What Makes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas One of the Most Fascinating Paintings in Art History

in Art, History | February 26th, 2025

Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninas almost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scrutiny ever since. If the public’s appetite to know more about it has diminished over time, that certainly isn’t reflected in the view count of the analysis from YouTube channel Rabbit Hole above, which as of this writing has crossed the 2.5 million mark. So has this video on Las Meninas from Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter. What element of this particular painting has stoked such fascination, generation after generation after generation? Easier, perhaps, to ask what element hasn’t.

“Through the 36 years he worked for King Philip IV, Velázquez produced dozens of paintings of the Spanish royal family,” says the narrator of the Rabbit Hole video. But the large-scale Las Meninas is different: “the painting appears more like a snapshot of daily life than a typical visage of royals posing to be painted.”

The figures it depicts include Philip’s five-year-old daughter Infanta Margaret Theresa and her entourage, as well as Velázquez himself, at work on a painting — which may be a portrait of the king and queen, reflected as they are on the mirror in the back wall, or perhaps the very image we’re looking at. Or could we possibly be Philip and Mariana ourselves?

On the rearmost plane of Las Meninas stands the queen’s chamberlain Don José Nieto Velázquez (possibly a relation of the artist), on whom it can hardly be a coincidence that all of the painting’s lines converge, like a vanishing point on the horizon. Diego Velázquez’s representation of himself bears an even more conspicuous detail: the knighthood-symbolizing red cross called the Order of Santiago. Born a commoner, Velázquez worked for most of his life in close proximity to the royals, and seems to have made no big secret of his aspirations to join their ranks. Presumably, the Order of Santiago was added after the painting was complete, since Las Meninas is dated to 1656, but Velázquez wasn’t finally knighted until 1659, close to the end of his life.

Different theories exist to explain who exactly added that red cross to the painting, as covered by YouTuber-gallerist James Payne in the Great Art Explained video just above. Like most works of art that have endured through the centuries, Las Meninas has its unsolvable historical mysteries, despite its unusually well-documented creation. But for serious art enthusiasts, the most compelling question remains that of just how Velázquez pulled it all off. “Las Meninas, with all its splendid effects, is a vigorous argument for the virtue of painting,” says Puschak. “This gets at the heart of the mirror, the vanishing point, and the multiple centers of focus. ‘See what my art can do,’ Velázquez is saying to the viewer” — whether that viewer is King Philip, or someone across the world nearly four centuries later.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney

in Animation, Art, History | February 19th, 2025

At a time when much of animation was consumed with little anthropomorphized animals sporting white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a completely different direction. His work is all about dancing geometric shapes and abstract forms spinning around a flat featureless background. Think of a Mondrian or Malevich painting that moves, often in time to the music. Fischinger’s movies have a mesmerizing elegance to them. Check out his 1938 short An Optical Poem above. Circles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. This is, of course, well before the days of digital. While it might be relatively simple to manipulate a shape in a computer, Fischinger’s technique was decidedly more low tech. Using bits of paper and fishing line, he individually photographed each frame, somehow doing it all in sync with Liszt’s composition. Think of the hours of mind-numbing work that must have entailed.

(Note: The copy of the film above has become faded, distorting some of the original vibrant colors used in Fischinger’s films. Nonetheless it gives you a taste of his creative work–of how he mixes animation with music. The clips below give you a more accurate sense of Fischinger’s original colors.)

Born in 1900 near Frankfurt, Fischinger trained as a musician and an architect before discovering film. In the 1930s, he moved to Berlin and started producing more and more abstract animations that ran before feature films. They proved to be popular too, at least until the National Socialists came to power. The Nazis were some of the most fanatical art critics of the 20th Century, and they hated anything non-representational. The likes of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky among others were written off as “degenerate.” (By stark contrast, the CIA reportedly loved Abstract Expressionism, but that’s a different story.) Fischinger fled Germany in 1936 for the sun and glamour of Hollywood.

The problem was that Hollywood was really not ready for Fischinger. Producers saw the obvious talent in his work, and they feared that it was too ahead of its time for broad audiences. “[Fischinger] was going in a completely different direction than any other animator at the time,” said famed graphic designer Chip Kidd in an interview with NPR. “He was really exploring abstract patterns, but with a purpose to them — pioneering what technically is the music video.”

Fischinger’s most widely seen American work was his short contribution to Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Fischinger created concept drawings for Fantasia, but most were not used, and only one short scene features his actual drawings. “The film is not really my work,” he later recalled. “Rather, it is the most inartistic product of a factory. …One thing I definitely found out: that no true work of art can be made with that procedure used in the Disney studio.” Fischinger didn’t work with Disney again and instead retreated into the art world.

