich Chapters: Hello Annette, Goodbye Bill Bob Ross, Inc. Why Bob Succeeded: Sincerity, Style, Preparedness, and Vision Bob's Reputation: Andy Warhol, Thomas Kinkade… and Bob Bob Ross, Inc. is not Bob Ross Changing of the Guard: Bob Ross, Inc. Since 2012 Steve Ross's Comeback (with Dana Jester) Main sources: Sex, Deceit, and Scandal: The Ugly War Over Bob Ross' Ghost by **Alston Ramsay** https://www.thedailybeast.com/sex-deceit-and-scandal-the-ugly-war-over-bob-ross-ghost Netflix Documentary: "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed" by Director **Joshua Rofe** and producers **Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone **(https://www.netflix.com/title/81155081) "Happy Clouds, Happy Trees: The Bob Ross Phenomenon" by **Congdon, Blandy, and Cooeyman** (https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Clouds-Trees-Ross-Phenomenon/dp/1617039950) PBS doc "bob ross: the happy painter" and "brush strokes"(official publication of the tv art club by BRI) + communications w various people Minor Sources Directly About Bob/Joy of Painting: https://artsfuse.org/235381/film-review-bob-ross-happy-accidents-betrayal-greed-painting-by-plunders/ - https://thehustle.co/why-its-nearly-impossible-to-buy-an-original-bob-ross-painting/amp/ - https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-bob-ross-owes-happy-trees-forgotten-painter - https://biographics.org/bob-ross-biography-the-man-behind-the-canvas/ - https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/10/bob-ross-inc-joan-kowalski - Alexander Cruz's testimony

I feel young again. Thank you so much for watching me. Bye bye. So they tell the story in the Netflix documentary, I believe, but apparently their oldest child, Annette and Colt. Annette M. Walt's oldest child died in a car crash. Annette was, of course, devastated, as any mother would be. and um walt was apparently a very a very doting husband to his wife and he drove to you know

12 plus 16 hours maybe down to clear water around Tampa on the west coast of Florida and um and uh yeah actually here you go i already got it brought up they were up in virginia all the way down to clear water florida there. Anyways, quite a big trip just to take an art class for a couple days, but Walt and Annette said they drove a thousand miles, precipitated the beginning of Bob Ross Incorporated, and Annette said she signed up for a five-day seminar but saw something special in Bob right away. I couldn't believe what I saw, people were mesmerized by him, and she said she didn't even paint. She ended up just following him around, watching him interact with people.

And I was mesmerized, too. I just thought, man, he really knows how to woo people, I think. And then her famous saying was, let's put it in a bottle and sell it. And that's exactly what they did. They proposed. They took him out to her birth. her joint, both of them, in the last day of class. And she said, you know, Bob, it's a shame I had to drive 1,500 miles to take this class.

Would you mind, you know, would you be open to coming to Washington, D.C. area, Virginia, D.C. And Bob apparently agreed, and they struck a, you know, a handshake deal right then and there. Bob would teach the classes, obviously, and Annette and Walt, mostly Annette, would be effectively be Bob's manager, being in charge of orchestrating and setting up the classes. And in turn, they dipped their hands in the business model that Bill had already established. that Bob was currently doing for Bill, which was you sell, you teach the class, and that's a fee, but you also sell the paint supplies with which you taught the class at the end of class. And from the tools, the brushes, the paints, the canvas, the magic wipe, and that was Nets business model. So it's from this point on that we can see Bill slowly exited the picture.

It was not for a couple of years, probably around 84, 85. All three of them, no, no, four of them, sorry, Bob, Jane, and then Annette and Walt. All four became equal partners in Bob Ross Incorporated when they started a couple years later. after being successful enough at selling the paints and scheduling classes. Joan said, you know, this wasn't anything new for Annette in Walt. They clearly had always, although Walt was a CIA, not agent, but he worked for the CIA. and they always had a couple kids I guess five or six kids and they had an entrepreneur streak in them and they were always trying to start businesses and uh joan the current and president of bob ross incorporated said that they'd perpetually been in motion with various side hustles to augment waltz salary and they to be able to you know send their kids to college she came home one from college one Thanksgiving or something like that and found the

tablecloth completely covered with supplies grabbed into the family's dining room so yeah the the Kowalskys began managing the finances of Bob in the company to begin the book that she wrote the best of joy of painting. As an introduction, the, uh, says I traveled with Bob for many years and I, you know, recognize he had something special

right away. And she saw the deeper meaning in it. She saw the value he was bringing in, you know, the effectiveness, the giving people purpose, um, whether, you know, helping all sorts of

people, grandmothers, the timid, people, she lists people with particular ailments that Bob helped to add a stroke or poor eyesight or overweight, crippled and says

as the joy of painting was born so was the joy of Bob Ross it's a vehicle to enrich your life Bob gives you desire motivation accomplishment

confidence and self-worth and consider this book a guide to putting your dreams on canvas into this more and part three is essentially this is a build-up for all the these are little teasers I'm dropping in about how we can really view what Bob was doing and in the actual impact he did and the legacy that he was carrying on from previous generations of painters and thinkers and thinkers. And Bob is well aware

that this was a means of expression painting. And it encompassed a philosophy of life. When you paint, it's essentially his idea, and to me it's sound, is that to paint, you have to have a vision and you execute that vision.

And painting is essentially and that's the way it is in life too and anything you do you have to have a vision you have to visualize it and in order to be effective in the world and to do anything successfully you have to be able to clearly

visualize it I remember Jim Carrey he's a famous example of someone who promotes it because he lived it he said uh I think when he was destitute completely his whole family was broke and he was Canadian he was in I think in LA or something and he was on top of the drove after a stand-up gig early on in his career and wrote himself like a million

dollar check I think was his famous story you guys have all probably heard this but for those who haven't it's a really interesting story of the origins of or really the effectiveness of motivation and challenging yourself and having a vision that you want so bad that you know you will see through clearly visualizing and seeing what what it is that you want and it helps you make it more easy and more accessible to make the intermediate steps clear in your head in order to be able to achieve that and Jim Carrey wrote himself a million dollar check when he was dirt broke and said he gave himself something like five years or so to be able to actually cash that check and what he did was carry that check around with him that whole time and eventually

apparently cashed it one day when he had earned enough he was able to cash that middle that million dollar check and he explicitly talks about being able to visualize success and that was his conduit that was his career was you know comedy and and stand up and being a comedy actor and bob's was being a teacher and a paint teacher and someone who used painting as a way to exercise the imagination of those he taught and Walt being the even more behind the scenes if Annette was his manager Walt was almost the the manager of maybe the maybe the orchestrator of some of the more really behind the scenes business deals more the legal end and some of the business moves and one that was very fateful was his idea to ask Bill as a

favor to air this commercial spot and they eventually did it twice so at least in 84 Bill was still on good terms with Bob and it probably soon after that that's when they really separated and what happened was Bill and so Bill was of course making profit off of all the paint supplies in the classes Bob and Annette were teaching and selling and Walt and the net came up with ways to get more exposure for the classes that they were booking

all along the East Coast and you know the documentary paints them as very greedy and I think they were it doesn't look good for them but what they did do was they fronted

a lot apparently they mortgaged their entire house they mortgaged their house to fund aspects of the business and the how-to books the first books were a part of that because it cost something like $30,000 to create a how-to book and they fronted the money to be able to do that and it paid off for them in the long run but they also took out ad newspaper and television ads they um

what else did they do they they made they funded a hotline so that people could call and uh you know

have constant access to ask where classes would be and that cost a lot of money and um Walt geniusly tracked where Bill's program

was most popular and apparently that was near Muncie Indiana and she Chicago in the Midwest. That was their Bill's largest following. And they asked Bill, who was, of course, generous and happy to help, if he would film a TV spot that I'm sure Walt and Annette had contrived, where Bill metaphorically and literally handed over the paintbrush to Bob. and this was hugely effective in, of course, gaining any audience that was loyal to Bill, knowing that they had Bob, Bob had gained Bill's personal approval and was his official successor. They did this in 1992, 82.

They did it again in 84. and that was really when Bill's show, I think ended in 82, I guess. Bill ended up having to do other paint shows because I think he felt that Bob would stay with him forever. But in 84, maybe it was 85, shortly after doing that segment with Bob and Bill, the Kowalski's and the Rosses would, like I said, established Bob Ross Incorporated and that would be a pretty big departure from Bill and they would start making their own paint supplies copying Bill making thick paints making the magic white instead calling it liquid white

which is what Bob did around season 7 while doing this commercial nope I didn't skip too much there maybe I did but there is a you know within a year or so it a successive you know a successive series of events that really showed that you know the Kualski's and the Rosses we already talked about they both meant business they were in it to really try to make money and to make good things happen in your heart and I'm sure not being their own that you know having to be a middleman for Bill was of course not the most financially savvy thing to do And I think Bill, you know, Bill knew that.

And I'm sure he understood, and there's even comments that I showed in part one that suggests that Bill even encouraged Bob to start his own line of products and company. But maybe, you know, maybe Bill didn't realize how that would actually, how much that would hurt his own business model. And I'm sure it did. because Bob, after his first season, kind of, sorry, that's herny. It did okay. But the second season, when they upped the production value, and they filmed it and based it in Muncie, Indiana, which was the heart of the Midwest,

where Bill's audience was the largest. He had the most demand. Of course, Bob started having the most demand, too, and within a couple years, I mean, I'm sure it was less than that. Within two years, I'm sure. Bob accelerated from 20 to 40 to 80, exponential exposure on PBS stations all across the nation. And with that, of course, comes Bob's. Successive Bob's more and more classes, more paint, paints and supplies.

sold as well. With TV that 1982 commercial initially needed, I guess they filmed it probably on their own with their own equipment and then to be able to pay for and put

it on actual television on smartly and very intelligently on both sides of bills show. They were able to show a commercial and this was an unusual thing but PBS being largely government funded. Don't, doesn't normally do commercials on PBS, but they were trying out.

I think they had lost funding around that time. And they had a severe deficit. And it was actually probably around the time we're going to see a, might see a testimony. I might not have put that in. But Fred Rogers went before Congress to testify how important his show and other childhood children's educational programming and educational programming in general was how much of a service how beneficial it was even if there was an immediate financial rewards you know incentives

there how educating the general public and of course the children in particular how important that is for developing healthy individuals who then in turn of course create a healthy society. One of the aspects we will be talking about in part three. This was interestingly the same time as that when funding in general, the government was short-funded in general at that time, short on funding, and they were pulling funding from all sorts of things

they deemed not necessary or essential. and Fred Rogers famously got a $20 million budget increase for PBS because of his powerful testimony. Very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence. How do we encourage reflection? So they made a lot of smart business moves And Bob got exposure And during that I think it was during

Filming that commercial Was just a way initially for Bob And Annette to be able to get more classes filled And it appears that they weren't Actively seeking out to start a painting program Of their own But when they took it to a local PBS station near Virginia in Virginia, to get converted to be able to be on the proper format to be run on the TV equipment,

run the commercial on TV station equipment. One of the PBS managers there, our producers saw the tape and was impressed and suggested somehow that they tried to do a series. Of course, they already had Bill as a blueprint. Didn't have to really reinvent the wheel there. But there was just bad sound, pipes creaking. Apparently the station failed to follow up on their end of the bargain and create intro and outro credit scenes.

