How Bob Ross Helped Me Out of My Depression
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post How Bob Ross Helped Me Out of My Depression appeared first on Consequence.
The first time I watched Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting, it had been more than three weeks since I stepped outside. What was the point? At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic I lived a five-minute stroll from a great collection of shuttered restaurants and a two-minute walk from a train station I no longer used. Several times a day I listened to the Red Line clattering past me down the tracks towards the day job I wasn’t sure I still had.
At first, it could have almost been a vacation. I went on my little walks, held Zoom dates with friends, set out to make a sourdough starter that smelled like nail polish from hell. But one day it rained, I stayed inside, and the whole routine turned to smoke; I stopped plodding around the block, delayed responding to messages even though I had all the time in the world, and the sourdough died in a cloud of farts.
I felt like a zoo animal pacing back and forth in my cage, occasionally stopping at the refrigerator to eat shredded cheese straight out of the bag. The thought of making food exhausted me. Everything did. I said to my wife, “Leave the couch? What am I, an Olympian?” She was doing better than me. It seemed like everyone was.
I spent hours in front of the TV, wearing a permanent groove into a couch I couldn’t afford to replace. Confronted with the golden age of streaming, I never found anything to watch, and even an umpteenth trek through my favorite sitcoms was about as appealing as a mouthful of ash.
I remember scrolling past Netflix ads for The Joy of Painting, wondering what kind of person would tune in to a man with a terrible perm painting dollar store landscapes. Not for me, I thought. But one day I switched on Netflix and didn’t even scroll, just set down the remote and stared blankly at nothing at all. Autoplay saved me — autoplay and Peapod the squirrel.
Ross’ affection for squirrels dated back to his childhood in Florida. “I spent a great deal of time in the woods, and there weren’t any other kids around and I had to learn to play with the creatures that were in the woods,” he once recalled. “That’s why I like animals and little squirrels and raccoons and all those things so much, because they’re very special, very special. And when I got old, I guess I didn’t lose that.”
At first, I only wanted to know if Ross kept them as pets (bad) or helped them with rehabilitation (good), but that initial curiosity led me down the rabbit hole of a surprisingly complicated life.
The son of a carpenter, Ross dropped out of high school in ninth grade to help his dad in the shop. He lost the tip of his left index finger, an injury he liked to hide behind a carefully-positioned palette. He spent 20 years in the military, most of it at a base south of Fairbanks, Alaska where he first saw the mountains that would dominate his art. There, he rose to the rank of master sergeant — a role not known for kindness.
“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,” he told The Orlando Sentinal in 1990. “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.”
Ross didn’t say this, but sitting in my dark apartment, phone in hand, eating shredded cheese straight out of the bag, I imagined I knew how he felt: hating his life, hating the person he’d become.
With no formal training, Ross began to paint. Out of necessity, he worked quickly, filling every second of his precious downtime with creation and color. Out of love, he painted those Alaskan mountains. William Alexander, a former German prisoner of war, taught Ross a “wet-on-wet” style that didn’t wait for the paint to dry, and with a few pointers, Ross’ work was soon good enough to sell in tourist shops. “I developed ways of painting extremely fast,” he remembered. “I used to go home at lunch and do a couple while I had my sandwich. I’d take them back that afternoon and sell them.”
Ross left the military in 1981 and began his second life as an art teacher for an art supply company back in Florida. During a group class, he was discovered by Annette Kowalski, who came straight home and told her husband, Walt, “This guy is amazing.” Walt had recently retired from the CIA, and together he and Annette decided to spend their golden years helping launch Ross’ television career.
After fits and starts, they found success with PBS affiliate stations, first in Virginia, and later in Muncie, Indiana. I had thought of Ross as a fellow midwesterner, but I learned that he never moved to Muncie, but instead drove his mobile home up from Florida every three months to film a new batch of episodes. And it was in Muncie that he met wildlife rehabilitator Diana Shaffer, soon to become one of his greatest friends. Having successfully turned his hobby into a profession, Ross found a new hobby, building an enormous enclosure outside his Orlando home where he nursed injured creatures back to health.
Many of them were reintroduced to the wild, including Peapod. “Everywhere I go now, people ask me about Peapod the pocket squirrel,” he said in an episode of The Joy of Painting. “You saw him in some of the earlier series, and Peapod, I think I might have mentioned before, he’s grown up and we’ve turned him loose and he’s got his own family now, a little condo in Miami, BMW, car payments every month — same thing we all have, except I don’t have a BMW.”
That’s the other thing I didn’t know about Ross — his sly wit. I assumed someone with that perm would be humorless, but the more episodes I watched, the more it felt like the opposite, like only someone who knew how to take a joke would turn their hair into, as Ross might have put it, a “happy little cloud.”
By this point in my research I was binging The Joy of Painting, despite having no talent or inclination for visual art. A big part of the appeal was his soothing voice — like a velvet blanket for the brain at a time when I desperately needed comfort. His process also tickles the same impulse behind so many YouTube shorts: From cooking videos to watching drains unclog, we love simple gestures that add up to a big accomplishment. Ross was decades ahead of that trend.
Given the state I was in, you might have expected Ross’ mantra to hit me like some grand epiphany. But the first time he covered an error by saying, “There are no mistakes, only happy accidents,” I was struck by how much more sly it sounded than when I had seen it on inspirational posters. Out of context, it tastes like a mushy platitude, but from the longtime master sergeant — a man who spent years cursing people out for their mistakes — “Happy accidents” has some real bite to it.
Ross knew as well as anyone the true cost of a mistake — how heavy it feels at the time, and how light it later becomes. His military experience wasn’t a mistake, even if it made him unhappy. The smelly death of my sourdough starter wasn’t more evidence that I couldn’t do anything right. It’s easy to stare at your errors, to linger over imperfection. Ross reminded us that after a few more brushstrokes it would all be forgotten.
But to me, nothing he did was nearly as inspiring as finishing a whole painting in less than half an hour. It took skill, of course, plus an unusual technique, and even diehard Rossians won’t argue that the finished products belong in general interest museums. Besides, he wasn’t trying to make singular masterpieces, just touting a process that anyone could use to find joy. If he didn’t show himself some grace, the timeline would never have been possible. A whole landscape in 25 minutes! If Ross could accomplish all that, surely I could finish one of my little walks.
So I did. First the walks, then the shredded cheese stayed in the bag as I resumed cooking, and soon enough I had found a new normal. I don’t remember when I stopped watching The Joy of Painting, and I don’t have a clear sense of how long that period lasted. But the experience has stayed with me
I still find myself in dark places from time to time, but now I’m quicker to recognize them, faster to start clawing my way back into the light. I don’t know if that period was a “happy accident,” and I doubt I’ll ever want to use a word like “happy” for my depression. But watching The Joy of Painting was certainly not a mistake.
How Bob Ross Helped Me Out of My Depression
Wren Graves
Popular Posts
