What’s Revealed in “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed”

At some point in my childhood, I believed that Bob Ross was the greatest painter who had ever lived. And for good reason. You couldn’t watch Leonardo da Vinci paint the “Mona Lisa” on television, but you could watch this peculiar man with an Afro paint a shimmering lake framed by snowcapped mountains and “happy little trees” in less than thirty minutes. Toward the end of many episodes of his PBS series, “The Joy of Painting,” Ross would take a palette knife and slash a tree trunk into the foreground—a potentially ruinous move that he would call a “bravery test”—only to create a newborn birch that snapped the whole postcard panorama to life. Voilà!

Of course, the main draw, whether you were painting along at home or not, was Ross himself: that alfalfa-sprout helmet of hair, that gentle sea breeze of a voice, that Buddha-like calm. “We don’t make mistakes—we have happy accidents,” he’d say, nudging us toward our better selves. Like Mr. Rogers, another low-key pastor in the church of public television, Ross came off as wise, warm, and a little too pure for this world. He died in 1995, of lymphoma, but his afterlife has been busy: immortalized in the lo-fi-eighties limbo of our collective memory, he’s become an Internet meme, a satirical touchstone (“Family Guy,” “Deadpool”), and a whispery god of A.S.M.R. In 2015, the entirety of “The Joy of Painting” streamed on Twitch, a year after FiveThirtyEight analyzed each of the series’ episodes and calculated, among other facts that just feel good to know, that fifty-six per cent of Ross’s televised paintings feature a deciduous tree.

Admirers of Ross’s saintly image may feel alarmed by the title of a new Netflix documentary premièring today: “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed.” The trailer, with its noirish overtones, doesn’t help matters, nor does the fact that the director, Joshua Rofé, made a previous docuseries about Lorena Bobbitt. Jesus Christ, what did Bob Ross do?, you may wonder. Can’t we have any good men? Indeed, the documentary has all the true-crime hallmarks: sinister underscoring, cryptic foreshadowing (“I’ve been wanting to get this story out for all these years,” the painter’s son, Steve Ross, says), traumatized-looking talking heads. But don’t worry: Bob Ross didn’t kill a man in Reno in 1966 or run a dog-fighting ring. If anything, the documentary is too accepting of his image as a celebrity faith healer.

The trouble, it turns out, has to do with the posthumous handling of Ross’s brand, which became the subject of an extended legal morass after his death. According to Steve Ross, his father’s name and image have been exploited, against the painter’s dying wishes, by a couple named Annette and Walt Kowalski, who, as Ross’s business partners, helped launch him to fame, in the early eighties, and then took control of Bob Ross Inc. (BRI), after he died. The documentary paints the Kowalskis as ruthless, parasitic, highly litigious, and, God forbid, chintzy: on the official Bob Ross Web site, you can buy Bob Ross bookmarks, Bob Ross coffee mugs, Bob Ross Christmas ornaments, Bob Ross waffle makers, and a Bob Ross Monopoly board. “They care about control,” Steve says in the film. “They want to own the whole dang kit and caboodle.”

The Kowalskis didn’t participate in the documentary, except in the form of a statement denying that their relationship with Bob Ross was “fractured at any point,” or that Annette and Bob, as Steve claims, had an affair. BRI, which is now run by their daughter, Joan Kowalski, recently sent Vanity Fair a handwritten memo from 1993, in which Ross asks Walt Kowalski for his comments on plans for a live show in Branson, Missouri, including a merchandising proposal that mentions branded toothbrushes, relaxation tapes, and soap-on-a-rope. In a Times video from 2019, Joan Kowalski says, cheerily, “The idea of socks and toasters and waffle makers, he would have loooved.” Maybe?

As a legal matter, the ownership of the Bob Ross franchise has been settled since 2019, when Steve’s company lost a lawsuit against BRI and lacked the funds to appeal. In the documentary, Steve claims that, when his father was on his deathbed, the Kowalskis pressured him to sign over his name and likeness, but he refused. Shortly before dying, in what may have been a defensive tactic, Ross married his third wife, a nurse named Lynda, whom he had known for just a few months. Steve recalls overhearing his ill father, all of eighty-five pounds, screaming into the phone—and this guy wasn’t a screamer—“You’re not getting my name!” A year later, BRI sued Lynda and Ross’s half-brother, Jimmie Cox, for paintings and other physical objects, such as the palette that Ross used on television. According to documents shown in the documentary, Ross left the majority interest of his trust to Cox, who then turned it over to the Kowalskis in 1997. (A representative for Bob Ross Inc.—which has, unsurprisingly, issued a lengthy statement contesting many aspects of the documentary—disputed Steve’s claims. Cox declined to appear in the documentary, “citing fear of being sued.”)

