35 Happy Little Facts About Bob Ross

Whether or not you’re artistically inclined, there’s a good chance that you—like millions of other people around the world—have been captivated by Bob Ross’s instructional landscape paintings and soothing voice. Here are 35 facts about the happy little legend.

A lifelong animal lover, Ross was always rescuing wounded animals and nursing them back to health. As a kid growing up in Florida, this meant one rather strange addition to the family: an alligator, which he attempted to nurse back to health in the Ross family bathtub. Even in his adult life, Ross was always playing host to orphaned and injured animals, including an epileptic squirrel that lived in his empty Jacuzzi.

Ross’s quiet voice and gentle demeanor were two of his most iconic traits, which makes the fact that he spent 20 years in the United States Air Force and retired with the rank of master sergeant all the more surprising. Basically, he was the guy who told everyone else what to do.

Before he lent his dulcet voice to The Joy of Painting , Ross spent a lot of time yelling. “I was the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work,” Ross once said . “The job requires you to be a mean, tough person. And I was fed up with it. I promised myself that if I ever got away from it, it wasn't going to be that way anymore.”

While stationed in Alaska during his stint in the Air Force, Ross indulged his creative side by painting his now-iconic landscapes onto golden pans , which he sold for $25 apiece. Today, they can fetch thousands of dollars on eBay.

From 1974 to 1982, German painter Bill Alexander hosted an art instruction show on PBS, The Magic of Oil Painting , where he shared his “wet-on-wet” oil painting technique. Ross discovered the series while working as a bartender, and became an immediate fan of the artist. He ended up studying under Alexander, who became his mentor. In fact, Ross dedicated the first episode of his own PBS show, The Joy of Painting , to Alexander. “Years ago, Bill taught me this fantastic technique,” Ross told viewers . “And I feel as though he gave me a precious gift, and I'd like to share that gift with you.”

In the early 1980s, as Alexander was preparing to retire, he asked Ross to take over teaching his painting classes. Ross agreed, and set out to tour the country on his own in a motor home, traveling and teaching people Alexander’s “wet-on-wet” technique. He told his wife Jane that he’d try it out for one year, and if he didn’t make enough money, he would return to Alaska.

It was during Ross’s time on the road that he adopted his iconic hairstyle . Since teaching painting wasn’t an extremely lucrative profession, Ross learned to stretch every penny. One way he did this was to save money on haircuts by getting his locks permed.

Though Ross reportedly hated the permed hair, he was a businessman first, which is why he kept it. “When we got a line of paints and brushes, we put his picture on,” Bob Ross Company co-founder Annette Kowalski told Mental Floss. “The logo is a picture of Bob with that hair, so he could never get it cut. He wasn’t always happy about that.”

(You can see what he looked like without his trademark perm here .)

Though it was Alexander who got Ross started on his career path as an artist, it was Kowalski—one of Ross’s students—who put him on the pop culture map. Kowalski, who is often credited as the woman who “ discovered ” Ross, took a five-day instructional course with Ross in 1982, and quickly became enamored with his calming voice and positive messages.

In addition to newfound painting skills, Kowalski left the class with a new client: she became Ross’s manager , helping him broker the deal for The Joy of Painting television show with PBS, and later, a line of Bob Ross art supplies.

The Joy of Painting ran new seasons on PBS from 1983 to 1994, so even at public broadcasting rates the show must have made Ross quite a bit of loot, right? Not quite. Ross actually did the series for free ; his income came from Bob Ross Inc.

Ross's company sold art supplies and how-to videotapes, taught classes, and even had a troupe of traveling art instructors who roamed the world teaching painting. It's tough to think of a better advertisement for these products than Ross's show.

How did Ross find the time to tape all of those shows for free? He could record a season almost as fast as he could paint. Ross could bang out an entire 13-episode season of The Joy of Painting in just over two days , which freed him up to get back to teaching lessons, which is where he made his real money.

In addition to being carried by approximately 95 percent of all public television stations across America, reaching viewers in more than 93.5 million homes, The Joy of Painting was a hit outside of the U.S. as well. The show was broadcast in dozens of foreign countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, South Korea, and Turkey.

The Joy of Painting was a big hit in Japan, where it aired twice a day. (His voice, however, was dubbed.) On a visit to the country, Ross was reportedly mobbed by fans.

“We're like drug dealers,” Ross once said of the popularity of his painting technique. “Come into town and get everybody absolutely addicted to painting. It doesn't take much to get you addicted.”

Though he was undoubtedly a pop culture phenomenon, the art world didn’t exactly embrace Ross. “People definitely know who he is,” Kevin Lavin, a “struggling” painter, told The New York Times in 1991. “In his own way, he is as famous as Warhol.”

“It is formulaic and thoughtless,” sculptor Keith Frank said of Ross’s work in the same article. “Art as therapy.”

“I am horrified by art instruction on television,” added Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart, who passed away the following year. “It's terrible—bad, bad, bad. They are just commercial exploiters, non-artists teaching other non-artists.”

The New York Times paid a visit to Pearl Paint Company, an art supply store in New York City, where an employee pointed to the “happy little corner” where they kept Ross’s products. “We hide them," he admitted, “so as not to offend.”

