Bob Ross wasn't the most skilled painter, and he would probably be the first to admit to that. He had a certain skill set that lent itself well to certain styles of paintings. Now, he developed that skill set because he liked pictures like that, so it's not any knock against the man at all.
To my knowledge, he didn't to portraiture or urban landscapes or people in general. Few, if any, animals.
Mountains, trees, waterfalls, sunsets, sunrises, moonlight reflecting off a lake. Occasionally a house or barn or shed of some sort. All very nature oriented and pastoral. He wanted to bring what he saw as the peace of the Alaskan wilderness to people.
But it does lend itself well to the sort of generative content created by DALL-E. Bob Ross had a method for painting mountains. A lot of his mountains are fairly interchangeable. He had a set of trees. He had techniques for river banks and flowers, etc. Bob Ross was in a very real sense, sort of a human DALL-E.
Isn’t the point of Bob Ross the journey of painting, less so than the result? In that sense, it shouldn’t be surprising that originality isn’t a variable he’s optimizing for with his output or television programme.