There he found admirers who were receptive to his vision. John Cage, for one, considered the German animator’s experiments to be a major influence on his own work. Cage recalled his first meeting with Fischinger in an interview with Daniel Charles in 1968.

One day I was introduced to Oscar Fischinger who made abstract films quite precisely articulated on pieces of traditional music. When I was introduced to him, he began to talk with me about the spirit, which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to liberate that spirit is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to percussion.

You can find excerpts of other Fischinger films over at Vimeo.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in September, 2014.

Night on Bald Mountain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pinscreen Animation Based on Mussorgsky’s Masterpiece (1933)

The Nazi’s Philistine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

Watch Dziga Vertov’s Unsettling Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications.

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Brian Eno Explores What Art Does in a New Book Co-Written with Artist Bette A

in Art, Books | February 17th, 2025

Brian Eno was thinking about the purpose of art a decade ago, as evidenced by his 2015 John Peel Lecture (previously featured here on Open Culture). But he was also thinking about it three decades ago, as evidenced by A Year with Swollen Appendices, his diary of the year 1995 published by Faber & Faber. This year, that same house is bringing out What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, a new book on that very subject written by Eno, in collaboration with the artist and novelist Bette Adriaanse, better known as Bette A. It deals with the questions Eno lays out in the video above: “What does art do for us? Why does it exist? Why do we like art?”

These matters turn out to have preoccupied Eno “since I was a kid, really,” when he first got curious about a “biological, psychological explanation for the existence of art” — a drive not so readily followed, it seems, by young people today. Eno relates a conversation he had with an acquaintance’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who said to him, “I wanted to go to art school, actually, because I really love doing art, but my teacher said I was too bright for that, so I should go for science subjects.” He sees it as “the death of a culture, when you take the brightest young people and stop them from thinking about a huge area of human activity.”

Clearly times have changed since Eno’s youth, when art school could be a gateway to making a permanent mark on the culture. With What Art Does, Eno and Adriaanse set about creating a book that could easily be read by a bright teenager — or even her teacher — and consequently clarify that reader’s thinking about the importance of art. Eno has been discussing that subject for quite some time, and to Adriaanse fell the “thankless task” of reading through his many writings, lectures, and interviews in search of material that could be distilled into a single, pocket-sized book.

Eno clarifies that What Art Does is not an explanation of the whole of art, nor does it represent a definitive answer to the question implied by its title. It’s more important to him that the book expands the swath of human endeavor that its readers consider to be art. “Creativity is something that is born into humans,” he says, and the goal is “reawakening that, saying to people, ‘You can actually do it. Whatever it is, it’s your thing, you can do it.’ I like to say, it’s everything from Cézanne to cake decoration.” As “the place where people experiment with their feelings about things” and come to understand those feelings, art can happen anywhere, from the painter’s atelier or musician’s studio to the hair salon and the bakery: all settings, Eno’s fans would surely agree, that could benefit from the occasional Oblique Strategy.

Eno: The New “Generative Documentary” on Brian Eno That’s Never the Same Movie Twice

Brian Eno’s Beautiful New Turntable Glows & Constantly Changes Colors as It Plays

Brian Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Creative Work: Don’t Get a Job

Brian Eno on Creating Music and Art As Imaginary Landscapes (1989)

David Byrne Gives Us the Lowdown on How Music Works (with Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: Discover the Art of Henrique Alvim Corrêa

in Art, Literature | February 11th, 2025

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween radio play caused public alarm (though not actually a national panic). After the occurrence, reports Phil Klass, the actor remarked, “I’m extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.”

Surely Welles knew that is precisely why the broadcast had the effect it did, especially in such an anxious pre-war climate. The 1898 novel also startled its first readers with its verisimilitude, playing on a late Victorian sense of apocalyptic doom as the turn-of-the century approached.

But what contemporary circumstances eight years later, we might wonder, fueled the imagination of Henrique Alvim Corrêa, whose 1906 illustrations of the novel you can see here? Wells himself approved of these incredible drawings, praising them before their publication and saying, “Alvim Corrêa did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen.”

Indeed they capture the novel’s uncanny dread. Martian tripods loom, ghastly and cartoonish, above blasted realist landscapes and scenes of panic. In one illustration, a grotesque, tentacled Martian ravishes a nude woman. In a surrealist drawing of an abandoned London above, eyes protrude from the buildings, and a skeletal head appears above them. The alien technology often appears clumsy and unsophisticated, which contributes to the generally terrifying absurdity that emanates from these finely rendered plates.

