Bob Ross

Bob Ross (Robert Norman Ross) was born on October 29, 1942 in Daytona Beach, Florida, to a carpenter father and a waitress mother. Raised in Orlando, he left high school in the ninth grade and suffered a loss of part of his left index finger while working as a carpenter—an injury that never hampered his brush work. At age eighteen he enlisted in the United States Air Force, serving from 1961 to 1981 and rising to master sergeant, where he first encountered the snowy Alaskan landscapes that would later dominate his canvases. During brief work breaks he practiced a rapid wet‑on‑wet (alla prima) technique he learned from Bill Alexander’s “Magic of Oil Painting,” eventually mastering it enough to sell Alaskan scenes on novelty gold‑mining pans, a venture that out‑earned his military pay. After retiring he co‑founded a small art‑supplies company with the Kowalskis, adopting his iconic permed hairstyle as a cost‑saving logo—though he later confessed he disliked it.