So it was just a bare bones. It probably cut right to Bob, who was, of course, green, wet behind the years as far as being a TV show host. you know even though he'd um got his you know earned his stripes on the road for a couple years at that point teaching it's still a different thing talking into a screen it definitely is weird i can only imagine if i had other people around me looking at me and critiquing everything i was doing here i probably would have quit this long ago this series got him of course up and running with the idea to do the joy of painting but it ultimately the relationship with them

for pretty much those reasons dissolved they just clearly weren't the smartest pbs station for them to choose to be based out of and they toured for another year or so until they found munsy in their Indiana. And this is where the magazine has a fills us, fills us in the station manager, Jim Needham, who remembers Bob showing up in 83, the winter of 83, to pitch the joy of painting. This would have been, they already would have had Virginia season one under their belt. And they were in town to promote a painting class, of course. Probably bought a couple of ads in the papers and stop by the PBS station say, hey, will you run our commercial with Bill Alexander on it? And they said, hey, well, it just happened that a committee in Congress recently allowed for 10 stations in the nation to sell commercials, and that one, they were one of them. And so Bob and Annette bought a commercial. spot right outside of Bill's shell it went extremely well and Jim described Bob as just having an

easy-going charm with an utter lack of pretense and we saw him Larry Dyer a program manager there I guess so Jim was the station manager Larry Dyer said the program manager says we saw him complete a painting in 26 minutes and 46 seconds. And he said, my goodness. Well, how many of these can you do? And Bob said, how many do you want? So how many do you want to do? They apparently produced them for $1,000 an episode.

Seems like a lot, but, you know, I'm sure they cost the crew, the editing all the time it takes, the facilities can't be used for anything else during the shooting so you're renting out the facility um says the series was picked up by around 40 other PBS stations right away a modest but successful showing but momentum came quickly b b b uh wyp b the station in munsey so the station in munsey it was a small studio that apparently quote bore little resemblance to a real TV studio I guess it was a re

you know adapted house but Needham station was adept at doing the lot with little in three days the content had been turned into 13 episodes

of series two and was offered by satellite to other Sorry, that's Ernie again, guys. I need to get them a carpet to lay on, maybe, and they'll be a little quieter. It was offered by satellite to other PBS stations. And Needham made a deal with Annette and Bob, saying that if 25 outlets picked up the show, they would do a second series, which would be season three.

And Needham says they got 30 stations initially. And then from there, the next series was 60. Third, about 100, and then he says it just took off from there, because there's a total of about three to 400 stations across the whole U.S. So you can imagine it was only a few years before they reached most of their stations. And Ramsey in his Daily Beast article says that, you know, there may not from, and he, again, I think I mentioned this earlier, he interviewed dozens of people. who personally knew Bob, Bob,

and knew what happened. And he says there might not have been a single moment when Bob pivoted from his role as an apprentice to becoming his own master. It was more likely just a slow burn as opportunities open and doors open and opportunities came about. So, 83, they shot their episode in Muncie, their season, which only took three days to shoot.

It's amazing the output they did. Every season you watch, it's funny, Bob will slip a little bit. At the end of some episodes, he'll say, he's like, all right, well, we just did that one. He's like, I hope you guys are, you know, feeling proud and feeling, uh, accomplished and ready to do another painting in just a few short minutes. And you can kind of tell he just kind of rolls with it pretty seamlessly. But, you know, he knows you're not going to just go right into another painting. But he was.

He was about to. 84 the next year, that's when the opportunities we're talking about start unfolding. The magazine on page. 21 yeah net says she mortgaged Walt in her mortgage to their house for 30,000 WVNC so okay so I guess this was Virginia after season one before they started the Muncie they had the idea to do an accompanying instructional booklet which I'm sure Bill had done you know another thing they take an idea they took from Bill and so they fronted a ton of money they clearly didn't have 30 grand just laying around

and that's why the Kowalski's and the Rosses were equal business partners because although Bob was the talent he was the star of the show I'm sure you know he was the ideas for the paintings I'm sure mostly came from him. He didn't have the business sense and probably didn't want to deal, make the business deals and all the other headaches that come with starting your own line of products

and paint supplies, scheduling the classes. You know, you have to plan those out in months, if not a year in advance. And so I'm sure he at that point he was more than happy to let the Kowalskies take 50% ownership collectively, and he and his wife collectively took 50% ownership in 85 when they started their business.

So 82, they start their first season, start, you know, take out a very risky financial debt to pay for things like their own, probably their own how-to, books and probably buying a bunch of paint supplies from bill in bulk and then selling them and you know keeping the profit after that 83 they start season two and they start probably doing more books more classes they probably have a larger demand from that exposure that they got 84 continues accelerating now and yeah this paid off for them they eventually would sell millions of books of books, millions of books.

And Dennis Cap, the CEO of the Martin F. Weber company, whose son would later be featured in the Netflix documentary, who would team up with Steve Ross to sue the Kowalskies and Bob Ross Incorporated

for trademark infringement using Bob's name and likeness. Dennis Cap but he poached Bob basically. He poached Bob, basically. not in poach but yeah i guess that is the word he approached bill or bob at a convention and said hey listen uh you're the perfect guy you're you're the exactly the face i would love to make my a line of products around and you're you know that uh he had his own aesthetic of happy art perfectly aligned with

bob and his image and they're at a trade show and uh apparently they made a deal right then and there. Getting slowly and then increasingly quickly swept aside by Bob being able to now have access to the Kualski's pretty ruthless, as we'll find out, from numerous testimonies. ruthless business practices and now this major art supply making paints and paint products for Bob

it's just like he's taken off the doors are opening he's walking right through and he's having burgeoning success Bill Alexander had demonstrated to him how to construct a successful business model of face-to-face teaching coupled with books, art supplies, and a television show.

Bob and BRI copied but sophisticated the approach. And in 1985, the die was finally cast. Bob and Jane Ross, Annette, and Walt Kowalski officially filed incorporation papers in Virginia Beach, or sorry Virginia, for Bob Ross, Inc. At that point, 85, that was probably around season 7, when we see that season 6 to season 7 transition of Bob subtly not making a big deal about it, just calling Magic White, Liquid White now. And probably not saying the word Almighty as much,

but he still kept saying happy and this and that. And on behalf of all of us here, we wish you the absolute best that life has to offer once again. Have a super day. God bless. We look forward to seeing you again. Bye-bye. A close friend of Bill's Robert Warren says he recalled he must have been with him in the exact moment Bill found out that Bob had struck out on his own. So although it was probably a long trip to get to this point for the Rosses and the Kualskis. For Bill, it was apparently out of the left field, and he says it was horrible.

Robert Warren says, who was a fellow, he was also a PBS painter himself, says it was horrible, heartbreaking. It was like he lost a son, and it broke Bill's heart. He never spoke to Bob again. And I think, you know, I've tried to make this case already, but I think it was inevitable that that would have happened. Bob was industrious. He produced over 30,000 paintings from over his life. He was already experienced. He was already older, seasoned. He already had the motivation of being a someone who was in the middle of his life, not young, not in the prime of his life necessarily. He didn't have time. And he knew he had a clear vision. He had more efficacy in enacting that vision. He made, he wasn't, he had already made, his own, cultivated his own talent and passion over years.

It wasn't like he was just getting into painting. He was just adapting to Bill's style of painting. And he saw how great and how useful it was to continue. doing the things he was already kind of doing he was already interested in teaching others and he'd been doing demonstrations for years as we said you know when he first got into the military um and he really of course was financially motivated he wasn't trying to just be a you know he makes multiple references to being a starving artist and you know choosing whether or not you want to be a starving artist or you want to try to you know use this technique to make paintings a

little quicker even if they aren't as thorough and fine art as they could be because you're able to turn them over and sell make more and sell more and therefore be able to eat you know proverbia proverbially of course bob being from the military working his way up the ladder he knew a thing or two about being a subordinate and I'm sure he was kind of sick of that by this point in his life. I mean, you don't generally get into business with the idea that you're just going to be someone's right-hand man's making money for someone else your whole life. You know, you ultimately want to. He'd made it this far and he had a track record like we saw of reaching out, going to classes,

meeting new people, traveling. He wasn't just going to stay under Bill's to Lidge for the remainder of his life. So I think it was inevitable. I think he was fair in doing so. He gave proper homage to Bill. And I don't think it was unjust and unfair. But I do, as we're talking, entering into the realm, the phase of Bob's successful career with joy of painting from his run from 82 until his death

in 1995. We're going to be seeing the slow, gradual, what's the word, just departure, the rupture, the estrangement of the eventual estrangement. We're going to be seeing the seeds of that. A little red flag starting to pop up between Bob and Annette. And I think right off the bat in hindsight now, there's one website, Bloomberglaw.com, talks about the legal aspects of Steve's case and how, you know, Bob probably made a bad deal right off the bat and right off the jump, saying there's some debate whether publicity rights should be transferable. In other words, if Bob assign rights to his image and likeness, his face, his voice, his appearance, his name, if he own those rights, rather, I guess, I forget what I just said, if he owned those rights and he died or anybody who has publicity rights, are they transferable to someone else? can someone after your death start using your image and this is actually a big case with the new technology of artificial intelligence

and making not sorry not artificial intelligence you know the technology deep fake deep fake relies upon I mean it's something I've definitely thought about if I ever getting really successful with this channel but Carrie Fisher

in the new Star Wars. After she had passed away, they used a CGI rendering of her and used voice clips, and maybe they were even fake, you know, artificially created lines of dialogue using, you know, blueprints from her actual voice.

Is that fair for a company, because it's not like they're doing it, for, you know, to pay her altruistically pay her tribute. They're making money off her image. They did that with Tupac, you know, at a concert, being a hologram years ago, a couple years ago now, years ago. The guy in this Bloomberg law article says, the right to assign your identity is a troubling concept

um it's a gal Mary LaFrance of the University of Nevada Las Vegas intellectual property law professor says you're essentially giving your right to a corporation to do whatever they want with your likeness and I think most scholars find that troubling So what's the lesson in all of this after the fact here? You know, he should have gotten legal advice from an estate planner before doing this. He, they said it, let's see, Ross apparently agreed to Bob Ross Inc.'s corporate setup, which essentially disinherited his family if a Kowalski outlived a Ross. So he

His major failure was To Not consider that both him and his wife would die before The Kowalskys did And they're still living Him and his wife both died 92 and 95 Leaving Steve Out in the cold

So they think LaFrance says She thinks the fact that they Establish the company giving rights to the owners, whoever I live to, um, sealed the fate,

made, made it so that Steve's case that they argue for. The documentary, Netflix documentary, didn't have any merit because it was already in writing from day one. And Bob should have consulted an estate planner before, you know,

signing his likeness and name. and voice and image over to the company. And we'll get into this later with what Bob was doing to try to, you know, rectify this and establish precedence to be able to, for his son to, after his death, fight for what he was fighting for. It strikes me, she says, as a big mistake, by the way, that, the way Bob allowed the other owners of, of the corporation to become the owners of his shares upon his death instead of those going to

Steve if there uh in summary judgment to be r i because steve and uh cap's son's company r sr aren't did not own bob's intellectual property rights and because robert and or you know steve roberts his real name robert and his company had filed the suit too late. Evidence showed that Bob Ross should have given his full rights of publicity and other IP or intellectual property

to Bob showed that he had given his rights not showed if he did give full publicity rights and intellectual property rights to BRI Bob Ross Incorporated and he no longer

as we'll see he tried to write in his will that Steve had complete control over his image and his name. But that was a personal will, and it's just anything he could have done. Bob in his lifetime wouldn't have overridden the legal, I guess, precedence of what he'd already signed over to the owners of, you know, whoever the majority share owners of Bob Ross,

Inc. were and he couldn't have known that apparently the model they set up and we'll get into this very shortly was that there were four members, two Kowalskies, two Rosses initially, all had each 25% ownership in the company. Upon Jane's death, she died first. Her shares went to equally distributed among, were equally distributed among, Bob, Walt, and Annette. So they own essentially 33, a third, you know, of each of them own a third of the company. But at that point, what that meant was whatever Annette and Walt wanted to do, they owned a majority share of the company.

Bob was only a third. So you can vote legally to override the minority. shareholders opinions about how to run the company so after after Jane died as we're going to find out there was creative differences whatever the case might have been it didn't really matter what Bob wanted to do with the company from that day out and it wasn't right away it appears like it was only you know at most two years before his death because Bob in 92 or 93 he did an episode of Joy of Painting, where Annette was featured on there as a painter. He was clearly still, and he introduced her as his partner and friend,

so they were clearly still very much on good terms. Anyways, for poor Bob, he, after about 90, you know, after the death of his wife in 92, he lost control of his company, as we're going to see. Before we get there, I wanted to elaborate on. the success. We really stopped right when the joy of painting started to become a success. In 83 and 84 and then 85 they established the company and broke off from Bill completely into their own adventure. I keep saying adventure.

It sounded certainly like one of those too, but they were off and running. They were on their own. trajectory and making their own decisions having their own business building their own empire and this was founded upon Bob's person ability to be personable and his resonance on the screen and there's so many aspects to this and I'm gonna break down there's a lot of aspects of Bob's popularity, a lot of things that made him popular, and a lot of reasons he was already able to tap into those. I would say he was a, let's see, Bill's certain aspects of Bill, the most obvious of which was Bill's bombastic, loud style, energetic style, we'll say,

was something Bob noticed might have been more of a hindrance than an asset to Bill and had his own personality and life experience that he brought to his joy of painting show but he knew also there was many aspects from Bill he paid attention to and gleaned

from watching Bill and seeing the success of his show in On the Pale. From painters dash online.co.uk, written in 2015, well before the, well before the documentary. One thing that Bob Ross, he says that one thing that Bob Ross that Alexander, Bill certainly lacked, was his soft, hypnotic voice. and in time even an appealing young man for a son Steve appealing him that he was quite sly dropping artful little artful little double entendres into his own presentations he was really

pretty charismatic on screen pretty clever and even the director Rofi of the Netflix documentary claims that it wasn't the Kowalski drama it was the relationship between Steve and Bob that he wanted to portray most importantly and that the love and loss that is so present in the dynamic between them he says is what I hope people will connect them and that that's what the film's really about and in the documentary we hear though um speaking of that talking for a moment about Bill's relatable, soft-spoken style,

his ASMR before ASMR was a thing. We see that he thought Bill's voice was kind of harsh. And Bob said, I talked to only one person when I'm filming. They feel like they know me and I know them. It's a very, very intimate relationship. And I wanted to make a... quickly look at the comparison they made shortly thereafter in the documentary

they kind of segue into Bob you know being a sex icon and deliberately trying to cultivate sexual you know and not sexual but a sexiness about him and attractiveness a you know a sensual

side to his presentation and they mentioned that there's the joy of cooking and then later on there was the book The Joy of Sex which was based on the joy of cooking I didn't look too much into the joy of sex but I did look into the joy of cooking

because yeah I wanted to I had actually never read the book or about the book too much too much. I didn't know anything about it and I was curious about why Bob chose joy, the word joy. And I'm sure a lot of it had to do with the Kowalski's saying, oh, it's really marketable from a practical standpoint. But I'm sure Bob also had some sort of creative license and input on that title. The joy of cooking was from their Wikipedia. there's a lot of comparisons I noticed a lot of things that Bob was clearly

this is just one of his influences and maybe I should have put this on the third part but Bob was tapping into something that was a clear exit pop a clear success well before he did what he did with Joy of Painting. The Joy of Painting is one of the U.S.'s most published cookbooks. It's sold over 20 million copies since it's printing in 1936. So it's been in print for almost 100 years now, almost 90 years. It was published privately at first. It's got numerous editions.

It was published. Rommauer, who lived until 1962, a homemaker in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, after her husband's suicide the previous year. She, 1931, she self-published The Joy of Cooking, a compilation of reliable recipes with a casual culinary chat, with more than 500 tested recipes and related commentaries.

So apparently, and I'm sure this, like everything, nothing is ever new, or at least completely out of the blue. Very few things are. Everything has some sort of predecessor. But this is interesting that it was so wildly popular. And apparently 40, 40 odd. years later, right during the 70s when Bob was just getting into this, late 70s, early 80s, the joy of cooking had a renaissance, a revival of, in one of its later editions.

He had the 7th edition in 1975, which was unchanged for 20 years after it was published. And so it was a wild success right at the time, Bob. was starting his show and the casual chat aspect was certainly a unique spin on the formal we'll talk about it briefly it spoke to people spoke to average Americans didn't speak to them as though they were a five-star chef spoke to them like they were a neighbor stopping by and asking how you you know made the recipe 1936, one of the first editions differed from other commercial cookbooks of the era by its retention of the author's foxy comments and anecdotes and its layout of the recipes. Instead of listing the ingredients for a dish at the top of the, you know, with preparation directions following the recipes and joy, shortened as joy, were presented by narratives, with the ingredients indicated they were,

incorporated into a narrative and a conversational tone with the ingredients indicated as the need for them occurred with each placed in bold phase and on a new indented line thus preserving a conversational style throughout the recipe and then she even cooked cooked cooked a lot I'm sure she published a book called a A variation of joy of cooking called streamlined cooking. Collection that could be prepared in less than 30 minutes. Interesting connection. But this wasn't a success.

It was an emphasis, had an emphasis on canned and frozen, not fresh foods. And some of the recipes were peeled off and put in later additions of joy of pain. painting, painting. She was 69, Irma, or Rombauer, when the 46th edition, 10 years later, of Joy, was published. And her health was beginning to decline, and she apparently had, she wanted to ensure that the book remained a family project.

So she negotiated with the publisher, a clause in her contract, naming her daughter, Marian Becker, Rombauer, Becker, as her sole successor in any future revision. I thought that was relevant, given that we just talked about that. So she was, you know, she made the right move apparently. There were Bob unfortunately failed to do.

Here we go. So during the mid-90s, Simon & Schuster, who owned the Joy of Cookings copyrights, hired an influential cookbook editor. Who cares who it is? But the new edition, apparently, to write the new edition, and they cut out most of the conversational colloquialisms and tone to it. And then in 1998, so apparently they got a lot of flack. and a lot of feedback. Poor sales is one form of feedback.

And people weren't impressed with the lack of conversational tone. They wanted a, you know, they wanted someone who was, they wanted a relatable, they wanted communication that was speaking to them, not speaking to a culinary student. And in 1998, a few years later, they revised and they put, out a perfect facsimile reproduction of the 1931 original and this was a pretty big success and they followed that up with a back going back to the more more of a conversational informal narrative in the 75th anniversary edition Julia Child who there's another PBS legend like

Bob Ross apparently learned to cook from the joy of cooking I thought that was interesting to add and and there's been a lot of other popularizations of the joy of the you know using the formula the joy of as their title and they even named Bob's series as one of them but you know so it wasn't just like because they in the documentary trying to know of course they were just trying to make something interesting and the opposite of this i guess of course they were just making something interesting but uh maybe it is the opposite of this but they uh i don't know i think i think they could have added you know thrown in a line or two about the connection about the show and the title because i think there's

it's interesting for me at least to hear to see things how they connect and relate throughout history because like I said ideas have a history things don't just come out of a vacuum they really don't and we're going to see that bob was influenced his values and who the values he continued on were part of a series of cultural ideas and movements in part three for as far as his health again And I think it really contributed to a soft spoken style, to have headaches, chronic health issues, you know, to be diagnosed with cancer. Let's see, if it was well before the joy of painting started in 82, you know, maybe it was the late 70s before he even got out of the, let's, you know, to be conservative estimate to not go too speculative. of, we could say 1980. So that means that, you know, he had had it for years by the time of his next.

He'd had it for over a decade. He had known he had cancer. And he had headaches, chronic other, I'm sure he had other related ailments that went along with that. And maybe that contributed, I think, to A, his style, but B, his philosophy of appreciating. every moment and seeing depth in life, because you have a deeper gratitude, undoubtedly, when you're brought into the proximity and awareness of death like that.

He was really very self-aware about the sleep and what we now call ASMR aspects of his work. He said, the majority of our audience doesn't pain. has no desire to paint, we'll never paint. They watch it strictly for entertainment value or for relaxation. We've gotten letters from people who say they sleep better when the show is on. And that's all right.

That's all right. It's fine. Bar Out magazine says, The way Ross spoke into the camera as if addressing one viewer was actually groundbreaking. It was a technique that pulled you in instantly and immersed you in Bob's world, akin to therapy. The joy of painting shows the positive power that TV or other forms of communication can have.

They say he had a demigod-god-like demeanor. You know, this points to a confidence they noticed. Someone who I think is a characteristic of people who have attained expert levels of skill. He was humble enough. These are all things that gave him a rapport, a positive rapport with his audience to be able to let their guard down.

Because, you know, if you sense someone's being a little deceitful or they're a little bit shady, or they have, you know, just un-altruistic intentions. If they don't, you know, if you feel like it's, overwhelmingly they're just putting on a facade and trying to sell you a product it's really hard to feel a sense of trust which i believe is the core aspect of being able to be relaxed and yeah feel have a sense of uh being able to drop your guard and having um being able to feel a lessening of your anxiety by watching someone.

He was humble. Yeah, he was able to laugh at himself. He wasn't offended by criticisms. One comedian centers his acts as a Bob Ross parody apparently in the 1990 Orlando article. Some find him almost slapstick because he's so overly sincere. Ross's happy little trees even showed up in the far side. comics in the 80s in the 80s um he takes this all with a sensile sense of humor and it makes it in him endearing it really does it makes them just more relatable it makes him easily above any

criticism and mockery in the 91 new york times article i'll reference once or more down the road. They say he has a soothing, sonorous voice, the oral equivalent, oral, as in sound, equivalent of demoral, which I guess was a type of muscle relaxer or cough medicine or something, helps you sleep. Is hypnotic delivery an inspirational message provide a bomb to agitated nerves and sometimes respite from insomnia side effects that have given mr ross a cult-like status as i used in part one equated them to a fad in that same article the two liquid weight liquid diet weight loss programs 24-hour wedding chapels TV evangelism and microwave ovens it's funny provides instant gratification to a

followers and satisfaction guaranteed and he did provide satisfaction he provided encouragement empathy he had a connection that all of these qualities made with his audience in the documentary he talks about having a one of his students a 93 old three-year-old woman. We had one lady who was 93 when we, she took her first class with us. I got a letter when she was 94 and she had said she had just, just had her first one-man art show and started a whole new career, a whole new career. He had altruism, altruism. Um, yeah, in the, in the Orlando article from 1990 said that when regular letter writers fall out of touch, Ross writes them back to ask if they're okay, phones them. At Christmas, he sends paintings to letter writers whose stories have touched

him. Not only does he cheer him up, but he gives away paintings, most of which, as they said, you know, go to fundraisers. At the very end of the article, they say, it's slowly, after a couple, hours with Ross one begins to realize why his show succeeds just like Fred Rogers in a more recent article in Indianapolis monthly.com writes Ross could look into the camera and deeply connect with his viewers Jim Needham said he's easy to talk to and listen to and that comes through the camera lens he has the I thought this was pretty appropriate, the rare ability to be intimate without

being intrusive. He was the same and the same was true in person. He was our friend said Neum at the studio. We looked forward to filming with him and we commit ourselves to a week with Bob and it was fun and we loved it.

He even talks about the towel of Bob, you know, talking about how he could perform essentially Jiu Jitsu, you know. No mistakes happy accidents. You could take a smudge or a blob and turn it into something else. A puff of cabot smoke or transform it into a bird. This is exactly something I'm going to point to in just a second. Another really great, really endearing anecdote of Alexander Cruz, his former student that

we mentioned in part one, who talked about Bob inviting him down to watch the rocket launch with him, made another, told me another anecdote about just that, Bob, just Bob's ability. And as he was an actual student of Bob, his instruction about how to remedy mistakes that have been made. in that, you know, Alexander's, Alexander Cruz's, future students were likely to make, and that was actually part of the training course for Bob Ross certified instructors, was to be able to think on the fly and be able to adapt and change and make happy accidents out of mistakes, you know, that get made, be able to fix a painting, and it's a cool little anecdote.

