Chapter 7: The Tao of Bob Ross

Bubble.

Bubble.

I am a happy little bubble drifting through happy shades of sunshine. A happy little bubble drifting on the breeze. A nice, cool breeze that blows me up into the sky. Into the clear blue sky and then back, slowly, lazily I drift to the ground. And pop. With a sigh.

This is my Tao of Bob Ross.

Dr. Marcy says I need to try relaxation techniques. She told me to breathe slowly.

Inhale, count to five.

Exhale, count to five.

She said I need to imagine the muscles in my shoulders melting into waterfalls. Imagine my feet filled with blinking white Christmas lights. She said I need to close my eyes and imagine warm blue skies. Hot yellow sun. I need to imagine I am a bubble drifting through summer clouds.

Dr. Marcy says I need to take up hobbies. That they will make me feel more fulfilled. She suggested painting.

I have never had any artistic talent. I can’t draw. I can’t even color between the lines very well. When I was little, my mother used to tell people things like, “He can’t draw a straight line with a ruler.”

Of course, my mother insisted that I didn’t have a talent for anything. Sports, math, singing, dancing — she’d tell everyone she knew that I couldn’t do it. I think just so she'd have something to talk about. "Kid can't kick a soccer ball to save his life," she'd tell the ladies at church even though I actually wasn't bad at soccer. But when it came to being artistic, she was right. I never did well in art class … the best thing I ever made was a bust of Edgar Allan Poe that I sculpted out of clay my sophomore year in high school.

My teacher said it was pretty good. I was really glad when it survived the kiln, considering that everyone else’s pots and bowls and statues exploded. Edgar made it through okay. There was one crack down the middle of his forehead, but I put paint over it so you can’t really see it.

The bust won an honorable mention at the city art contest. I still have it sitting on a shelf above my bedroom door.

Since Dr. Marcy said I should take up painting, I went down to Artist Depot and bought a bunch of canvases. I bought the Bob Ross Joy of Painting Master Paint Set, which comes with eight colors plus brushes, a palate knife and a FREE "Getting Started" one-hour DVD. Everything I need to start painting like Bob Ross, it said.

I’d never watched an episode of Bob Ross before. I wasn’t allowed to watch PBS when I was a kid. Parents thought it was too liberal. No Sesame Street. No Reading Rainbow.

No Bob Ross.

So in addition to the Bob Ross Joy of Painting Master Paint Set, I bought the Bob Ross 10-DVD Set. When I got home I popped in a DVD and then I spent the next four hours watching Bob Ross paint happy little trees and happy little clouds.

He’d flick his brush around, making trees, making clouds, talking in this low, cool voice.

“What a pussy,” Humper kept saying.

“Shut up,” I’d say back.

In Bob Ross, I’d found my new prophet.

Chapter 15: How to Make a Sky

Dr. Marcy holds the paper. It’s creased into sections from where I folded it up to shove in my pocket.

“Hmmm …” she says.

She clears her throat. Scratches the back of the page with a fingernail.

“Well, Fred, I’d hoped you would open up a little more. You know, about the experience.”

“But that’s what happened.”

“Yes, I understand that, but we need to explore the incident. How did it make you feel to lose Derby?”

“Shitty.”

“Yes, well, I assumed as much. But can you elaborate on that? How does ‘shitty’ make you feel? Define ‘shitty’ for me.”

“Hmm … well, it’s just … kind of shitty.”

My homework this week: define “shitty.”

X

Instead of defining “shitty,” I decide to show Dr. Marcy how much I am learning about painting. My Bob Ross lessons are really paying off, and I want her to know that.

I crack open a Pabst Blue Ribbon and I write:

HOW TO MAKE A SKY

To make a sky what you do is take a tube of phthalo blue paint. Squeeze some of the paint out onto your palette. Don’t be too sparing about it. Get a nice, big dollop, mix it around and pull some of it across the palette with your brush.

Okay, now, once you’ve done that, you want to take your brush and tap it against the paint. Nice and gentle. This will ensure an even distribution of paint though the bristles. After all, you don’t want to get any blue smears across your sky. You don't want any unintended jet streams — blue wads of air for clouds to trip over.

Now, once the brush is ready, you want to take it and cover the canvas with crisscrossing strokes. Tiny little crisscrossing strokes filling the canvas out to the corners.

Just go at it, marking out the blank white space, making something out of the destruction of nothing. 

Yeah, that's it! Just make nice, tiny little crisscrossing strokes with which you will construct the heavens ... like God would have done it if he’d been working with oils instead of light and clay. There is no land to inhibit you yet. No mountains or trees or happy little rivers to block your view or hold you down. At this point, the sky goes on forever with no skyline to cut it in half. It's just you and the canvas and a brush and phthalo-blue expanses to swim through forever. Like a bubble adrift in boundless, breathless air, you paint.