Bob Ross - Television Show

Television Show

Ross was the host of the public television series The Joy of Painting. The show ran from January 11, 1983, to May 17, 1994, and still appears in reruns in many broadcast areas and countries, including the PBS oriented Create, and is a popular YouTube presence. During each half-hour segment, Ross would instruct viewers in oil painting using a quick-study technique that used a limited palette of paints in each work and broke down the process into simple steps. Art critic Mira Schor compared him to Fred Rogers, another PBS television host, noting that the softness of Ross's voice and the slow pace of his speech was similar. He attributed his soft voice to a promise he made to himself "never to scream again when he left the Air Force".

Ross later founded his own successful line of art supplies and how-to books, and also offered painting classes taught by instructors trained in the "Bob Ross method," building a $15 million business. In a 1990 interview, Ross mentioned that all his paintings were donated to PBS stations and that his earnings came instead from sales of his 20 books and 100 videotapes (the total to that date), as well as profits from some 150 Bob Ross–trained teachers and a line of art materials sold through a national supplier. Ross also talked about the donated paintings on the show Towering Glacier (#2341), on which he said that they were to help the stations out..

Ross also filmed wildlife footage, squirrels in particular, usually from his own garden. Small animals often appeared on his show, even during some of his trickier works, as he would often take in injured or abandoned squirrels and other assorted wildlife and look after them.