Yeah, you know, I guess that's probably a great place because I have a little bit small, a little section about Mr. Rogers, but that was a perfect little segue for Alexander Cruz's happy accident story, his lesson that Bob taught him. He says, when I was taking certification classes with Bob, especially on the final week,

it was a three-week course, Bob One of those days Bob had several canvases prepared with liquid white and various colors applied with a palette knife that looked like

abstract works so I'm guessing he just had blobs and you had to kind of make something of it and remember this is kind of like a test this is what Bob was it was an example of his mastery the master teaching the students

and it was a test something Bob had mastered the ability to do and recover from and do it effort effortlessly too seamlessly and it's actually cool that i didn't realize how um how rigorous the teaching was from his uh in his classes there the canvases were all lined up students came in grab one um it had to turn that abstract work into a complete landscape using only the colors that were on the canvas. It was a test. And I made a landscape.

We worked during the morning and with what I got, with what I got. So I guess he didn't just make it one size fits all. He gave each one a unique series of abstract paintings. I made a landscape that had a forest and a pink sky. By noon the work was almost finished and we all went out to lunch But Bob stayed behind to make changes to the paintings He puts it in quotes changes to the paintings For example he put on more paint with a pallet knife on top of what we'd already painted

And believe me we had a lot of fun fixing that mess No, no, no he says he had a lot of fun making that mess And we arrived back from lunch we all had cries of astonishment and laughter seeing all our works kind of essentially damaged and then Bob says

now you have to fix that and we spent the afternoon fixing the additional new mistakes and he told us you know possibly a student in your classroom is going to have something like this or worse and you should know how to correct it

and at the end of the day around 5 in the afternoon, an employee of the establishment they were taking the class in at the time, came to me and says, you know, she really liked my work and she wanted to buy it. So Bob came to me and says, you know, how much you're going to sell it for? He said, I asked him, you know, what do you think I should take for it?

And he says, whatever you want. And so he said, I understood that out of respect, He didn't want to put a price on my work. I thought that $60 was, you know, a reasonable amount. This was in the 90s, remember? Early 90s. And so anyways, she bought the painting. And as he was wrapping up finishing it, you know,

clearly she bought it because she saw it was almost done. She, he handed it over to her, and she apparently was so excited about it. She forgot it was still wet and hugged it and got it all over her. And he says Bob and me both at the same time said, wait, no. It's, uh, don't touch it. It's still wet. But it was too late.

And so what Bob did here was use that as an example, as a great lesson to say, to teach Alexander to fix the painting that she had just messed up because she, you know, paid for it. And he said, Bob picked it up, put it on the easel for me, and said, now fix it like you learned today. And Bob stayed after class with him, stayed, you know, for another hour and a half. While he fixed the painting, the woman, almost crying because of what had happened, apparently gave him $20 more and told me she liked it better than she did before.

And then Bob told him, hey, now you understand. and the purpose of today's class. Your painting turned out better than the first time you did it. The more you practice, the better your work will be. And Alexander says this was a lesson I never forgot.

And then afterwards, we went out and Bob even invited him out to dinner, took him out to dinner. And they enjoyed, he says they enjoyed dinner as two good friends. And this was the Bob Ross, that many people knew. He was a friend who had a passion for art, and he went out of his way

to help me make this fun, but at the same time, educational for me, because he saw that I, too, shared the same passion. Alexander ends his anecdote to me saying that, for me, he was not only an excellent human being, an excellent teacher as well, but above all, an excellent friend. Beautiful. Pretty cool. You know, we've made a lot of comparisons to Mr. Rogers, and I thought it was cool that when I popped on, I remember, you know, I've seen a couple episodes, but I didn't really remember it very thoroughly. And in the Mr. Rogers Wikipedia, apparently Fred Rogers emphasized, because I've been watching Sesame Street with my little girl. And they do a lot of like preschool learning in numbers, letters, you know, they touch upon social

interactions, I guess, but apparently Mr. Rogers, Fred Rogers in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood emphasized young children's social and emotional needs over the cognitive learning that, that Sesame Street was more geared towards. And apparently an article about the show, Mr. Rogers, said, While both target the same preschool audience and prepare children for kindergarten, Sesame Street concentrates on school readiness skills, while Mr. Rogers' neighborhood focuses on the child's developing psyche and feelings and sense of moral and ethical reasoning. And another article about Rogers says he taught children about civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth in a reassuring tone and leisurely cadence.

Swimming and playing piano were, quote, lifelong passions that both gave him a chance to feel capable and in charge of his destiny of Fred Rogers. apparently he swam every morning at 5.30 a.m. He woke between 4.30 and 5.30 every day to pray, read the Bible, and prepare himself for the day and going swimming. And swimming for him gave him an important part of the strong sense of self-discipline that he cultivated. And he didn't smoke or drink. And he was actually a pastor. So he had a very clearly faith-oriented spiritual bent to him and his philosophy behind his show.

And I just noticed such an overlap with Bob and what Bob did. I don't think Bob ever had any spiritual dreams of becoming a pastor like Mr. Ross, but he definitely had a spirituality to him. It's not hard to see. in his stage presence, because it almost comes across as a sort of sermon in certain. Steve says that he believed in God, but he didn't believe in the God that was being used by the priests. He says, Steve said that Bob said God's inside everything, including us. We are a part of God, and the vibration of God is within us.

And Bob, like Fred Rogers, he spoke with an attention to the viewer's emotion, as much as the rational understanding of the technical, you know, instructions of the painting process. You can even move rivers here, and so can you. I would play soldier all day, then at night I would come home. And this painting was a way of finding a world that was full of peace, and it was calm, and there was no bad things here. Yeah, his painting was a world that was full of peace and calm, no bad things here. And he was very, we'll talk about it later, of course, but just briefly about his efficacy as a teacher.

And he told Steve, apparently in the documentary, he wanted him to take over. So he purposely painted simpler because he didn't want to, you know, make it too difficult. set the bar too high, but also because he didn't want to intimidate people away from painting. He purposely kept it bare bones and as simple as he needed to be able to create a competent landscape. Because he wanted to engage his viewers. He understood the fundamentals about art and the technical words, but he didn't use them. He talked about perspective. and planes and painting in layman's terms saying that, there's just layers and oh in the distance,

it gets a little lighter in the distance, you know, and as you go closer, things are less light, you know, they're more bold and the colors are darker. His station manager, Jim Needham, said that once, he was asking Bob, you know, why he didn't do portraits or something a little more advanced? And Bob apparently said that I'm looking at my audience. He says, I do things they can do.

I do things they can do. I think maybe we need some trees that are even closer. By putting all these layers in your painting or planes, as they're called, it helps create that illusion of depth and distance in your world. Wanted people to paint. Speaking of that, Dana made a point to say he liked the thrill of watching a new student smiled. Dana Jester is a good friend. Bob Ross experience

an exhibit in the studio, the former studio in Muncie. An article on it says, quote, that they were trying to recreate the joy of paintings, soul-affirming zeitgeist. He was trying to make art accessible to everybody,

trying to open everybody to creativity. Rodriguez Whidholm, maybe Windham, Wittholm, former director of the DePaul Art Museum of Chicago, says then, she included Ross's exhibit, in her last exhibit, New Age, New Age Strategies for Survival, because she respected,

she knows respected contemporary artists who were inspired to learn about painting thanks to Bob. So she says she's never dismissed Bob's influence. She recognized it, how impactful, into how many people he was impactful. Joan Kowalski apparently heard from plenty of people over quarantine in 2020, saying that we're hearing people that they had an uptick in sales, essentially.

If I get this, you know, a subscription if you didn't view this page. Okay, well, one article I was able to at one point access said that Bob in in response to saying that he wasn't really getting, you know, he was getting criticism in the art community for making such basic paintings. He said that we're getting letters from art professors saying that, quote,

we may not totally agree with the way you paint, but we appreciate what you're doing because you're sending literally thousands of people into art colleges. Thousands of people. It's an impact, you know. That's a real impact right there. As I mentioned earlier, I really think his master sergeant rank, he's known to have, you know, use the words tough and mean. He used to have to be tough and mean. He was the guy who screamed at you if you were late for work. But later on, when he was interviewed, he said, I don't intimidate anyone. Instead, I try to get people to believe in themselves. I tell people. you can do this and they're right back and say you were right I can do this and now I can I believe I can do anything and that's where it starts you have to believe in yourself

yeah it seems like such a trite observation but it really was doubting yourself is the biggest obstacle to trying new things and it's only until you try new things that you start realizing oh you might you might not have a propensity for certain things but some things you're surprisingly good at and you have an aptitude for and wow maybe you're inspired to pursue an entirely new thing that you never would have thought to before this and it's that's a beautiful thing imagine if that happened to millions tens of millions hundreds hundreds of millions of people. If they were inspired to go outside their comfort zone, try to expand themselves. I mean, you generally, generally don't spend time hating on other people and demeaning and definitely not

doing anything evil when you're out there working on your own self-development and you're actually because it humbles you to run up into a wall and to recognize that you have a lot of room for improvement. It prevents you from making rash judgments towards other people and building yourself up instead of knocking other people down. That's what Bob was all about. I thought this other aspect of how extremely prepared you might expect someone who was a military man for 20 years was.

There was a, you know, they did an entire 13 episode 6. season like we said in about three days averaged about four episodes a day and yeah Joan Kowalski said he was fast, organized he had everything planned out

so he could get back to Orlando Needham called him a rare he had a rare and unpredictable sense of humor and inspiring optimism nice personality traits there but he had

a crystal clear vision about what he wanted to do on his show and he executed that he executed that precisely you know we know he did three paintings per show like i mentioned in part one he did the reference painting you know he did those a couple weeks or whatever before he filmed before he went up there to film so he had all his 13 paintings that he was going to do for that season already done. He just set them up and kind of set them up off camera and look at them as a guide. But he, what Steve said, I found in a article, or no, a video here, as Steve was, Steve was interviewed by local news crew. And he said that my dad made at least seven or eight versions for every painting because he was doing them to get down every, every,

brush stroke, memorize it, and get it down to, you know, the 27-minute mark that he needed to be under to allow time for intro, outro credits, and the, you know, PBS information that they would display between shows for the local station. Nick Kowalski backs this up, saying, Bob used to lay in bed at night, and he told me he rehearsed every word and every, you know, knew exactly what he was going to say on every one of those brush episodes he rehearsed every brush stroke and that was the most spontaneous one they ever did because someone broke into their motor home and stole all 13 reference paintings but Bob was well prepared

you know he it just goes to show you how serious he took this and that also to me expands over into his philosophy and what he was talking about on the show wasn't just trivial you know meaningless rambling things he said i think he really meant because he knew this was his image his reputation and he was using his image for good for uh to spread a positive message goes into the studio design speaking of his image he a part of the magic was that the limited studio space. It was a converted living room with a covered fireplace and windows,

a large carpet that provided a lot of sound dampening. It was a really intimate place. And Bob, page 20 year, I guess I was on here. I haven't changed, turn the page in like an hour. Wanted a homey, comfortable space for his viewers. To envision like a log cabin.

Yeah, he always wanted it to be homey and comfortable, but that was his, he wanted like this elaborate set. But Walt says he thinks it finally dawned on Bob that he wouldn't get that. He wouldn't be able to create the intimacy with the viewer, with all that in the background. And it makes sense, honestly. I was thinking about this, and I turned the exposure down. a lot on this on my camera so that you know it's just me I got a little bit of my bookshelf in the background I still have a it's a little bit of chaotic behind me anyways but I still have to unpack my books from like a year ago but I found that not only is it less stimulus if you're

watching this at night because it's generally just dimmer but it's less to look at less chaotic If you are trying to look at, you know, me talking, it's just easier to focus in on that. Teaser that I will bring up in part three is being the predecessor to live streams nowadays. He had a style of fusing his personality and with his real time with his craftsmanship. And it was live. It was live because the camera. man Richard Collins Richard Collins said occasionally they go back and do an edit you know if there was technical problems or Something if but as far as Bob goes there was no mistakes that they edited out you know like we talked about he would fix them on the fly or just you know use them as literally a teaching instruction

and an example you know I point in case to our case point um and he was proud of that there was no trickery going on going back to our trusting of bob and the mostly you know upfront uh candidness candid quality about how he presented himself he was uh that's what he said in the documentary there's no editing to these shows and he really prided himself on that. All the time I get to ask, do you actually paint the pictures this quick or is it video magic?

