Just about everyone knows who Bob Ross is. The longtime host of “The Joy of Painting” on public television was famous for his peaceful landscapes populated with what he called “happy little trees” as well as his noteworthy hairstyle and – most of all – his friendly, calm, almost trance-inducing demeanor.
But what everyone may not know is that the largest collection of Ross’ work sits in a warehouse in Loudoun County. That same spot off Route 50 – in a nondescript office park – is also the worldwide headquarters of Bob Ross Inc.
The collection is overseen by Joan Kowalski, the daughter of Ross’ business partners in Bob Ross Inc. and a longtime employee of the company.
Kowalski grew up in the area and lives in Sterling today – and indeed, Bob Ross had a home in the Herndon area for many years.
Joan Kowalski
The first major exhibit ever of Ross’ paintings was in 2019 just up the road in Purcellville – and turned out to be an unexpected smash hit.
More than 30 years after Ross’ death from cancer in 1995, Ashburn Magazine spoke with Joan Kowalski in a wide-ranging conversation about her friend’s legacy, the growing business she runs, and recent headlines about some Bob Ross original paintings hitting the auction block. Here are excerpts from our conversation.
Q: So how did your family get connected to Bob Ross the artist?
“About 45 years ago, my mom took a painting class with Bob down in Florida. He was just a guy in a motorhome that would drive up and down the East Coast, giving tiny little painting classes, and my mother would go home and tell my dad, ‘This guy is extraordinary … let’s do something to help him with his classes.’ Because they weren’t very well attended, and he was sort of a struggling artist, if you will.”
Q: And that led to a long partnership?
“Yep. One thing led to another and the four of them – my mother and father, Bob and his wife, Jane, all created a tiny little company called the Bob Ross Company – I want to say 1982 or maybe even 1981. And then it was incorporated three or four years later.”
Q: When did you come on board?
“I came to work here in 1988. I started answering the phones – the 800 number that you see after the television show on public television. And then I just worked my way up.”
Q: Has anyone ever been able to get an actual number of how many paintings Bob did in his life?
“Well, he’s quoted as saying he painted about 30,000 paintings. And I think he’s probably right. He probably did paint that many. He painted every day. He was ferocious about making sure that he kept his technique very fresh.”
Happy little trees painted by Bob Ross.
Astri Wee Photography
Q: How many paintings are there in the collection that you oversee?
“We are going to do an inventory soon because we have been donating some paintings lately. But I’m thinking it’s maybe a thousand paintings that we have.”
The warehouse in Chantilly that is home to the Bob Ross painting collection.
Astri Wee Photography
Q: Are there a lot of his paintings in private hands?
“Yes, there are. Bob used to give paintings to people as they were walking by when he was in the TV studio. If somebody had come to watch him film and they’d say, ‘Oh, I really like that’ – he’d respond, ‘You want it?’ So there are a lot of Bob’s paintings out in the wild.”
Q: Did he sell many of his paintings?
“He may have sold a few, but not really. He was more interested in the process. He liked to show people how to do their own paintings. He wasn’t really that fascinated with his finished paintings. He was onto the next one and never really gave the finished painting a second look.”
Q: Is it true that he did three versions of each painting?
“Exactly. He did one at home that he would plan and practice on before he went to the studio [to tape a show]. And then there was another painting that he actually did on air. That’s the 26-minute version.”
Q: The 26-minute version?
“Yes. That’s the one you watch him painting on the TV screen. That’s the painting that apparently – according to the appraiser – has the most value, because you don’t usually get the chance to have an actual 26-minute video proof of the artist creating the painting. So that’s extraordinarily valuable to some people. They get a big kick out of it.”
Q: And what’s the third painting?
“The third painting is the one that he would take maybe two or three hours to paint and those are for his instructional books. Those are where he really took the time to make them extremely gorgeous – very detailed – because he knew that the pages in those books would last forever and he wanted them to be really good.
Q: Are all his paintings landscapes? Did he ever do portraits or still lifes or anything else?
“He didn’t do anything but landscapes and seascapes. He had attempted other types of painting, but you will hear him talk about it on television sometimes – his teachers would tell him, ‘You should stick to landscapes.’ He preferred mountains and trees and water and that kind of thing anyway. It fit his personality.”
Q: You’ve donated some paintings to the Bob Ross Experience, a museum exhibit in Muncie, Ind.
“This is something very exciting. It opened about five years ago. It’s the actual little house where he filmed his programs back in the day.”
Q: It’s in a house?
“The public television station that he chose to film all his shows in was nothing more than a little tiny historic house owned by the Ball family. Ball canning jars are a big deal [for canning fruits and vegetables]. And the Ball family is a very big deal in Muncie. And so this little historic house that used to belong to the Ball family is where he filmed his programs. And they’ve turned that adorable little house into a Bob Ross museum and it’s fantastic.”
Q: And they have some of his paintings there?
“They have probably a hundred – most of them are from us. You can see the exact spot where Bob stood. His exact easel. They even went and got old-time TV cameras that are replicas of the exact type of camera that was used to film ‘The Joy of Painting.’”
Q: What type of collaboration is there between you and the museum?