Alvim Corrêa was a Brazilian artist living in Brussels and struggling for recognition in the European art world. His break seemed to come when the War of the Worlds illustrations were printed in a large-format, limited French edition of the book, with each of the 500 copies signed by the artist himself.

Unfortunately, Corrêa’s tuberculosis killed him four years later. His War of the Worlds drawings did not bring him fame in his lifetime or after, but his work has been cherished since by a devoted cult following. The original prints you see here remained with the artist’s family until a sale of 31 of them in 1990. You can see many more, as well as scans from the book and a poster announcing the publication, at The Public Domain Review and the Monster Brains site.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Hear Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from 1938: The Original Tale of Mysterious Objects Flying Over New Jersey

Edward Gorey Illustrates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inimitable Gothic Style (1960)

Orson Welles Meets H.G. Wells in 1940: The Legends Discuss War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, and WWII

H.G. Wells Interviews Joseph Stalin in 1934; Declares “I Am More to The Left Than You, Mr. Stalin”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Behold Harry Clarke’s Hallucinatory Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Story Collection, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1923)

in Art, Books, Literature | February 5th, 2025

As you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader of this site, we’re big fans of book illustration, particularly that from the form’s golden age—the late 18th and 19th century—before photography took over as the dominant visual medium. But while photographs largely supplanted illustrations in textbooks, magazines, and newspapers over the course of the 20th century, works of fiction, which had been routinely published in lavishly illustrated editions, suddenly became the featureless banks of words we know today. Though image-heavy graphic novels and comic books have thrived in recent decades, the illustrated literary text is a rarity indeed.

Why did this change come about? “I really don’t know,” writes Christopher Howse at The Telegraph, but he points out that the era of illustrated fiction for grown-ups ended “after the death of the big Victorian novelists,” like Dickens and Trollope. Before adult picture-books went out of style, several now-famous artists made careers as book illustrators. When we think of the big names from the period, we think of Aubrey Beardsley and Gustave Doré, both of whom we’ve covered heavily here. We tend not to think of Irish artist Harry Clarke—a relative latecomer—but we should. Of the many incredible illustrations from famous works of literature we’ve featured here, my favorite might be Clarke’s 1926 illustrations of Goethe’s Faust.

So out-there are some of his illustrations, so delightfully nightmarish and weird, one is tempted to fall back on that rather sophomoric explanation for art we find disturbing: maybe he was on drugs! Not that he’d need them to conjure up many of the images he did. His source material is bizarre enough (maybe Goethe was on drugs!). In any case, we can definitely call Clarke’s work hallucinatory, and that goes for his earlier, 1923 illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination as well, of which you can see a few choice examples here.

Dublin-born Clarke worked as a stained-glass artist as well as an illustrator, and drew his inspiration from the earlier art nouveau aesthetic of Beardsley and others, adding his own rococo flourishes to the elongated forms and decorative patterns favored by those artists. His glowering figures—including one who looks quite a bit like Poe himself, at the top—suit the feverish intensity of Poe’s world to perfection. And like Poe, Clarke’s art generally thrived in a seductively dark underworld filled with ghouls and fiends. Both of these proto-goths died young, Poe under mysterious circumstances at age 40, Clarke of tuberculosis at 42.

Clarke’s illustrated edition of Poe contained 8 full-color plates and 24 black and white illustrations. The Irish artist also notably illustrated editions of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault, with images that—as you might imagine—are likely to terrify some sensitive children. You can purchase your own edition of the Clarke-illustrated Poe here, re-released in 2008 by Calla Press. And to see all 24 of Clarke’s black and white plates, head over to 50 Watts.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories (1894)

Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875)

Harry Clarke’s 1926 Illustrations of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psychedelic 60s

Oscar Wilde’s Play Salome Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in a Striking Modern Aesthetic (1894)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A 1933 Profile of Frida Kahlo: “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art”

in Art | January 26th, 2025

Walter Keane—supposed painter of “Big Eyed Children” and subject of a 2014 Tim Burton film—made a killing, attaining almost Thomas Kinkade-like status in the middlebrow art market of the 1950s and 60s. As it turns out, his wife, Margaret was in fact the artist, “painting 16 hours a day,” according to a Guardian profile. In some part, the story may illustrate how easy it was for a man like Walter to get millions of people to see what they wanted to see in the picture of success—a charismatic, talented man in front, his quiet, dutiful wife behind. Burton may not have taken too much license with the commonplace attitudes of the day when he has Christoph Waltz’s Walter Keane tell Margaret, “Sadly, people don’t buy lady art.”

