Comfort TV

Saint Robert. (Celebcandle company.)

I watch an episode of The Joy of Painting every night before bed. It's every bit a part of my power-down routine along with sleepy-time tea and passionflower extract.

Comfort tv.

His show was filmed in my hometown, at the Minnetrista Cultural Center, where they also sometimes have Garfield-themed exhibits and educational things about the Indiana gas boom.

His studio (with the ol' clock on the wall) is itself an exhibit now, and includes a pack of the cigarettes we never saw him smoke, but he just had that voice where you could tell.

He's been gone now thirty years, but there are other things you can just kind of tell just by listening to his Camel-tinged drawl.

I have no doubt he liked a big American breakfast with dark black coffee.

I have no doubt he appreciated a beat-up old American truck.

I have no doubt he loved the smell of burning wood in a cast iron stove.

I have no doubt he shot guns up in Alaska where he lived between filming, and he could probably dress a deer, too.

But I have no doubt he'd thank the poor ol' feller when he was doing it. Might have even wept a little.

I like to think he was the kind of person that kept their politics gentle and unnamed. Just inhabited, like in the way he cared for Peapod the Pocket Squirrel. And the way he felt all lonesome trees needed a friend. And the way he elevated all painters, no matter where they came from or their prior experience.

I like to think that Bob Ross was one of the fading old guard of Americans.

But I don't know any of this for sure.

Bob Ross is dead.

(Long live Bob Ross.)

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What I’m reading: RAW VISION Issue 125 (Outsider Art Brut magazine)

What I'm listening to: Crypt Records playlist (Various)

Read the Brazil tour blog at the Substack: