If there is a Church of Sacred Landscapes then Bob Ross is its Jesus Christ. That is not a sacrilegious statement of bizarre cult-mindedness. Painting is a religion that has its tenets. And Bob Ross explained to us the will of God on his painting show on PBS. All the illustrations used in this post come from the Facebook page Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. All the wisdom comes from things the Master said on the show.
Bob Ross was the prophet of the paintbrush. He would present us with a lightly prepared canvas at the beginning of the show and then proceed on camera to take his brush and palette knife, and all his paints, and create a piece of the world before our very eyes. And he was not Picasso or Van Gogh or even Norman Rockwell. He was not a talented artist, but rather a very practiced one who knew all the tricks and shortcuts to sofa painting, the art of knocking out scene after scene after scene. He could make his little piece of the world in only half an hour, and he made it obvious how we could do the same. His work was not gallery quality… but his teachings were Jesus-worthy.
His work was natural, flowing, and realistic in the random complexity it presented. He took standard paintbrush strokes and pallet knife tricks and made them dance across the canvas to make happy little trees.
His painting methods presented us with a philosophy of life and a method of dealing with whatever mistakes we might make.
And of course, any good religion must take into account the existence of evil.
Bob Ross tells us that evil is necessary as a contrast to what is good and what is true. We need the dark. But we don’t have to embrace it. Bob’s paintings were never about the dark bits. He always gravitated towards the light.
Of course, sometimes you have to beat back the darkness. A good artist takes care of his tools.
Bob Ross admonishes us to look and to learn and love what we see. The man radiated a calm, gentle nature that makes him a natural leader. His simple, countrified wisdom resonates because we need calm and pastoral peace in our lives. It is one of the main reasons mankind needs religion.
So I definitely think we ought to consider building a Bob-Rossian Church of the Sacred Landscapes. We have our prophet. The man has passed away, yet he is risen to paint again endlessly on YouTube.
And if you are willing to try… Bob Ross will smile upon you.
Catch a Falling Star 
Finding My Voice
As Big MacIntosh welcomes more little ponies into my insanely large doll collection, I have been reading my published novel Snow Babies. The novel is written in third person viewpoint with a single focus character for each scene. But because the story is about a whole community surviving a blizzard with multiple story lines criss-crossing and converging only to diverge and dance away from each other again, the focus character varies from scene to scene.
Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies.
In Canto Two, Valerie Clarke, the central main character of the story, is the focus character. Any and all thoughts suggested by the narrative occur only in Valerie’s pretty little head. Canto Three is focused through the mind of Trailways bus driver Ed Grosland. Canto Four focuses on Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Baily. And so, on it goes through a multitude of different heads, some heroic, some wise, some idiotic, and some mildly insane. Because it is a comedy about orphans freezing to death, some of the focus characters are even thinking at the reader through frozen brains.
The ponies decide to visit Minnie Mouse’s recycled Barbie Dreamhouse where Olaf the Snowman is the acting butler.
That kind of fractured character focus threatens to turn me schizophrenic. I enjoy thinking like varied characters and changing it up, but the more I write, the more the characters become like me, and the more I become them. How exactly do you manage a humorous narrative voice when you are constantly becoming someone else and morphing the way you talk to fit different people? Especially when some of your characters are stupid people with limited vocabularies and limited understanding?
The ponies are invited to live upstairs with the evil rabbit, Pokemon, and Minions.
I did an entire novel, Superchicken, in third person viewpoint with one focus character, Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken himself. That is considerably less schizophrenic than the other book. But it is still telling a story in my voice with my penchant for big words, metaphors, and exaggerations.
The novel I am working on in rough draft manuscript form right now, The Baby Werewolf, is done entirely in first person point of view. That is even more of an exercise of losing yourself inside the head of a character who is not you. One of the first person narrators is a girl, and one is a werewolf. So, I have really had to stretch my writing ability to make myself into someone else multiple times.
I assure you, I am working hard to find a proper voice with which to share my personal wit and wisdom with the world. But if the men in white coats come to lock me away in a loony bin somewhere, it won’t be because I am playing a lot with My Little Ponies.
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