And yet, far from the Keanes’ San Francisco, and perhaps as far as a person can get from Margaret’s frustrated acquiescence, we have Frida Kahlo creating a body of work that would eventually overshadow her husband’s, muralist Diego Rivera. Unlike Walter Keane, Rivera was a very good painter who did not attempt to overshadow his wife. Instead of professional jealousy, he had plenty of the personal variety. Even so, Rivera encouraged Kahlo’s career and recognized her formidable talent, and she, in turn, supported him. In 1933, when Florence Davies—whom Kahlo biographer Gerry Souter describes as “a local news hen”—caught up with her in Detroit, Kahlo “played the cheeky, but adoring wife” of Diego while he labored to finish his famous Detroit mural project.

That may be so, but she did not do so at her own expense. Quite the contrary. Asked if Diego taught her to paint, she replies, “’No, I didn’t study with Diego. I didn’t study with anyone. I just started to paint.’” At which point, writes Davies, “her eyes begin to twinkle” as she goes on to say, “’Of course, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.’” Davies praises Kahlo’s style as “skillful and beautiful” and the artist herself as “a miniature-like little person with her long black braids wound demurely about her head and a foolish little ruffled apron over her black silk dress.” And yet, despite Kahlo’s confidence and serious intent, represented by a prominent photo of her at serious work, Davies—or more likely her editor—decided to title the article, “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art,” a move that reminds me of Walter Keane’s patronizing attitude.

The belittling headline is quaint and disheartening, speaking to us, like the unearthed 1938 letter from Disney to an aspiring female animator, of the cruelty of casual sexism. Davies apparently filed another article on Rivera the year prior. This time the headline doesn’t mention Frida, though her fierce unflinching gaze, not Rivera’s wrestler’s mug, again adorns the spread. One sentence in the article says it all: “Freda [sic], it must be understood, is Senora Rivera, who came very near to stealing the show.” Davies then goes on to again describe Kahlo’s appearance, noting of her work only that “she does paint with great charm.” Six years later, Kahlo would indeed steal the show at her first and only solo show in the United States, then again in Paris, where surrealist maestro Andre Breton championed her work and the Louvre bought a painting, its first by a twentieth-century Mexican artist.

And Margaret Keane? She eventually sued Walter and now reaps her own rewards. You can buy one of her paintings here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings Collects the Painter’s Entire Body of Work in a 600-Page, Large-Format Book

Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

Photos of a Very Young Frida Kahlo, Taken by Her Dad

A Brief Animated Introduction to the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Wide-Ranging Creative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Discover His Films, Music Videos, Cartoons, Commercials, Paintings, Photography & More

in Art, Film | January 16th, 2025

Image by Sasha Kargaltsev via Wikimedia Commons

As every cinephile has by now heard, and lamented, we’ve just lost a great American filmmaker. From Eraserhead to Blue Velvet to Mulholland Drive to Inland Empire, David Lynch’s features will surely continue to bewilder and inspire generation after generation of aspiring young auteurs. (There seems even to be a re-evaluation underway of his adaptation of Dune, the box-office catastrophe that turned him away from the Hollywood machine.) But Lynch was never exactly an aspiring young auteur himself. He actually began his career as a painter, just one of the many facets of his artistic existence that we’ve featured over the years here at Open Culture.

Lynch studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-nineteen-sixties, and the urban decay of Philadelphia at the time did a great deal to inspire the aesthetic of Eraserhead, which made his name on the midnight-movie circuit a decade later. When the MTV era fired up in just a few years, he found his signature blend of grotesquerie and hyper-normality — what would soon be termed “Lynchian” — in demand from certain like-minded recording artists. It was around that same time that he launched a side career as a comic artist, or in any case a comic writer, contributing a thoroughly static yet compellingly varied strip called The Angriest Dog in the World to the LA Reader from the early eighties through the early nineties.

In 1987, the year after the art-house blockbuster that was Blue Velvet set off what Guy Maddin later called “the last real earthquake in American cinema,” Lynch hosted a BBC television series on the history of surrealist film. That ultra-mass medium would turn out to be a surprisingly receptive venue for his highly idiosyncratic art: first he made commercials, then he co-created with Mark Frost the ABC mystery series Twin Peaks, which practically overtook American popular culture when it debuted in 1990. (See also these video essays on the making and meaning of the show.) Not that the phenomenon was limited to the U.S., as evidenced by Lynch’s going on to direct a mini-season of Twin Peaks in the form of canned-coffee commercials for the Japanese market.

