Bob Ross Insights Hidden in his Painting

Bob Ross Insights, Hidden in his Painting

“I can't think of anything more rewarding than being able to express yourself to others through painting. Exercising the imagination, experimenting with talents, being creative; these things, to me, are truly the windows to your soul.”

                          ― Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, Vol. 29

What do we find when we look into the window of his soul? One of the first things that might come to mind when you think about Bob Ross is: “Happy clouds,” and “We don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents.” How are those two things related? Does it go deeper than debunking the assumptions that there is more than only happy blue skies?

This might seem like a stretch, but looking at the mere percentage of clouds appearing in Bob’s paintings shows something interesting. In 91% of his paintings there are at least one tree, but in only 44% there are at least one cloud. This would seem to show that the way Bob sees life, is more like a growing tree, and less like a history of the weather. I guess this means we might as well enjoy the clouds while they are there, because like anything else temporary, they will blow away.

In 22% of Bob’s paintings there were man-made structures, which I think implies that the picture is beautiful, and maybe is, most beautiful, when only 22% has ridged structure we made, and the rest is open for change and growth, in us, and others. Shakespeare said, “A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.” Leaving 78% of our heart open for others to grow without us trying to control them, seems like a pretty optimal approach to love. I have found, that as I have stifled my impulses to control people, reasons to trust them later blossom. I have also found that the fear that I am only capable of loving something or someone I can completely control, is stronger than the fear of the unknown of what will come out of the heart of someone I love. Love is the trust that someone’s heart is capable of accessing goodness, and the support, inspiration, and enabling power we give to help that goodness in others materialize, even if we can’t understand what it will be.

Only in 2% of Bob’s paintings was there a bridge, I think that’s because true connections are rare, but are less rare when we give each other room to grow, room to make mistakes, and room to start new. We probably wouldn’t want someone judging our current dreams on past failed dreams, and so we should give others the same benefit of the doubt. Do we really want to only participate in the goodness we have already stumbled into and understand, or join someone’s adventure to stumble into goodness we have yet to imagine? A friend is someone who shares a dream, a true friend is someone who can let someone else’s dream seed in their heart and mind.

Historian Thomas Fuller said, “If you have one true friend, you have more than your share.” I think we get so eager to see the fruits of our labors, that we are tempted to plant more pea plants that we can eat from in two weeks, than planting apple trees that will take more than a decade before anything eatable comes. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that only 30% of Bob’s paintings had bushes. My experience has shown there are more bushes in life than trees, but that’s not the world that Bob wanted to paint.

“Painting offered me freedom. I would come home after all day of playing soldier, and I’d paint a picture. And I could paint the kind of world that I wanted.” I remember going to the house of a friend of the family and seeing her pomegranate tree, which was at least three times as tall and looked so much more like a tree, and asked what kind it was, because ours are all short bushes. She laughed, and said, “they’re the same kind as yours, the only difference is I pruned mine.” Friendship is not a co-dependent relationship where we find someone’s neurotic need that is complimentary to ours—it is the process where as we get closer to each other, the walls we have built up to keep people out crumble, and we let each other in.

Our first instinct in life is to cuddle; a newborn baby placed on a bare chest just melts into the person holding them. We don’t wonder whether they want to hold us, whether we are worthy of it, or what it will say about us if we do acknowledge that we need someone to hold us. At some point despite the influence of that first instinct, the conditions society has forced on us about on being worthy of being held seep in, which can be summed up as, you are worthy of love once you prove that you don’t need it. Instead of looking for opportunities to hold others or be held, we frantically look out for things that will disqualify us from love. One little mistake, and we are taught to feel that the painting should be thrown out and we should start over.

Referring to a sloppy brushstroke that was supposed to be part of a tree on the shore, that crossed into the water, Bob said: “If you happen to get some of it down in here, who cares? We’ll end up turning that into reflection We don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents. Just don’t worry about it. Learn how to use what happens.”

All the mistakes Bob Ross ever made, which I am sure is quite a few before and even after he started his show, made him who he was. In life, it is hard to figure out what we don’t know that we don’t know. Instead of feeling ashamed and closing up when something we didn’t know we didn’t know gets thrust into our attention, we should be happy to reflect on it and learn.

