Home in the Valley

An old barn sits on the edge of a meadow with its red roof sagging and its boards worn silver, the kind of building that has clearly outlasted whoever built it. Bob Ross painted structures like this often, and he had a specific trick for them: the roof and siding come from a palette knife loaded with paint and dragged sideways, so the chipped, splintery texture is really just the tool leaving its own marks. The same knife work shows up in the fallen log in the foreground. Everything else here comes from brushes, including the fan brush that made the evergreens and the two-inch brush that scrubbed in the blue haze of the distant hills.

Ross worked in the wet-on-wet method, laying fresh oil paint into a still wet layer, which is why the whole thing could be finished in the twenty-six minutes of a television episode. He learned the technique from painter Bill Alexander and turned it into The Joy of Painting, which ran from 1983 to 1994 and made him one of the most recognized painters in America, though almost never through galleries. Before that he spent twenty years in the Air Force in Alaska, where part of his job involved shouting at people, and he decided that when he got out he would never raise his voice again. The landscape you see here, with its lake, meadow and mountain, is closer to his memories of the north than to anywhere in Florida, where he actually lived and taught.