There is no editing. Absolutely know. What you see is what happened. Even the mistakes. It's pretty interesting that, you know, in 2015, we'll be getting into this pretty shortly here, but he had a renaissance in

2015 on Twitch. Amazon owned streaming company. You guys might not have heard of it because you're over here in the Stone Age on YouTube. I'm not on Twitch either, but he, his episodes were aired on Twitch in a live stream. A, I got the figures, yeah. In 2015, we'll get into how that happened, I guess, later, but he hadn't really made it to the internet. I don't think he was on YouTube before that either.

And in 2015, they partnered with a number. another company to promote a, I guess, artistic channel on Twitch, a, like a sub, like a genre. I guess there's a whole art genre on Twitch to promote it, and they ran an eight-day stream, which I've just back-to-back episodes of Joy of Painting, and at one point it had 170,000 people watching consecutive at the same time. that was pretty uh that's a pretty large number right there feel like most tv shows nowadays unless they're really exceptionally popular don't even have that much watching chapters nine and ten made an interesting comparison with bob and the fine art community with andy warhol and it was

and also Bob and the less than fine art, but kind of kitsch, less, you know, more criticized, more or less, what's the word, condescended upon in the art world community of Thomas Kincaid, and how he kind of pandered to the Christian audience, even though he himself was less than saintly to be put it mildly. And that's why they have

Bob and Andy. They are philosophers and academics in the art community. And so they respect Andy Warhol but they distinguish him from Bob

and they don't respect. Let's just put it that way. Thomas Kincaid. And that's why they say Thomas Kincaid. is no Bob Ross and interestingly he was still alive when this book was written in 2011 I think he died in 2013 but uh chapter 9 this guy will be actually yeah this was the other guy who was kind enough while I have him here to reach out to me Davy T painterman uh davy turner goes by the painterman

he was super super nice and he he had a unfortunate communication with Bob Ross incorporated which I will talk about yeah so Bob and Andy I mean there's so many I'm just making a case I guess is that of how well respected and loved and you know respected and beloved Bob was in and out well not in the art community as much but he's increasingly as the

I think I mentioned in part one as the lens of what is and what isn't good art is evolving Bob is increasingly becoming more respected if not

for simply the being the necessity of his popularity pointing to his popularity pointing to how how he resonates with people and what that might mean because if he was a terrible artist unless people were watching him ironically like watching a bad movie he wouldn't be worth looking at but he was a gifted He, not gifted, let's use talented and skilled artist. He was a masterful artist.

And he, like we said, kept it simple. So, yes, he wasn't making fine art, but he reached people. He had, he had more layers in that he, more layers to his art, in that he was not only making the art. And I'm going to elaborate on this in, uh, in part three. He was making art out of the actual communication with the people he was reaching on television. With the process of instruction, with the philosophy, with the, with the medium of painting, and with the actual subject matter of landscapes, as I'm kind of hinted at.

And the, uh, Bob and Andy, um, ASMR all over this page. Bob and Andy's place is a refuge. His paintings So they contrasted the sterile and civilized cartoonish imagery Bob's pictures did of Warhol's pictures with their flat, crisp lines that seemed cold and commercial.

Instead, Bob's paintings invite us in. They invite us in. They welcome us into a pictorial space where we can take a break from labor, obligations, status anxieties of commerce and modern life, places where the eye can relax, and by extension the viewer can too. And I'm going to talk about that to just the psychological aspects of landscapes themselves and how they affect us. They were equally as calculated the authors, you know, Cogden,

writes as calculated and as complex as Warhol's paintings, but the intention of the Bob Ross paintings is to take refuge and rest. I thought the white collar versus middle class blue collar aspects of Warhol and Ross, respectively, were an interesting juxtaposition. Warhol painted for an economically successful artists, and ultra-rich collectives who bought his work? Interpreting them took intellectual work and had a mental payoff.

He made a film about sleep to, you know, ironically distance himself from it. And I thought maybe this was too much of a reach, but, you know, the upper class can afford not to sleep. They can afford if they don't go to work, I mean, they don't have any primary obligations that will, you know, that if they don't meet, they won't eat that week. I would say unless they're in a political position,

they have less general stress, less day-to-day stress in the quarters of all spikes, and they accompany that and the anxiety of just surviving and living in a much less safe and secure. environment that comes along with being in a lower income bracket so they can sit there and have the leisure of thinking about sleep rather than actually needing it to perform manual labor and make a paycheck. Bob Ross on the other hand painted for people who didn't belong that in that elite group you know he used plain speech direct imagery There's symbolism in landscape paintings, but there's no need to necessarily interpret a landscape painting beyond what it means to you for it to make sense.

You don't need to make any abstract interpretation of it. You know, Bob, and we said that before, he got annoyed when people were talking about getting too abstract in some of the classes he was taking. He's like, I just want to know how to paint a tree. Don't tell me about the qualities in theory about a tree. What makes a tree? Yeah, there's generally hidden meetings and things that subtexts that need to be interpreted and parsed out of a elite painting that Warhol represents. You know, a bunch of different colored cans of Campbell's tomato soup,

What does that mean? I don't know. I'm not an art critic. Bob's paintings you just feel good in. There's no hidden meeting, meaning without having to contemplate intellectually. He asks us to pay attention to every detail, every nook and cranny of the canvas.

You know, Andy Warhol, his paintings are often so overly, deliberately simple. You can kind of just take the men, take the image in and a glance. Um, yeah, Bob is honest about practical shortcuts. Work, work smarter, not harder. You know, he says, this is the easiest way of making a tree that I know about. Keep it simple. Measure twice, cut once. Or measure once, cuss twice. As a coffee cut my dad has from, um, Bill and Aaron Napier's shop, from hometown. That reinforces Bob's. middle class blue collar everyday appeal is relatability to the working class average citizen and Thomas Kincaid might be you know generally in that same caliber in that same league as painting for the everyday person and he directed it more towards Christians you know

explicitly towards Christians actually and so that they made a whole chapter making a point to say Thomas Cuncade is no Bob Ross in the sense that Bob Ross is the much higher standard than Thomas Concade is. From a website,

a Christian website, Ship of Fools, people thought Thomas Cuncate was an artist, Ross was a teacher and a voice. I don't think the two can really be compared. It's like a forum. Another one says, Ross is probably far less interesting.

in painting in the painting he was doing than teaching his viewers not about painting either but about life there were no mistakes in his paintings just happy accidents you know how tall should this tree be as tall as you want it to be it was a happy tree too you know you should like being a happy little tree and find happiness in the fact that we exist we have value just by being watching old Bob Ross makes me feel like I want to be more kind to others

I can't see what's wrong with that Kincaid on the other hand was pretty much the opposite someone tries to see their if someone tries to use their Christian faith as Kincaid arguably did as a reason for you to do business with them be sure to count your fingers

when you're done shaking their hands They even say a markedly Christian saying, or Christian sentiment Bob gives in one of his sayings, I like oils, they're forgiving. And all of us need a lot of forgiveness. I don't know. The whole thing goes on to talk about. You know, Kincaid both produced beautiful scenes because Kincaid was a landscape painter in a way. And they were, you know, very painting with broad strokes, so to speak. they were similar they painted in a similar style or they painted similar subjects you know but um and they both

produce you know you can't deny kinkade was a great painter he was um but there is a less than straightforwardness about him kinkade emphasized investing in his art ross emphasized investing in yourself don't buy his art he gave his art away He wanted you to maybe buy his products to create your own art and learn to be able to teach yourself and teach others. Kincaid's personal values and actions conflicted a little bit with his claimed belief. They really don't make Kincaid look that good. Essentially call him a fraud. They say he marketed himself as a Christian.

but painted pieces of grand castles and brick mansions. Not exactly things one could say of a Christian who revokes all material wealth and follows Jesus. He sold tens of thousands of paintings as, quote, limited editions. He touched up prints and sold them as heirlooms. and investments. There was apparently a whole factory of Thomas Concade painters that painted

paintings to which he would just sign his name. You know, Bob Ross gave away his paintings. He wasn't paid. Made his supplies that he did sell. Made them cheap, accessible, simple. Only sold, you know, a dozen or so colors. Concade.

Wasn't selling art products, I don't think, but, you know, he was selling plenty of other things. They even have an entire village based on a Concade painting, which Concade's company was a partner, investor in. I thought this was really interesting, the landscapes. Bob's Landscapes versus Concade's landscaping. Bob's paints sparsely Bob's painting

sparsely inhabited nature with human Let's see Bob what Bob paints was sparsely inhabited nature With human activity confined to small clearings Ancient paths Well worn paths you know

Broken down fences Abandon shacks They emphasized Unclaimed Untamed Untamed to mysterious nature, with only traces of human activity. Bob's empty shacks, they say, I don't know if I have it here, but Bob's empty shacks were suggested they were placed, you know, travelers could seek refuge,

wanderers could seek rest, and critters might be holed up in the rafters. You know, his landscapes were more for the animals than for people, let alone, people who were private investors. Kincaid, on the other hand, was, as you might imagine, I like the phrase was pretty, it was witty. Kincaid didn't paint nature, he painted real estate. He had cottages and manors and castles and estates

with trimmed hedges and rustic gardens. He emphasizes private, gated real estate, entirely tamed by humans. Bob was the opposite. And they say, yeah, when Kincaid paints a tree, it's not a landscape. It's landscaping. So anyways, they say, in the end, Warhol feels like a prankster. Kincaid feels like a fraud. And Bob, good old Bob, feels like a friend.

Kincaid apparently bragged that he made a million dollars in one hour on the shopping network. Apparently his company made $4 billion in revenue in 2012 the year he died, year after this book came out. He's making deals with greeting cards and Hallmark cars and Disney. So they're saying, I like their general idea. distinction the way they discriminate Bob from Kincaid they say you know Thomas was obviously he was down he was down for consumption he was aiming at people consuming his art Bob joined consumption with production a huge theme we're going to be relating in part three is the

drastic shift in American culture from pure you know gluttonous consumption especially of ever cheapening products diminishing in quality to production

and consuming things but also producing things and globally with this what I'm doing right now I'm using my technology to produce I'm consuming and making it into something of my own that I am in turn giving for others to consume and do what they will with and perhaps do the same, turn around and make content.

Which would be super cool if I inspired someone to make a video on Bob based on some interesting little fact about him or even. if I inspire you guys to paint. And the last little distinction between the three of them, I guess, Warhol, Kincaid, and Bob Ross. Warhol distances himself. Contrast to the everyday world, all three of their pictures, were a little too colorful, a little too saccharin, a little too simple.

