David McRaney  |  Journalist

Burnt Umber

You remember Bob Ross don't you? He was the strange man with the afro who sort of taught how to paint when local television had nothing better to air. I hadn't thought about him in years, so I looked him up on the internet, where I was shocked to find out he had passed away.

There was just something about Bob Ross, something moving slowly behind you as he sucked you in, something unmentionable as he dabbed his way through yet another mountain obscured by trees, something lonely in the way he lethargically moved from brush to brush, something distant in his easy smile.

Bob Ross was one thing, and there was nothing else like him. In our living room we saw him standing there alone, framed by the corners of the set in a studio that was as empty and unreal as the creeping shadow he cast over me every Sunday afternoon.

His voice would stir like turning leaves and vibrate at some sort of subsonic frequency that made your eyelids sag. Before long, you would be under the spell, filled with the spirit of his steady hymn.

Like clean Japanese architecture, his power was the negative, the unspoken, and the void. There was nothing between him and you, and he asked nothing from you. You were the seeker, and he the sought. There was a vacuum that intensified as he neared the final highlights on heavy globs of branches and smears of lake.

Now that Bob is dead, his persona is complete. Inside the television, he has melded with the dull, predictable paintings he churned out every week; his dull predictable shows both exist and cease to exist in our minds at the same rate. His mountaintops and rotting shacks, both weighted with snow, are as insubstantial as Bob himself.

His wispy afro and gentle whisper concealed the bittersweet reality of what he was in a way that television edits and low quality stage lighting never could. He was a master, reduced by the machine.

He was a philosopher that had turned a profit. Where he truly came from and where he was truly going, we will never know, because Bob's presence was only known to us in the same way his imagination was, in small wet on wet performances on lazy Sunday afternoons.

Those moments we shared were distant and intimate in chorus, ephemeral and unknown, lingering upon waking, then forgotten.

Originally published in The Student Printz on March 31, 2005