TV Painter Bob Ross Dies

Bob Ross, 52, host of the public television series "The Joy of Painting," died Tuesday in Florida after a brief battle with cancer.

Mr. Ross gained fame as the soft-spoken, bushy-haired, bearded artist who taught viewers his easy, quick style of landscape painting.

In 1989, Seattle Times writer John Hinterberger did two columns about a hectic session learning to paint by watching Mr. Ross' show.

In the second story, Hinterberger reported that Mr. Ross had telephoned him after a reader mailed him a copy of the first story. "He was not particularly offended," Hinterberger wrote, and quoted Mr. Ross: "You would be surprised - you would be amazed - at the number of otherwise normal, decent persons in this country (and a few others) who are television-taught painters. I know of one woman who took up painting with our method when she was in her 90s, and she sells her paintings regularly."

Mr. Ross was a retired Air Force first sergeant whose painting show went on the air in 1982 in Falls Church, Va. By the next year, it was on 60 stations and has been on continuously since, airing on virtually all public television stations in the United States and also in Japan, Mexico, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Turkey, Iran, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Philippines and South Korea.

As Hinterberger wrote, "I wonder how many `artists' out there have had no other formal training except from ` . . . the man with the lullaby voice and the cotton-candy hair.' "