“Painting With John”: John Lurie’s Miniseries That’s Absolutely Nothing Like Bob Ross
I just want people to know that none of the trees in my paintings are happy. They’re all miserable. They are very unhappy. The flowers in particular are miserable. They hate life. These are not happy trees. They are miserable.
At this point, it’s fair to say that Bob Ross is an indelible cultural figure. The first episode of The Joy of Painting aired in 1983, and today – in 2021 – almost 40 years later, no one can seem to forget about him. Walk into any gift shop and you’ll find socks, enamel pins and t-shirts with Bob Ross’s face, maybe including one of his many optimistic -isms. The huge resurgence of appreciation for Bob Ross in 2020 during quarantine did not come as much of a surprise: people needed (and still do!) to make art as much as they needed a large dose of infectious positivity pushing them to pick up a paintbrush.
So, Bob Ross being the immovable beast that we all acknowledge him to be, any television show that involves painting on screen is, whether consciously or not, responding to The Joy of Painting. John Lurie’s television series Painting with John, which aired in January of 2021, acknowledges this expectation almost immediately, asserting in the first episode that, “Bob Ross was wrong: everybody can’t paint. It’s not true.” This radical moving-away from what I’m calling “The Joy of Painting Approach” does not stop here: from Lurie’s demeanor towards the camera to his staunch refusal to explain his painting technique, the entire show feels as if the anti-Bob Ross were being born.
In fact, the title “Painting with John” is wildly misleading (it refers to his 1991 television series Fishing with John) – John does not invite you to paint with him (he only occasionally talks about what he’s painting), nor would he want, the viewer gets the impression (this is important), for you to copy his paintings, ala Bob Ross. Like Ross, he recognizes the importance of creating art, but painting, for John Lurie, is an intensely personal endeavor. Watching Lurie’s watercolor paintings as they’re being crafted feels at once voyeuristic and like an honor of the highest order.
The value of getting people to pick up paintbrushes and try to create something is immeasurable, but The Joy of Painting instills viewers with confidence more than it actually teaches them how to be creative. Lurie recognizes the disconnect between teaching technique and nurturing creativity, and decides to take his show in a completely different direction from Ross: “I was hoping that this show would be educational. But I paint so much from intuition, and I don’t know how you teach painting from intuition… So I will teach you things I’ve learned from life as I go.” While John paints abstract scenes littered with the figures of animals and humans, trees and shapes, he tells stories – usually funny, sometimes sad, always interesting.
"The sky is falling, I am learning to live with it."
Now in the collection of Anthony Bourdain. pic.twitter.com/AOMpxurOKI— John Lurie (@lurie_john) May 30, 2018
The act of creating the show, for Lurie, seems to be a therapeutic endeavor in the same way that painting is. The final product is not just footage of John painting; it is a snapshot of the joyful moments he has on the island he inhabits, often including interactions with the two women he employs. In the second episode he mentions two side effects from chemotherapy that continue to hinder him: sleep apnea and vertigo. Because of this, he says, he only sleeps “an hour here, an hour there” throughout the night. These symptoms paired with a slew of other illnesses that Lurie suffers from creates a brief window of the day during which he describes himself as “okay.” Painting with John is about appreciating these moments when Lurie is able to enjoy himself.
Which is one of the reasons that watching John Lurie paint feels like such a sacred act: he seems to savor it so much. This is due in part to the fact that it is one of the only creative enterprises he can engage in anymore. As he mentions in the first episode, he has always been a very artistic person (his parents somehow achieved greatly at nurturing this in him and his siblings), and, although everything John Lurie touches turns to gold, his paintings and television series are not what he’s famous for. He became known to the public for co-founding the no-wave band “The Lounge Lizards” with his brother. When he became ill, he became unable to play music. In the final episode of Painting with John, Lurie describes how painting went from being a casual hobby to an all-consuming passion, telling himself: “This could be what music was. This could give you back what you lost.” His love for the process is evident in the care that he gives to every inch of his paintings; the big picture (the beauty of each painting) is comprised of a network of carefully constructed details.
Lurie’s painting process isn’t one of building towards something; the end goal is never in sight until it’s on the canvas. This stands in stark opposition to Ross’s style in which, at the beginning of each episode, each painting looks like nothing special, but turns into a beautiful scene by the end. Lurie does not paint linearly, adding details haphazardly without explanation. His storytelling style mirrors this: you’re not initially sure why he’s telling you what he’s telling you, but it’s satisfying when it comes to the end (even if it doesn’t make sense). The end credits always feature the paintings that John worked on during the episode, along with the titles that range from straightforward – “Purple Mice Facing East” – to vague and poetic – “After she left, he would stand out in the yard at night and quietly say her name.” Seeing the completed projects, after only being shown bits and pieces – usually only details – offers a unique type of satisfaction.
John Lurie may not be as warm and positive as Bob Ross; he’s certainly not as comfortable talking to a camera (“If you’re good at it, you can probably make a lot of money, but it’s not a good thing…”), but, nonetheless, he has an undeniable appeal. Painting with John is a feel-good show, albeit in a wholly different way than The Joy of Painting. In a shocking change of pace from the rest of the show, during the final episode Lurie says to the audience, “You know, you should try this. You should get some paints and some brushes and some paper … and just mess around with it … just put the paint on the paper and see what you have.” He urges you to recognize that it will be bad to begin with, but that you will get better if you keep trying. To me, this feels like a more sincere call to paint than anything Bob Ross ever provided: paint only from yourself and for yourself, and you’ll never have to endure the soul-crushing comparisons that inevitably ensue from trying to copy someone else’s work.
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