"A Walk in the Woods" just sold for nearly $10 million.
(And no, it wasn't painted by Hunter Biden.)
So why....?
You might recognize its creator's name: Bob Ross.
This was the first of Ross's 400-some TV paintings -- 31 seasons, 403 episodes over a 40-year period on PBS.
And he did each painting in 30 minutes.
Ross, who died in 1995, still has a Youtube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. His paintings are in collections across the country, including the Smithsonian. However they're rarely up for sale -- Bob Ross Inc. owns many of the originals. Even the museums who own Ross paintings usually got them as donations. (For an appraiser, this is an automatic signal: strong provenance, combined with rarity, generally equals Big Bucks. It's called "replacement of like and kind" in appraisal talk -- but if there are few 'comps,' or comparisons, the values often go up.)
Ross was an adequate painter. But his real gift was encouragement.
'There's no secret to this. Anyone can paint. All you need is a dream in your heart and a little practice,' Ross said in his first episode.
And he kept that easygoing approach the rest of his life.
No comments:
Post a Comment