I think saccharine means like sappy, excessively sweet and sentimental. Warhol distances. himself though using the ironies you know with a knowing wink and Cade and just outright denies there's any saccharine sappiness to his paintings he's you know he denies the impossibility of the paintings he's making his visions outright as attested by trying to make an entire gated community gated

by the way of uh well actually hold on i don't want to say that i think it's gated might not be but i would assume it is um yeah just kind of being leaving you with a taste like a disingenuousness in your mouth after learning a little bit about concade and then bob on the other hand just embraced the ironies of his arts wholehearted simplicity They say in the book here, he quote, actually genuinely believes in the possibility of creating the happy world that he paints. Kaked employed multi-level marketing for paintings, essentially. He actually left a lot of people out on their butts by pushing massive demand. And then he pushed so many limited additions, you know, quote, limited additions that,

Eventually the demand would fall out in these poor mom-and-shop, mom-and-pop shops, in malls and all that would be stuck with tons of essentially worthless paintings and cheap paintings, prints that were just printed and then like kind of touched up, which is, you know, it's not the real deal. Who comes the fateful turn south for Bob? And this starts with a behind the scenes that wasn't known to anybody until, you know, anybody that wasn't behind the scenes until the documentary in 2019, 2020 in the article by Ramsey. And now there's tons of people speaking out against the Kowalski's bad reputation. the art community, especially the PBS, you know, art instructor education community back then.

You know, the people, the floral painters, the Jenkins, that were interviewed on the documentary were an example of that. They, and Alexander Cruz made his own testimony. He didn't even need to tell me specifically, but he didn't, he didn't, he didn't, he didn't. mention that he 100% verifies the um what he said and claim and stands by what he said he made a when he made a public statement about the koalskis after the documentary came out and it was his essentially response and verifying that everything in the documentary because it was seemingly so you know it was so sensational seemingly dramatized He claims it was all true and then some.

So the Quolsky's, I want to give them their due. And I think plain and simple, the bottom line is they were pretty ruthless, pretty greedy. They did it legally, and that's a little bit, you know, they might have played a little dirty, but they did so within the bounds of legal. legality and it's so unfortunate you know even if bob sweet personality and his wish of well-being on others all his viewers was what fundamentally led to his success you know he was complicit in letting the koal skis do the dirty work it was known that he said he turned his head when uncle walt you know had to mean business by making deals and whatnot.

Definitely seems toward the end from what I was able to gather that Bob regretted, ever partnering with him towards, he was already so invested in them commercially and with his logistics of the entire business and the running of the business, you know that he wasn't able to and then emotionally because they literally lived together at certain points and they were like a family at other points and maybe even as the documentary hints

him and Annette had an actual sexual relationship at a point he was so intertwined so entangled as certain famous actors wives like to call cheating he was so so it was such a mixed up in such a complex relationship

with the Kowalskys yeah it's unfortunate but he couldn't really do much about it couldn't do much about it the Daily Beast article says Bill wasn't the only one who felt burned by the Rosses and the Kowalskis

you know what they were doing seemed perfectly legal but it was largely unethical. Ramsey says other artists later saw a similar playbook deployed when a net launched a line of floral paintings that bore an uncanny resemblance to the widely recognized masters of floral painting at the time, Gary and Catherine Jenkins. And Jones says, you know, replying to these accusations, it's a business. And when you start a business from scratch, you sort of decide your parameters based on the desired effect. What a political answer.

And Ramsey makes a point in the article. It would say, well, they were pretty sharp elbowed parameters. So they would employ sharp elbowed parameters while they were trying to get their desired effect, apparently. Bob, in the article, Ramsey says, Bob, during contract negotiations, you'd kindly defer her to Uncle Walt. and you know rather than be the tough guy himself if a contentious point arose during the conversation you know towards the end he wouldn't even speak about bill publicly saying that he was their main competitor

and that's sad here's here's a whole slew of things bill here's i think this i mentioned earlier Bill, uh, lightly, uh, criticizing Bill, lightly veiled criticism of Bob. You could tell Bill was unfortunately pretty bitter towards the end there. But also towards the end, you can see the, um, the distinction between Bill and Bob and, you know, Bill had that harsh style of speaking. He said, bye, bye, he would just finish a painting, be like, hmm, he looks done. Bye-bye. And Bob would have his, have his, although rehearsed and kind of

ritualistic it was also still endearing and said from a genuine place of sincerity saying happy painting God bless my friend he

wasn't easy to it wasn't hard to see how Bob was more endearing to the audience but despite that we still had this to deal with we have Alexander Cruz's statement

confirming the documentary it's pretty damning here remember this guy Alexander Cruz worked with Bob Steve and Dana during the early 90s and he had nothing but nice remarks to say

about these guys he said I had the opportunity to meet them all and they on top of being my teachers and mentors they were my friends I could call them that honestly I was only 17 when I met Bob but he had a grace and fatherly tenderness he adopted me as one of his own he never missed an opportunity to give me positive advice and put big dreams in my head as we talked about earlier in part one You know, I had the joy of meeting Steve and Dana, and they were my friends too. Built it home like I was with relatives when I was hanging out with them.

And he said he was really hit hard when Bob died, like a father died. And he says about the Kowalskies, he says, as for this documentary, it's no doubt that everyone who spoke said the truth he says and remember he worked he was a certified instructor so he was in the wider business circle of you know behind the scenes of the business of bob ross incorporated from the beginning the he says the koalskis had always had a culture of hurting the business of others for them to be in charge. The mentality of a quittate to para bonermay yo,

which means get out of my way so I can take over a very famous saying in Puerto Rico. He's from Puerto Rico, Alexandria. He said many years ago, they got the Jenkins out of the race like the documentary shows, but there are many Jenkins stories that were not told in the documentary that many of us know about and resent and they were just greedy and malicious against the Jenkins he says the truth is I was happy to see them being able to speak their peace in the documentary but apparently they only got about 2% of the four hours of the interview from the Jenkins which you know is what happens in a documentary but I can only imagine what else they kept out in vanity fair recently

Joan Kowalski was interviewed in the Vanity Fair saying in an article titled Bob Ross Incorporated would love it if you stopped hating them after as you can imagine the documentary came out In response to the IP theft from the Jenkins, they said, uh, the interviewer, you know, says, your mother Annette and her rival painting flower book, they see, the Jenkins seemed to believe that they were the target of a, uh, you know, essentially diminishing them as a business rival and that, and that improperly copied aspects of their books and, uh, Jones said, I don't think you can block another artist from wanting to paint flowers. I saw the documentary.

It made me laugh, sorry. In the book, it says, load the brush, and then there it says load the brush. And she's like, well, you know, there's only so many ways you can say put paint on the brush. That's legit. That's honestly legit. You can't say that. About Bill Alexander, though, she claims complete ignorance about that. She says, I talked to my parents about this and none of us felt any animosity.

This was a new one. We've never heard that Bill Alexander was unhappy with Bob. So that's came out of nowhere. I haven't got anything else to say about that, essentially. But Cruz's story goes even further. Alexander Cruz's story. Alexander continues saying, that there is a lady named B Cox who I think I found that she died in 2011 actually

Who became a painter for Bob Ross Incorporated after Bob died? She apparently went and took Dana Jester Dana Jester's instructional courses on how to paint animals and stole a lot of Dana's techniques because Dana would paint a landscape, but he also got he's very accomplished on his own right and he left him and Steve left when Bob died for obvious reasons they were allied with Bob and they saw the

the injustice the Kowalskies were treating Bob and his family with and Alexander says I took I followed Dana around after

you know Bob had died and he left BRI and so did I and in one of the classes Dana was teaching that I was in one of my classmates was B. Cox and this person who also took classes with Dana who I called Annette's spy was the one that brought the painting with animals theme to Annette.

And Annette also wanted to steal the idea of making a color line and brushes and a whole a whole line of products revolving around wildlife by just tweaking Dana's techniques. She did later make videos for Bob Ross Incorporated. Apparently there was, you know, in the documentary, a suggestion box for essentially spying and ratting on people who talked about anything non-Bob Ross related that was competition in the Bob Ross classes.

And so, you know, yes, so far, it's not damning evidence, but then you have the quality control and the products. You have Cruz talking about Bob was demanding when it came to quality control and the TV presentation. Cruise about some fallout after Bob's death, including drastic lowerings, lowering of the quality of both art supplies and the non-art merchandise that they tried to put out and on the Kualski side and that and Joan both did say that Bob was a tyrant at times regarding the show and the supplies and he could be Jones said he could be kind of a terror

about some aspects of the business and we'll we'll be elaborating on that in just a moment on how the Bob might have been a terror and the approach to the art supplies that Bob employed. And how that contrasts pretty remarkably from the approach the Kowalski's employed. That same 91 New York Times article that I mentioned earlier, it says that even 91 Bob was enjoying success, his Orlando-based empire because he did by then move back from Muncie to Orlando to be with his

mother like I talked about she had died in 91 and he moved back home to take care of her you know he was at the center of a 15 million dollar empire 300 certified Ross instructors Steve included a bunch of art supplies how-to books videos 200 letters a day and listen to this 80 million viewers regularly tune in regularly tune in to see Bob and they call his hotline all the time stations other stations tried to lure them away from the small kind of amateur WIPB in Muncie Indiana station but he He had freedom. He'd been there since 1983. He was loyal. They were loyal to him. He had complete creative freedom in what he did there. He was on almost 300 of the 337 PBS stations nationwide.

New York City's PBS station ran him twice, twice a day. And now at this point in his career, in this early 90s, he had been going for almost 10 years in his, in the, in the, early 90s, he has financial freedom to do and live how he wanted at this point. He still stayed purposely reclusive. He admitted he's not easy to find and actually wondered why they were interviewing him for that article. He says, I stay hidden. He's like, you know, I never turned down requests. I just, I'm rarely asked. He pursued various hobbies, collecting Victorian opalescent glass. He had his 69 Corvette. We talked about I liked fast cars. I'm sure maybe he had one or two more. Maybe, maybe not.

Most importantly though, he was able to use this, his new income, to help rehabilitate wildlife. He talked about it. And as the shows went on, every later season had more and more of him featuring the animals and talking about conservation and rehabilitation and encouraging us to go out and you know find local people who often support it right out of their pockets the article in 1990 the Orlando article even says

that you know he's the head of a 30 employee firm you know Bob Ross empire there and uh but he lets them worry about the business well he devotes his time to something he finds more satisfying caring for injured animals he even at that point did to dream bigger pondering ways that he could in but apparently want to launch a apparently he wanted to launch a Fred Rogers mr. Rogers neighborhood type of show that was centered on the wilderness and environment environmentalism he wanted to call it Bob's Bob's world it would be a wilderness version of Mr. Rogers neighborhood.

So he was finding ways to make genuine positive impacts in the world. But it was around this time that, you know, a series of tragedies in the last few years of his life would start unfolding. He'd already had his poor health throughout the years. That just kept getting worse. 91 his mother died 92 Jane died his wife

his second wife and with her death not only did he have to deal with that but like I mentioned earlier the Kowalski's now as her shares her 25% share was split with them

they now had two-thirds ownership of the company given that they voted in the same direction and I think they did and they claim their relationship with Bob wasn't fractured that Kualskees do at any point but it's not what the dozens of other testimonies say John Tham, Steve's, Vickies even

Bob's own will testify to that Dana Jester Alexander Cruz a lot of other people don't make the Kualis look innocent as they claim to be. Ramsey's article says at this point Ross, he wanted to branch out,

and however, when he did, it started going downhill, his relationship with the Kowalski's and also his own health. In 1992, Jane died, and that's when the struggle for Bob's legacy really started.

And Joan, in the article, I'm going to start bringing that up more. The Vanity Fair article responding to the documentary, giving the Kowalski's side of the events, I guess. It still honestly doesn't make her or her parents look all that good.

She has some points that are fair, but she gets a little tense, you can tell. Even though it's in writing, you can tell her answers are like she feels a little backed into a corner because she doesn't know how to answer these without making her

her parents look bad. Yeah, she says, for instance, you know, the way it was structured was that if one died, the other three pulled their money and bought the estate of the deceased person, so that was the 25% stake that Jane would have owned.