Bill Alexander was one of the artists who wasn’t thrilled with Ross’s success, even though he had been his protégé. “He betrayed me,” Alexander told The New York Times . “I invented 'wet on wet.' I trained him and he is copying me—what bothers me is not just that he betrayed me, but that he thinks he can do it better.”

Though part of Ross’s appeal was his conversational tone, none of this talk of happy accidents or other happy little things was ad libbed. “He told me he would lay in bed at night and plan every word,” Kowalski once said . “He knew exactly what he was doing.”

Though you’d never know it from his painting technique, not all of Ross’s digits were intact. He lost part of his left index finger when he was a kid in a woodworking accident while working with his dad, who was a carpenter.

While trees and wildlife often helped bring Ross’s paintings to life, he rarely painted people. In fact, he liked to keep his work as people-free as possible.

“I will tell you Bob’s biggest secret,” Kowalski told FiveThirtyEight . “If you notice, his cabins never had chimneys on them. That’s because chimneys represented people, and he didn’t want any sign of a person in his paintings.”

The Joy of Painting regularly featured a rotating cast of happy little animals, with a tiny squirrel named Peapod probably getting the bulk of airtime. According to Ross, Peapod liked to sit in his pocket .

Though The Joy of Painting was a beloved series, people didn’t seem to be watching it to learn how to be the next Picasso. It was once estimated that only 10 percent of viewers were actually painting along with Ross.

In 2014, FiveThirtyEight did a statistical breakdown of Ross’s work on The Joy of Painting and found that 91 percent of them included at least one tree—by far the most popular element. (And if he painted one tree, there was a 93 percent chance he’d paint a second one—though he referred to any additional trees as “friends” on the show.)

On a few occasions, Ross’s son Steve subbed for his dad as a guest host. That same data set discovered that Steve liked happy little lakes: 91 percent of Steve’s paintings featured one (as opposed to Bob’s 34 percent).

Ross shot 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting and made three near-exact copies of each painting per episode. The first copy always hid off screen, and Ross referred to it while the cameras rolled (none of his on-air paintings were spontaneous). Ross painted a third copy when filming finished. This time, an assistant would stand behind him and snap photos of each brushstroke; these pictures went into his how-to books.

For all his worldwide popularity, there aren’t a lot of interviews with Ross. It has nothing to do with the artist being publicity-shy—it’s just that people rarely asked. “I never turn down requests for interviews,” he once said . “I’m just rarely asked.”

For all his hokey-ness, Ross was cool enough to be asked to be a pitchman for MTV—which he deemed “The land of happy little trees.”

Though some thought it was an April Fools’ joke, Nintendo had plans to create a series of video games based on The Joy of Painting . Unfortunately, the project ran into production problems pretty early on, so we’ll never know what might have been.

In 2001, Bob Ross Inc. media director Joan Kowalski told The New York Times how people almost seemed embarrassed to admit that Ross’s voice was the perfect solution to insomnia. “It's funny to talk to these people,'' she said . “Because they think they're the only ones who watch to take a nap. Bob knew about this. People would come up to him and say, 'I don't want to hurt your feelings, but you've been putting me to sleep for 10 years.' He'd love it.”

Even today, Ross has become an ASMR star: On the ASMR thread on Reddit, “Bob Ross” is listed as a common trigger . A video of Ross painting a mountain has a staggering 7.7 million views , with others regularly surpassing 2 or 3 million views. Of course, not all of those are ASMR viewers, but a mounting online presence suggests they certainly deserve some of the credit.

In a 1991 interview with The New York Times , Ross claimed he'd made over 30,000 paintings since he was an 18-year-old stationed in Alaska with the Air Force. Yet he was not one to hawk his own work. So what happened to them? When Ross died of lymphoma in 1995, most of his paintings either ended up in the hands of charity or PBS.

“One of the questions that I hear over and over and over is, ‘What do we do with all these paintings we do on television?’ Most of these paintings are donated to PBS stations across the country,” he said . “They auction them off, and they make a happy buck with ‘em. So if you’d like to have one, get in touch with your PBS station, cause … we give them to stations all over the country to help them out with their fundraisers.”

The fact that Ross didn’t try and turn a profit from his own work doesn’t mean that you can’t find one for sale. At one point, more than a dozen of his paintings hit the black market when someone stole 13 reference paintings from Ross’s van during the show's second season.

In the early 1990s, Ross was looking to branch out from art and had an idea for a kids’ show called Bob’s World , where he planned to go out into nature and teach kids about wildlife.

The Bob Ross Art Workshop in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, is a must-visit destination for Ross die-hards: In addition to offering art classes in Ross’s method, you’ll find a collection of the artist’s original paintings.

Two Inch Brush —named after Ross's brush of choice for the wet-on-wet technique—is an unofficial database that organizes all 403 paintings from The Joy of Painting by season and episode.

In August 2017, Funko released a vinyl figurine of the iconic artist/television personality. It depicts Ross dressed in his trademark jeans and button-down shirt, holding a painter’s palette. Sadly, it doesn’t come with any miniature paintings of “happy little trees.”

A version of this story originally ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2021.

Loading recommendations... Please wait while we load personalized content recommendations