Mountain Summit

That snowy peak was probably made with a palette knife loaded with white paint, dragged sideways across the canvas in a single confident sweep. The dark streaks that read as rock faces and crevasses are simply places where the knife let the underpainting show through. Bob Ross built mountains this way on television hundreds of times, and the trick worked because our eyes fill in the rest: shadow, altitude, cold air. Below it, the lake holds a pale reflection, and the yellow-gold shrubs along the near bank push forward against all that blue, giving the scene its depth.

Ross spent twenty years in the Air Force, much of it stationed in Alaska, where he first saw the snow-covered mountains that turn up in nearly every one of his landscapes. He learned the wet-on-wet oil method from German painter Bill Alexander and used it to finish a full painting in the twenty-six minutes of a television episode. Purists have never quite known what to do with him, since the work is formulaic by design, meant to be copied rather than admired. Still, the layered evergreens here, dark in front and fading to hazy blue behind, show a real understanding of how distance drains color from a scene.