And it also happened when Bob died. So I just wonder if, you know, Steve and Jimmy Cox, his brother would have gotten any right to buy that. Maybe they wouldn't have had the money, maybe they didn't have the right to begin with. Essentially after, yeah, we'll get to that. Bob, for years, had been convinced that he'd die early. And now that we realize he, in the late 70s, so, probably in his mid-30s he had already had a cancer

diagnosis. It makes sense. He apparently even in the mid-80s had a heart attack. He suffered migraines. The producer Sally Schneck said, you'd have a hard

time knowing it if he was suffering a headache because he kept such a positive attitude. In early 1994, though, he had a second to battle with cancer. It's right around the time that, so early 90s he lost his mom and Jane. Right after that, he got diagnosed with cancer. So within the first three years of the 90s, he was having all this dumped on him. And then the Kowalskies apparently started pressuring him

to sign over the rights because they were just planning ahead for Bob's death. The rights to his name likeness, even though apparently legally they had owned it by being owners, full owners of Bob Ross Incorporated, BRI, after Bob had died, I think they just wanted to secure it so in writing from him so that it was incontestable. And this was when it became obvious that their relationship was, in fact, fractured, fractured towards the end. And it's kind of making it look really bad on them when you realize that Annette says days before he, this month or so, she went to visit him and they were sitting out by a lake. She paints this picture and she says that, she quotes Bob, although we only know it's her story. She says that Bob called her the wind beneath his wings. And, um, and Walt

insists that on his deathbed Walt says, hey, do you want this company to continue without you or not? And he says, he claims that Bob shook his head, yes, and said yes, I do want you guys to continue the company. So

it's hard to believe that either of those anecdotes with all the context, the larger context of their behavior. Ramsey writes in his article that they began pressuring Bob to sign over the rights, his rights, after his diagnosis and after his wife's death. Bob started circumventing their legal claims that they were trying to make.

His last phone call from Tham, like we talked about earlier, said that, you know, John Tham, his paint instructor buddy, said that he'd had it with BRI and was leaving the corporation, and Bob wanted to buy a building in Branson, Missouri, which is apparently a famous tourist mecca akin to the Las Vegas of the South, at the time at least. And Bob had teamed up with an Indiana family that was about to break ground on a theater there. And they were developing the stage version of the joy of painting

to accompany a Civil War musical. And Bob planned to charge a gate fee so people could watch them, do what he did on TV. But this would be a huge scale event. It would be a live version of what he was doing to people. And he would, yeah, be in concert with this other venture. And he asked John Tham if he wanted to, you know, paint with him and be incorporated into the show.

And John thought it was a great opportunity. But it never happened. It never panned out before Bob passed away. His last attempt to really break away creatively was to create a children's show, different from the Bob's world. This was a show he just was featured on. It wasn't really about him called Elmer and Friends. And this is all from Ramsey's article in The Daily Beast. This is called...

This is a pretty hard one for the Kowalski's not to look bad on, And this was, I think, touched upon in the documentary, but, man. Ramsey says, the Qualskies, however, even after all we've talked about at this point, says they could go lower. Bob plays himself in a handful of scenes, and he helped a troop of wayward kids in search of a minor's hidden treasure. The miner's name happened to be Old Walt, who, as Bob explained in the show, was long deceased. Treasure Beyond Measure was the first episode. It aired two months after Bob died. In less than a month later, the Kowalskis would sue the children's show.

Filed federal lawsuit against WIPB and the show's producer. It was produced out of Muncie, Terry Marsh, a dermatologist. And their headline was, Bob Ross, Inc. a children's shell and a lot of um company by a photo of a broadly grinning Bob so it made him look really bad because no you know we all none of us really knew Bob had died so we thought that was it was Bob suing a children's show but uh man so yeah they demanded $500,000 in penalty in uh damages apparently uh let's see for apparently encouraging, assisting, in cooperating with Bob Ross in the breach of his, quote,

fiduciary duty of loyalty to Baum Ross, Inc. The Kowalski's argument went something like this, according to Ramsey. Because Bob had consented to a specific limited trademark filing, such as the cartoon likenesser on paint products, they now extrapolated this, to say that Bob's actual likeness, meaning himself, appearing on any sort of footage. And thus what had been recorded on the show was protected by their trademarks. So Bob Rock, they owned not just Bob's paintings

in his likeness, but himself. So, yeah, a lot of it, they think, was because I'll put in here, Bob had been really looking sickly. He was real pale, real thin, probably lost all his hair. And so he had to wear a wig. That looked really, it looked obvious that it was a wig. And they probably didn't want that image of him being widely circulated

and especially used outside of their control of his image because it's exactly what Bob knew he was doing. He knew he was creating something, whether it was art or another show, that was completely separate and independent. and therefore outside the control of the Kowalskies. And they knew that would be widely distributed at a certain point and it would look bad

because there was apparently a, there's a pretty good case that they didn't want his death being publicized because it's bad for business to think that, you know, people to sign up for classes, up for classes, thinking that maybe they might be meeting Bob, you know. And they don't, but that might prevent them from signing up. Anyways, that's, it was pretty sad to see all that happened. By phone recordings, like they say in the documentary, apparently for the, they settled out of court for the lawsuit, and Bob had taped all his conversations with Walt and Annette

saying that verbally, they said he could do that show. and then when he died, they turned around and sued against the show, sued the show. And Linda, his third wife that he married, and who was a nurse, and he married her to try to protect his own assets under the apparent assumption that she would keep everything that her husband bequeathed her. and there was a lot of phone audio recordings of Walt talking to Bob, Bob talking to Walt and Annette that incriminated them, and I guess part of the settlement for the lawsuit was for them to, those tapes to be destroyed. Very, and so Joan in her Vanity Fair article swears up and down there was no

bad blood between them at the end. She says they apparently offered the Kowalski's offered Steve and Linda you know Bob's remaining family 1% of any profits for the next decade and they turned it down I guess because you know they thought they were owed more than that Steve never signed anything let's see no no no sorry Bob never signed anything though confirming his name and likeness should be given to Bob BRI. And he made some fast changes to his will, according to the WealthAdvisor.com. A clause specifically addressing his name and likeness in the rest of his IP. All those rights were going to go to Steve and Bob's half-brother Jim.

And his third wife, Linda, replaced Annette as the administrator of Bob's estate. And so he had an 11th hour last minute marriage to Linda being his third wife. So bad that Bob would be so aggressive towards the end of his life, which clearly paints the picture that the Kowalski's were going to use his image and weren't going to use it in a way compatible with what Bob would have wished and weren't going to give Bob his Bob's son what Bob would have wished them to give him. Yeah, and so this guy, interestingly, on agsearchblog.com, he's a PR specialist, and he's like giving advice to Joan Kowalski saying,

here's how you mitigate the damage, do damage control after this documentary. He says, I'm not saying one way or the other, but the documentary, regardless makes them look really bad and he says they're definitely regardless of the fact that they won in the actual legal court they're losing in the court of opinion of public opinion and he gives them advice that'll give briefly on how to best you know handle the situation Bob's funeral was kind of a weird situation doesn't make them look good either. They didn't attend the Kowalskies. They didn't attend Bob's funeral. And I guess they sent a bunch of lawsuits towards Bob Ross's estate, meaning Linda, Jimmy, and Steve after Bob died. Joan swears that

it was just for get any of the, any of the supplies, arts, paintings that were owed them and owned by the company because Bob made multiple you know paintings throughout for each episode and apparently he had a lot of them at his house and I guess they thought that they shouldn't be in the hands of his wife and son and brother um Vinity Fair seems like they you know they're trying to give Joan a chance to straighten out the story give her side of the story and uh Joan seems to to be getting agitated towards the end there. She says, these are good questions. I see, because now I see the picture you're trying to paint,

when they asked, why didn't your parents attend Bob's funeral? And she says, well, you know, Bob was really sick, and Uncle Jim, she calls him Uncle Jim, called my parents saying, Bob's getting close. Bob's getting close. You should come down here. So they went down and spent a flight with him, spent a few days with him.

They said he couldn't speak anymore, but they spent a good deal of time just talking to him. This is a win-in that says in an NPR interview in 2016, you're the wind beneath my wings. She says, I think I'm doing what Bob would have always wanted, and he'd be happy if he could see it now. Jones says that her father Walt went in and held his hand and asked him if he wanted the company to continue I don't know how whether that's a political answer because she left out the details of how it would continue Apparently Bob squeezed his hand nodded yes This is all what she's saying to the Vanity Fair interviewer Funerals are funny things how she justifies her parents not attending Bob's funeral in the

my parents had just been there, you know, they'd just been with Bob. I don't go to funerals myself. I think maybe my parents decided that since they'd just been there, there wasn't. It's a family thing. And Bob had a brand new wife. I don't know. She sent out notices to everybody to come down or anything. So it sounds sort of creepy, but not really, because they have that visit they had just had with them.

And the interviewer asked was, was there any awareness that there? there was going to be this dispute over Bob's personal estate and all the things they sued him for. And she says, not at all. This whole thing is like total, when we got sued by Steve four years ago, that was the first we had heard of anybody being unhappy. And Steve and Dana and Dennis Cap, I guess, the younger son of Dennis Cap. sued Bob Ross so that they preemptively so that they wouldn't be sued for using Steve's name apparently

as an artist and apparently Bob was worth about 1.3 million half of that was his third of Bob Ross incorporated so 600, about 700 grand would be given to Steve Linda and I guess Jimmy I don't know if they could have purchased the stock with that to get more stake in the company? Maybe not. Maybe they didn't have a right if the company was still private. Still, you know, I guess it's public still. Yeah, there's a whole section I won't even get into

about how they sued Bob's estate for personal reimbursements, like when Bob's cancer treatment, and when he was out eating dinner with him that, which would be, you know, two of the three business owners, That would be considered a business lunch, but they were suing him for like 1410 at Shoney's. $17 at Cracker Barrel. I don't know. It's pretty hairy.

But, and they sued Elmer and Friends, and they sued one company, which was using the main Bob Ross image of him smiling. You know, that's apparently the trademark image. one of the many trademarks that they own. Apparently they own where did I put it? They own a lot like over 100

trademarks relative to Bob and the reason one of their reasonings for not letting a clothing company use a form of that with a cat on it or something like it was like thinly manipulated

so I understand and they wouldn't want their image such a significant trademark that they own being used in any sort of way. Their reasoning was that they would need it to confirm, conform, be used on products of only the highest quality. And this is straight from a court document, and that it would have to conform with wholesome and whimsical nature of Mr. Ross's images and his art. And it was definitely a wholesome and whimsical, uh, artistic license that they were using on the image of Bob Ross painting. But I guess that wasn't enough for them. Um, so they're, they're justified, I think, in that specific situation. Because it isn't, it is such a integral, a central part of their brand.

but they've been known to sue apparently many other people for much smaller infractions and I hope I'm not one of them but reasonable and fair enough in my use of any images or speaking about them given that this is primarily educational Yeah, she tried to justify the old member friend Joan Kowalski in the Vanity Fair interview, justify it, saying that it was justifiable to sue the children's show. She's like, we're, you know, if you don't nip things in the butt, and you do have to set a precedent and show the court that you're not being arbitrary, and you do have to, I guess, you don't just pick and choose what you sue for. as far as intellectual property rights goes.

And she says that you have to, you know, we're very protective our IP rights, in other words, our image of Bob and how it's used. And she says, we just felt the property can get very, very far from our reach when they asked if the lawsuit

of Elmer and Friends was justified. And she's like, I think we are always very protective of it. And then with this situation and with Bob wanting to do it, I'll say yes and no. I'll say yes. Filing the suit was the right move. BRI was, you know,

we were able to make sure the video on cassette were what Bob wanted. She's like, it's being, his image is being scrounged at, from vultures, from all angles. It's terrifying what they want to do with this image. Bob, she says, was a fanatic about protecting his own IP that he created he was the one we learned it from she says he knew that his persona could be used for bad she's like because we didn't allow it to

be used in violent video games and products probably being the celebrity death match from MTV in their late 90s or the alcohol and marijuana that's why so many people associate it which is legit you know it is a brand thing to be more wholesome and not be affiliated with drugs because we don't want to see people to see the bad and anything that has to do with Bob Ross they have to show due diligence I think it's just so easy based on the documentary and their bad reputation that they made you know Joan and her parents Annette and Walt to not like them to see to think that they're just really, really underhanded people.