When someone says they love us, we may question whether they would still love us if they knew our past, but that doesn’t make sense, because they are seeing the sum of our past when they see us and say that they love us. How is it that we are simultaneously grateful for what we have learned, and embarrassed we couldn’t have learned it another way? …as if there were even possible. Once we really just decide to own our past, we realize that we can’t, because it can’t be owned. It is only when we try not to own our past, that it owns us. We realize when we face our fears, that they were the only thing connecting us to our past, and that they are imaginary—our desires couldn’t be the same now as they were when we “messed up,” otherwise we wouldn’t fear them now, we would desire to repeat them. Even the fear now is not the same at it was when we made the “mistake,’ because otherwise we wouldn’t have done it if it were. Once we realize that the person who did everything in our past doesn’t exist, and that only the us now exists, not only does that allow ourselves room to grow, but allows us to allow others the room to grow too.

We are painting our concept of life, and though we know we are nowhere near done conceptualizing it, we fear that either not everything will fit, or that it will not look beautiful when it’s done. We can come to the conclusion that life seems crazy, mysterious, or surprising, but not bad, because we don’t know what it is yet, and it would only be bad if all those crazy, mysterious, surprising experiences didn’t bring something more valuable than they cost.

If we are trying to paint a picture with no shadows, that would mean we were trying to paint something with no sun… and a world with no sun sounds worse to me than a world with some shadows. Everything we gain in life we gain from happy little accidents we decide to learn from. Love, not just in a romantic sense, but in every instance of it, is something we fall or stumble into—love is a happy accident that we try to recreate. It is the ability to recreate what is revealed through happy accidents that is growing in us, that is the tree in 91% of all Bob’s paintings. Sometimes it takes a while to understand how an accident is happy, sometimes it takes a lot of processing, and that’s okay.  

“I don’t want to say ‘real unpleasant,’ but, [Paintings] bother me if they don’t have a lot of depth in them. Our world, the way I see it, has a lot of depth, and that’s the way I like to see paintings.”

I think that’s what really bothers us or gets us down, is when something happens that we have nothing positive to reference in our concept or painting of life. For example, what do we reference in our life philosophy when our parent’s marriage is failing? Where do we turn when the major theme our life philosophy is that love is always enough, and love is all we need? Maybe it is teachers calling on us to spit up answers immediately in school that makes us feel like we should have a ready answer for everything in life, but I don’t know. Either way, we should cut ourselves some slack, life tends to dump harder questions than we are ready for, and it is easy to assume we are the problem, and not the hero on a journey to find the answer. When we are overwhelmed by life, it would be better to say, “Wow, if I make it through this, I am going to have learned a lot,” rather than, “Either I am broken or life is—either way it is not worth it to try.”

We have to be able to take a very poignant experience, with more detail than we can process immediately, and calmly simplify it down till the resolution matches something on our painting, and then bring the painting up to the resolution of the experience. After a trauma, we are tempted to just start a new canvas, and end up with two, one totally dark, and one totally bright, and not knowing which situation will reference which.

Our confidence might go up and down whether we are doing life “right,” but regardless of how we feel right now, going back in time to a year ago, or ten, it’s easy to see how we could handle it a lot better, which means we are growing. We learn faster what we should be doing than our ability to do things increases, and that’s okay, it’s just a fact of life. Staying at seeing 100 opportunities to do good and doing fifty of them, is not better than becoming aware of 1000 opportunities and doing 60… it just might feel better. We are building up the awareness of love, and a capability to act on it, it’s a process, and Bob gave a formula to succeed at it.

“All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.”

For tools, happy accidents show us the tools we need to develop, and knowing what needs to be done, means we just have to look around for what can do that task. For instruction, everyone has at least one piece of the puzzle of life they can instruct us with, and it is the game of love to figure it out. The vision will come, no one’s heart is broken, the only thing that can break is the wall around it. Since we can’t comprehend the infinite complexity of love, we probably shouldn’t be scared of what we see now or might see later—the vision of love comes in glimpses that we must compile to understand.

We are worthy of love, because two hearts are always better than one—whether we can see that, when someone opens up to us, or whether they can see it when we open up to them, it is still a fact. Look for opportunities to hold people, and when the opportunity finds you, let people hold you. Life is beautiful. Love is worth it.