All this haggling is, to be honest, a bit of a letdown, more wearying than enraging. But there are bigger issues at play. We hear from Gary and Cathwren Jenkins, self-described “pioneers in the hobby-craft industry” (they teach how to paint flowers), who claim that the Kowalskis ripped off their instruction manual and tried to drive them out of business. A former BRI employee in Europe says, “The Kowalskis had no desire whatsoever to spread happiness and feel good. They only were interested in the money.” We’re left to wonder what Ross would have wanted his legacy to look like, and who should benefit. As for Steve, he appears to be wrestling with his father’s shadow, which looms over him like a less-than-happy little cloud. After resisting his father’s late-in-life efforts to make him a protégé, Steve had what he calls “a small nervous breakdown” when his father died, until he rediscovered the joy of painting for himself.

The documentary has less interest in complicating the image of its main subject. Born in 1942, Bob Ross dropped out of school, in ninth grade, and joined the Air Force as a teen-ager. He was stationed in Alaska, where he took up painting and saw the snowy vistas that he would re-create for the rest of his life. Watching TV one day, he caught Bill Alexander, a German painter who had a PBS show called “The Magic of Oil Painting,” and became one of his travelling instructors. Alexander used “wet on wet” technique, or alla prima, which allows the artist to speed up the oil-painting process by priming the canvas with a base color like white or gray. By 1982, Ross was teaching his own live classes, in Florida. It was Annette Kowalski who saw Ross’s commercial potential, while she was taking a class to help cope with the loss of a child. As she once explained, “I called Bob, and I said, ‘I don’t know what you’ve got, but I think we ought to bottle it and sell it.’ ”

“The Joy of Painting,” taped in a studio in Muncie, Indiana, débuted in 1983, making Ross a competitor to his former mentor. “He betrayed me,” Alexander told the Times, in 1991. “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.” This particular “betrayal” goes unmentioned in the documentary. But Alexander was missing the point: what made Ross able to outpace his former mentor was his placid persona, his soothing voice—the opposite of Alexander’s Teutonic bark. Ross cultivated an intimate, even sensual, allure. “He pretends like he’s talking to one woman in bed,” Annette Kowalski said, in 2011, and even Ross’s son agrees: “He practiced. He was trying to be a little sexy.” In the documentary, one of Ross’s co-workers describes him as “a little bit of a flirt,” apparently not in a creepy way. It is noted that the title “The Joy of Painting” sounds a lot like “The Joy of Sex.”

How much of Bob Ross was an invention? In some ways, the offscreen Ross was a perfect match to his hippie-sage persona. (He had pet squirrels.) In other ways, not. A friend recalls being taken on a thrill ride in his 1969 Stingray. Ross’s hair, a holdover from the free-love era, wasn’t naturally curly—he had it permed every few months, a process that he called having his “springs tightened.” As a nature-loving aesthete, he didn’t seem to have much mind for business matters, which, for better or worse, he left up to the Kowalskis. The documentary treats him as a spiritual healer, somewhere in the family of the Dalai Lama, but it’s more accurate to place him alongside Julia Child, Richard Simmons, and other lovable oddballs who found a niche in mass media and burrowed their way into popular culture.

Although Rofé interviews art historians about Ross’s techniques, the film, curiously, never interrogates him as an artist. Alongside Thomas Kinkade, who did for candlelit cottages what Ross did for landscapes, he was one of America’s foremost purveyors of kitsch. This put him at odds with an art world that at times seemed embarrassed to be represented by him. In 1991, when “The Joy of Painting” was carried by two hundred and seventy-seven stations and Ross stood atop a fifteen-million-dollar empire of live classes, art supplies, and how-to books, the Times’ Alessandra Stanley visited Pearl Paint Company, in SoHo, a crossroads of the New York art scene. The Bob Ross merch was hidden in a corner, and the staff dismissed his work as “pizzeria art.” “I am horrified by art instruction on television,” one Abstract Expressionist teacher in Manhattan told Stanley. “It’s terrible—bad, bad, bad. They are just commercial exploiters, non-artists teaching other non-artists.”

Ross wanted to bring the joy of painting to the masses, and you could see his easy-as-one-two-three approach as either crass commercialization or a populist mission. Painting, he seemed to believe, was a form of therapy, available to anyone with a canvas and a brush. If he never pushed his millions of pupils to search for their own subject matter, that was perhaps because he never pushed himself to paint anything but the same lakes, the same mountains, the same happy little trees, sometimes cranking out more than three episodes a day. The most intriguing insight I’ve found into Bob Ross as an artist doesn’t appear in the new documentary but in the 2019 Times video. It comes from Annette Kowalski, who happens to be the only official authenticator of Bob Ross canvases. “He wanted no sign of people,” she says of his landscapes, explaining how to spot a fake. “I don’t know why. He didn’t like people, I guess.”

This piece has been updated to include comment from Bob Ross Inc.