Even Mulholland Drive, the picture many consider to be Lynch’s masterpiece, was conceived as a pilot for a TV show. Not long after its release, he put out more work in serial form, including the savage cartoon Dumbland and the harrowing sitcom homage Rabbits (later incorporated into Inland Empire, his final film). In the late two-thousands, he presented Interview Project, a documentary web series co-created by his son; in the early twenty-tens, he put out his first (but not last) solo music album, Crazy Clown Time. That same decade, his photographs of old factories went on display, his line of organic coffee came onto the market, his autobiography was published, and his MasterClass went online.

Lynch remained prolific through the COVID-19 pandemic of the twenty-twenties, in part by posting Los Angeles weather reports from his home to his YouTube channel. In recent years, he announced that he would never retire, despite living with a case of emphysema so severe that he could no longer direct in any conventional manner. Such are the wages, as he acknowledged, of having smoked since age seven, though he also seemed to believe that every habit and choice in life contributed to his work. Perhaps the smoking did its part to inspire him, like his long practice of Transcendental Meditation or his daily milkshake at Bob’s Big Boy, about all of which he spoke openly in life. But if there’s any particular secret of his formidable creativity, it feels as if he’s taken it with him.

David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Surrealist Video

David Lynch Being a Madman for a Relentless 8 Minutes and 30 Seconds

David Lynch Explains Why Depression Is the Enemy of Creativity — and Why Meditation Is the Solution

David Lynch Muses About the Magic of Cinema & Meditation in a New Abstract Short Film

David Lynch Tries to Make a List of the Good Things Happening in the World … and Comes Up Blank

Angelo Badalamenti Reveals How He and David Lynch Composed the Twin Peaks’ “Love Theme”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting from Start to Finish: Every Episode from 31 Seasons in Chronological Order

in Art, Television | January 15th, 2025

Bob Ross the man died nearly thirty years ago, but Bob Ross the archetypal TV painter has never been more widely known. “With his distinctive hair, gentle voice, and signature expressions such as ‘happy little trees,’ he’s an enduring icon,” writes Michael J. Mooney in an Atlantic piece from 2020. “His likeness appears on a wide assortment of objects: paints and brushes, toasters, socks, calendars, dolls, ornaments, and even a Chia Pet.” Here in Korea, where I live, he’s universally called Bob Ajeossi, ajeossi being a kind of colloquial title for middle-aged men. It’s quite an afterlife for a soft-spoken public-television host from the eighties.

Ross quickly became a pop-cultural figure in that era, starring in semi-ironic MTV spots by the early nineties. But over the decades, writes Mooney, “the appreciation of Bob Ross has morphed into something nearly universally earnest.” It helps that he has “the ultimate calming presence,” which has drawn special appreciation here in the twenty-first century: “More than a decade before most therapists were telling clients to be mindful and present, Ross was telling his viewers to appreciate their every breath.” This meditative, positive mood pervades all of The Joy of Painting’s more than 400 recorded broadcasts, and they even deliver the soothing effects of what YouTube-viewing generations know as “unintentional ASMR.”

Now you can watch almost all those broadcasts on a single YouTube playlist, which includes all of The Joy of Painting’s 31 seasons, originally aired between 1983 and 1994. (The videos come from the official YouTube channel of The Joy of Painting and Bob Ross.) Despite having ended its run well before any of us had ever imagined watching video online, the show now feels practically made for the internet, what with not just its ASMR qualities, but also the parasocial friendliness of Ross’ personality, the instructional value and sheer quantity of its content, and the highly consistent format. Every time, Ross paints a complete picture from start to finish: usually a landscape featuring mighty mountains, freedom-loving clouds, and happy little trees, but occasionally something just different enough to keep it interesting. And so the man Mooney describes as “probably America’s most famous painter” lives on as a beloved YouTuber.

What Happened to the 1200 Paintings Painted by Bob Ross? The Mystery Has Finally Been Solved

Experience the Bob Ross Experience: A New Museum Open in the TV Painter’s Former Studio Home

The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross & Banksy: Watch Banksy Paint a Mural on the Jail That Once Housed Oscar Wilde

Artificial Neural Network Reveals What It Would Look Like to Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting on LSD

Watch a Master Japanese Printmaker at Work: Two Unintentionally Relaxing ASMR Videos

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

What Makes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas One of the Most Fascinating Paintings in Art History

Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney

Brian Eno Explores What Art Does in a New Book Co-Written with Artist Bette A

Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: Discover the Art of Henrique Alvim Corrêa

Behold Harry Clarke’s Hallucinatory Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Story Collection, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1923)

A 1933 Profile of Frida Kahlo: “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art”

The Wide-Ranging Creative Genius of David Lynch (RIP): Discover His Films, Music Videos, Cartoons, Commercials, Paintings, Photography & More

Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting from Start to Finish: Every Episode from 31 Seasons in Chronological Order

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