“We support them and we’re working with them on a traveling exhibit. We will donate some more paintings and it will just travel all around the country. We’re very excited about that – and I have to tell you – it all stems from that Purcellville exhibit that became so popular.”
Q: Tell us about that. I don’t think a lot of folks realized that until Purcellville, an exhibit of Bob’s paintings hadn’t really ever been done before.
“It was the first time we had ever decided to take those paintings out of storage and actually show them. You know, the mission was always to teach other people how to paint their own paintings. That was Bob’s big thing and that was the company’s big thing – creating teachers and having teachers teach classes so that people could paint their own paintings. That was what Bob saw as the mission of the company and it never really occurred to anybody to do any exhibits.”
Q: The Smithsonian National Museum of American History has a display of Bob’s work, including a painting, his easel, and a painting knife and a brush.
“They’ve got three or four of his paintings. We donated them. We had been asking the Smithsonian – ‘Don’t you want some of Bob’s paintings?’ and we never could get an answer and it made us feel bad. And then we decided to get really gutsy and say, ‘Here’s everything. Here are some write-ups. Here are paintings you can have. Here’s everything you would need.’ And they finally said, ‘OK, we’re sending a truck.’”
Q: Do you think there were doubts because some in the art world maybe didn’t consider Bob’s art to be at a museum-level caliber?
“Definitely. Too kitschy. Too for the ‘everyday guy.’ And particularly when Bob was alive, he used to have a lot of insults slung at him.”
Q: How did Bob and Jane and your parents respond to that?
“It just emboldened them. They just dug their heels in deeper. And honestly, if he’s in the Smithsonian and people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for Bob’s paintings, then he has jumped the shark in terms of legitimacy.”
Q: Meaning that should quiet the naysayers?
“Absolutely.”
Q: Why do you think people love Bob Ross? How did he capture the imagination of so many people?
“We’ve done studies. Nobody sits down and watches just one episode. The official analysis is that three episodes is the minimum. It’s like eating potato chips, right? Bob just had a special way of making people feel and he knew how to capture that magic and share it in a very slow, quiet way and that’s why it has lasted.”
Q: And now it seems a whole new generation has discovered Bob. A friend in Ashburn said his grade school age daughter goes to sleep watching Bob’s show each night.
“If you’re familiar with Twitch TV at all – it’s a platform that kids go on to watch each other play video games. And it’s wildly popular. Now what does this have to do with Bob Ross, right? Well, they came to us about eight or nine years ago and they said, ‘We want to open up a new sub channel of Twitch and call it ‘Creative.’ And we’d like to have a Bob Ross marathon to sort of launch this new channel.”
Q: That’s a big marathon.
“A marathon of all of Bob’s episodes lasts about 8 days, if you can imagine. There are 403 episodes of ‘The Joy of Painting.’ Now some of those feature guest artists. But 381 of them are with Bob Ross, so you figure 381 half hours.”
Q: So you jumped at the opportunity?
“No. I originally said no. And my nephew – I guess he was probably about 17 at the time – and he said, ‘Aunt Joan, you want to do this.’ So we did. And I remind my nephew of this all the time – this whole thing is his fault. It was amazing. Kids coming out of nowhere in the Twitch chat talking about how they remembered Bob Ross. They had forgotten how much they loved him. It was amazing.”
Q: And this apparently started a whole “We love Bob Ross” wave?
“It was this big surge of new interest. Then came the merchandise – Funko pop figures. A monopoly game. Plushies too. All sorts of things. He’s a really big deal in people’s lives and I only wish that he was here to see it.”
Q: Let’s talk about the recent decision to donate 30 of Bob’s paintings to support public television – a decision that has already raised millions. It must have been hard to hear about the recent funding cuts.
“It was. If you watch a lot of public television – a lot of it is ‘how to’ programming – cooking shows, travel shows, painting shows, sewing shows. It’s not politics at all. It’s just a way to have comfort in your life. And so, politics aside, when the defunding occurred, we were sort of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There’s a large part of public television that the president and Congress are missing. Bob was ferociously devoted to public television. He would have never, never, never considered any other venue.”
Q: So how did that lead to the decision to make this donation in support of public television?
“We’ve never sold paintings before, I’ll tell you that. But it was just totally the right time to do it and I didn’t ask anybody’s permission. I just decided this is the perfect way to get these paintings out and have the proceeds make a difference. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be like a really big deal. Would people want to buy them for $25? I didn’t have a clue. I had no idea how it would be received. But at the first auction in Los Angeles, we sold three paintings and raised over $600,000. In January, three more sold in Boston for more than $1.2 million.” [Editor’s Note: The next auction of three Bob Ross paintings is scheduled for April in New York.]
Q: Didn’t a single Bob Ross painting sell for a million dollars recently?
“So that was the John Oliver show [‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’]. They contacted us and they said they really wanted to buy one at auction, but it was too rich for their blood, and I said, ‘Well, we’ll give you one.’ So, it’s actually 31 paintings that are out supporting public television and the one that the John Oliver show sold went for a little bit over $1 million.”
Q: That’s amazing.
“I’m still speechless.”
This article originally appeared in Ashburn Magazine, published by InsideNoVa.