The name Bob Ross evokes verdant green forests and opalescent seascapes. But one of the most beloved episodes from the 11-year run of the famed television painter’s show The Joy Of Painting rendered a work entirely in gray, in order to make painting accessible to colorblind fans. This episode in particular enjoys periodic virality. On YouTube, it boasts three times more views than most other episodes of Ross’s show.

Ross’s reputation has received numerous revisions since his death in 1995. In 2016, his former business partner told NPR that not only was he a tyrant off-camera—he also hated his iconic perm. Not all the Ross revisions have been negative, though. In 2019, works by Ross appeared in a museum exhibition for the first time ever. Later that year, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. acquired a few pieces from the obscure warehouse where Bob Ross Inc. stores the artist’s original canvases. This defied Ross’s own view of himself: in 1994, another television icon, the late Phil Donahue, had asked Ross whether he’d admit that his work would never hang in an art museum. “Maybe it will,” Ross replied. “But probably not the Smithsonian.”

Bob Ross in The Joy of Painting. Photo via YouTube.

When a Netflix documentary dropped in 2021 alleging that the artist had had an affair with business partner Annette Kowalski, the public was left wondering whether we ever really knew Ross after all. But one truth still remains certain—Bob Ross truly believed that absolutely anybody can paint.

As Ross recounts at the start of season two’s fourth episode, a fan approached the artist as he was giving a painting demonstration at a mall. “Bob, I could never paint because I’m colorblind,” the fan lamented. “All I can see is gray tones.”

Bob Ross begins the grayscale scene. Photo via YouTube.

“So I thought today we’d do a picture in gray just to show you that anyone can paint,” Ross says, explaining that he’s mixed up a bunch of gray paint using one-third blue pigments and two-thirds brown pigments and that he’ll make a mountain scene using only this gray and white. “I have the other colors on my palette only because I was too lazy to clean my palette before we started,” Ross jokes.

Thus, his “almighty brush” begins painting the “almighty sky.”

After cloaking the mountains he’s made in a bit of mist, Ross says, “Mountains used to really give me a fit when I was a traditional painter. Oh, I’d spend weeks sometimes with a little brush trying to make all these things happen. Isn’t that fantastic—that you can make mountains happen in minutes? There is no big secret to it.”

“All you need is a dream in your heart, and an almighty knife,” Ross proclaims, wielding the blunt-edged painting tool.

From there, the artist adds trees, and even a cabin, because “I’ve always wanted to live in a beautiful little mountain range like this.” Then, he says, “We’re gonna sign it in red, we’re gonna cheat.”

The artist with the finished artwork. Photo via YouTube.

Shortly after, the camera pans to an identical painting rendered in burnt ember instead of gray—reminding viewers that anyone can employ the methods he’s just demonstrated in hues that work for their vision.

“You have a super day,” Ross says before the credits roll.

“And all of a sudden,” comments one of the video’s many touched watchers, “I am having a super day.”