But they do have a very strong, a pretty strong case that they are just trying to make Bob's brand as wholesome as possible. And a lot of this is, they did pay Steve out of court, apparently, in the lawsuit. And she says he's very happy with the amount they got. But when it said, So it turns out that Bob did receive permission to be on Elmer and Friends.

She says, I don't think that was actually a lawsuit. And the people say, yeah, no, it was. She goes, okay, well, we have to use the court system at times. We have to be really careful. I guess she doesn't really comment on the Elmer and Friends one, which is understandable. I wouldn't want to comment on that. Joan has been the face of BRI since 2012 when Annette and Walt stepped down.

And apparently Steve was, I guess he was young enough when his father died that his father, so Bob left his will and his estate in control of his wife and his brother-in-law, Steve or step-brother. and apparently sorry I said Steve his half brother Jim had control and apparently Steve didn't even know

so he must have a bad relationship with Jim he didn't know about any of this until 2017 or so and he was pretty upset about that in the documentary they say this he had a bad relationship he thinks he'd never had a good relationship

with his half-brother, his dad's half-brother Jim, Uncle Jim. And it seems to me that Jim and Linda probably sold out and settled out of court for some sum of money, I'm sure some of which Steve got, but none of that included the ability and the rights to Bob's image and likeness and his IP rights. his rights to use any of his paintings, anything he ever painted for Bob Ross Inc. That was all out of touch, off limits for Steve. And Steve claims that when his father died, Annette pulled him aside and said, listen, you can do anything you want with your father's image, as long as it's not art-related.

You know, you can make whatever. And she, like, listed some things that they're apparently, doing a very much non-art-related merchandise nowadays. And that's why Steve said, listen, it's my father's name, it's my last name, it's my actual name, because his middle name is Steve, and his real first name is Robert or Bob. So he is a Bob Ross. And he thought that he might have gotten sued if he used his own last name to sell paint products,

a Ross line of paint products. Joan, apparently in 2012, took over the company, Walt Nannette, I think they're probably in their 90s now, stepped down. And right around 2012, a couple years after that, she apparently had a changing of the card with, they got rid of Martin Weber. They started Alexander Cruz. And some other people claims that they were cheapening their products. And that was also when they signed a deal with another company, a publishing company, to go on Twitch, make their YouTube channel, make products like this, like the magazine. I found at the checkout line of my grocery store.

And a lot of that's completely understandable. but it's the it's the slight hypocrisy between them saying that they want to they don't want to cheap in his image and then putting out a slew of pretty cheap quality products as well that doesn't you know sit well with a lot of people but again it's even if it's not wholesome or wholly ethical you know by non-legal standards like moral the moral the most moral thing to do. It's legal. It's 100% legal from what it seems like. She said that they departed in 2015 the Weber company that Bob had formed such a tight relationship with who made their paints and art supplies. And Jones said that we saw some things. She was biting her tongue like Alistair

Ramsey says. Alston Ramsey saw some things in the organization, the Weber. organization that concerned us and it was a shrewd and necessary business decision to leave and the documentary uh Weber says that he went through the warehouse and saw people putting Ross's name on paintings so I don't know I honestly don't know the last little bit I'll say that Lawrence Cap is Dennis Cap's son, apparently. I think the thing that tips it in favor of Steve Dana, Lawrence Cap, is Alexander Cruz's testimony saying that, you know, he had personal rapport with Steve and Dana

and with Annette, and it doesn't look like Annette was the most straightforward, care selfless individual in fact quite the opposite he said after Alexander says after the death of Bob Ross many of us thought Steve was going to continue with the company but apparently Annette never saw him as sales material and apparently a lot of the companies faithful to Bob actually left a lot of the teachers and former students of Bob's left the company when he died because of this tension to the death of Bob. Kowalski's tried to make many changes in the qualities of their paint products, meeting resistance from the Weber company, creating conflicts

and the business relationships they had. So they would consult taking into consideration. They would, They would consult with people who knew Bob, you know, before he died, and about the integrity and respect they had for Bob, talking about what are you regarding the quality of products and, you know, Alexander says they would do paint by numbers. It would cheapen Bob's legacy, his already, you know, at stake legacy with the art world, even more. it didn't get general public appreciation for being so cheap and poor

saying that in the art world Bob already had enough securing trouble securing his legacy his respect and it's a bad idea you know you don't want to damage Bob's name putting out puzzles and paint by numbers art kits and stuff Bob wanted people to

you know try painting the way he was teaching them not just a, you know, cheap merchandise to sell. And Cruz insists that they were always trying to get money, you know, from his name. And that was always Bob Ross for them. Lawrence Cap, Dennis Cap's son, says that his company basically went under. Really took a hard hit when they had a, quote, divorce by Joan in 2012, leaving the company somewhere around there and they said half the revenue was from Bob Ross paint supplies and I'm not sure why you know I mean it could have been something shady unethical on

Weber's and that Joan wanted to distance herself from or it could be that Joan saw a more lucrative opportunity to make cheaper products that maybe had less that maybe was of less quality somewhere else, saving her, making her more money. Yeah, Alexander said Dana has been put through a lot through the, by the Kowalskies, and told him personally. Doesn't say exactly what, but, you know, the documentary was kind of formed and given the go-ahead by Steve and Dana, they were willing to participate in it, Apparently, after Lawrence Gap entered the equation and helped get some funding for RSR Art in their lawsuit against Bob Ross, Inc.

Steve's basic claim in the lawsuit was that he was wrongfully denied control of his father's image. Bob cheapened his father's legacy, essentially. Yeah, I don't know if Bob would have been okay with all the merchandise out nowadays. There's a lot of merchandise. There's NFTs, there's bobbleheads, there's waffle makers, cereal, socks, underwear, puzzles. There's a lot on the market. And let's see, the Daily Beast says that in 2012, BRI made less than $200 a year, licensing Bob's products.

That was when Joan took over. Five years later, they were making over a million a year doing that. The company holds 154 copyrights, numerous trademarks on his name and likeness, and they use it to sell millions, tens of millions of dollars, I'm sure. And they're making lots and lots of. of money definitely out there um or guy some of the cheap products in question from Gizmodo there's two 32,000 Bob Ross NFTs there's pop packs are they called Funko heads there's those there's elements skateboards polar fleece

jackets footwear cut and crew apparel chunky custard puzzles man just toys signs uh tree planning kits which are legit wall graphics limited edition coins

stationary I guess magazines as well underwear socks I guess there's a pair of rocks maybe I have to see that um

it's a lot they are really really making a buck off Bob Bob's image here in the PR guy I mentioned earlier says that you know there the Colise's claim to be keeping one of their big claims was that they were keeping Bob relevant and no one else would have done it and maybe Steve wouldn't have done it for a while at least but it doesn't mean he couldn't have came back 15 years later and gotten in to the business of marketing Bob again and putting him on the internet. They say he does, that claim doesn't hold up because they are cheapening his image with poor

quality products. If not for the efforts of the remaining founders. Yeah. The statement falls flat. He says the PR guy because Bob Ross's shows his personality, it wouldn't have never been lost. or even waned. It's hard to make a point that Bob would have ever gone out of style

to any significant extent if he was still out there being aired on PBS. Now he's on YouTube. You know, his image would have certainly made it there. Energy drinks now. They're essentially putting out gag gifts. Energy drinks and cereals and boxers. putting, you know, making euphemisms about male genitalia.

He says like, man, you are cheapening his image and you got to be careful doing it. Equating his image, you did good to keep it away from drugs and violence, but you're equating it now to just cheapened gag gifts and, you know, cheap, ironic merchandise. and they're just cheap commodities and the guy says it's compelling that Steve Ross claims he didn't receive any money from the Bob Ross Inc. And that strikes the public as highly unjust, makes it really a negative image on their part. And the guy says apparently more than 43,000 people have signed a petition as of a couple months ago in early 2022.

saying that on change.org petition saying that Bob's name and likeness should be given over to Steve. And that petition notes that BRI is now worth $20 million. And Cruz's final statement is saying, listen, everything on that was true on that documentary. And all they're trying to do now is damage control, using words like legacy and memory of Bob Ross. Those of us who knew him know he never would have left a legacy.

He never would have left a legacy. Those of us who knew him know that Bob never would have left a legacy of commerce where his image was sold to the highest bidder. He never would have left a legacy where the company ignores

its... They're true warriors, the instructors. Instructors he claims that are being pushed to the side. Their opinions aren't being heard. They're being ignored, essentially. He never would have left the legacy of lowering the quality of materials for a better

profits. Much less left us with the memory of abuse and outrage that the Kowalskies did indeed leave. He said, I'm not a person. Alexander says, I'm not a person to promote hatred, but I do promote justice. For my part, I will be a CRI teacher. You know, I won't promote the sale of materials from BRI since they're below student quality.

And above all, I will not support the Kowalskies. They've failed all the CRIs because he's a, you know, fundamentally he was a Bob Ross paint instructor. Due to lack of communication, lack of respect, their indifference to the demands they had, they have failed us all. I wonder what the demands were. They failed Steve, Dana, Jenkins family, the Cap family, Weber, their audience, and they failed Bob. So they think that the PR guy says,

hey, call Steve up, try to negotiate a profit-sharing motive or relationship or creative control relationship. He says, the business 1.0 world of top-down control of an image of companies has changed. The Kowalski's realistically, if they want to fix it with their reputations, how it's been damaged. It can't be done purely through a spin-doctored, well-written official statement. They'll need to reach out to their detractors being Steve and Dana

and be open to a more collaborative solution. You know, Bob's, I had so much more written about that, and I, uh, taking a while already, so I'm glad I skipped over most of it. I didn't want it to be the focal point on the Steve's and the Kowalski's lawsuits. I think it's really cool that Steve is now coming back with Dana Jester. They're touring, they're teaching art shops, actually, so go on Dana's Instagram, and he's promoting when his dates are. And he's showing, you know, paintings and showing behind the scenes from the demonstrations. And I hope nothing but the best for them.

Back in 95, apparently Bob's final words to Bob were to always, Bob's final words deceive. We're always to continue, you know, just to continue. A simple prophetic acknowledge that Steve might. struggle and apparently Steve really did and after his dad died got into a deep depression and he settled into a hermit lifestyle that defined his existence for nearly 15 years as the uh all allston ramsie article says at the end but it ends beautifully and I encourage you all to go read the article because it was really, he was a really good writer.

He ended it poetically, beautifully. He said that after Steve and Dana had hosted their first workshop together in like 20 years, Steve went back online after the weekend was ended. It was a whole weekend affair. And just wanted to see the comments and the, you know, feedback. And he said that as, as, He recalled going online to check the comments, left by students and attendees and how encouraging it was to hear such positive reviews about the experience. Steve took a deep breath and began crying.

Tear tears streamed down his face as he felt the long absent grace of God and the simplest and that simplest of emotions. the one that had been absent in his life for so long that he'd forgotten what it even was. Joy. Steve said it. It was like the first time I'd had the son on my face in a thousand years. That's what his experience, painting, and teaching painting, and continuing the legacy of his father of his dad was, after almost two decades, out of the spotlight.

really symbolic of what Bob's continuing legacy really is spreading joy telling people to continue keep moving forward even though life's tough keep reaching out expanding your abilities keep trying keep being creative keep expressing yourself keep growing pretty cool pretty beautiful

if you guys made it to the end of this thanks for watching thanks for thanks for support in the channel thank you to all my Patreon's supporters and I hope you guys join me in part three where we go over Bob's

legacy in more detail we analyze his his place in history and among historical trends and philosophies and ideas and movements and how effective of a teacher he really was

and how he's influenced me and many others. Thanks for watching.