LOS ANGELES – Three original Bob Ross paintings will hit the auction block Tuesday to raise funds for public broadcasting. The sale comes as government funds for public television have run out after cuts made by the Trump administration.
Auction
“I think this actually would have been Bob’s idea,” Joan Kowalski, president of Bob Ross Inc., told Straight Arrow News. “And when I think about that, it makes me very proud.”
Ross’s “The Joy of Painting” aired from 1983 to 1994 on public television and continues to this day.
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Kowalski said he had the idea to direct funds toward American Public Television and PBS, and noticed Ross’ paintings were increasing in value. So, she reached out to the auction house, Bonhams.
“We had great success with two paintings by Bob Ross that were sold in August of this year,” Aaron Bastian, senior director of California and Western paintings at Bonhams, told SAN. “One of them sold for roughly $115,000 and the other one sold for $95,000 and I think that was an eye-opening number.”
The paintings up for auction are 1993’s “Home in the Valley,” 1990’s “Cliffside,” and 1993’s “Winter’s Peace.” Bidding will begin in the $25,000 to $30,000 range.
“[Bob] loved public television,” Kowalski said. “He loved that it was sort of him and the viewer and nobody else. He liked that sort of relationship.”
Ross died in 1995, but has remained extremely popular 30 years later.
“I think that there’s a certain amount of snobbery in the art business, but Bob is a cultural touchstone,” Bastian said. “He crosses a lot of different generations. Kids these days have seen him on YouTube. I watched him with my parents, right? And so, it’s something that is readily accessible to everyone.”
Still, bidding on the paintings will require a bit of foresight.
“For our auctions, you need to register ahead of time, and we need to prove that you are you, and that you can pay for the thing,” Bastian told SAN. “And then after that, there’s a couple different ways you can bid. You can bid in person, you can bid via our app, and you can also bid online. And so, the auctioneer that day will be taking bids from all of those places. You can also bid via telephone.”
Bastian said the auction will happen very fast.
“It’s only a few minutes,” Bastian said. “It can go longer if there’s an extended amount of bidding, which we certainly hope for.”
Helping public television
All the money raised from the auction will go to Create Channel, which is “the premium lifestyle channel for public television stations,” according to Gabriella Jones-Litchfield, president of GJL Media. In her role, Jones-Litchfield helps place programming within the public television system.
“This is an amazing contribution at a difficult time,” Jones-Litchfield told SAN
American Public Television distributes the Create Channel, and this money will help stations afford it.
“Stations have to subscribe to the channel because there are operational costs, and with cuts recently going on, we want to be able to still provide this lifestyle content free of charge to viewers,” Jones-Litchfield said.
Kowalski said keeping public TV alive would be important to Ross.
“It probably would have been his idea to get these paintings out of storage and auction them off to help the television system, which he considered an American treasure,” Kowalski said.
This is also just the start.
“If this goes well, we’ll just keep going,” Kowalski said. “We’ll just keep giving paintings to American Public Television and letting them go through Bonhams to auction them off. We’ll just go until everything is fully funded again and we can relax and watch our public television.”
Public television has also gone through other means to remain on the air.
“There is a bridge fund, Public Media Fund, which is a depository coming out of Boston,” Jones-Litchfield said. “They’re bringing in donors, foundations to help build a bridge fund for smaller rural stations.”
Defunding public television
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in May to stop funding for stations like NPR and PBS, calling them “biased.”
“At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” Trump wrote in the executive order.
Tim Graham, executive director of the right-wing media company Newsbusters, told SAN he supported the move.
“I don’t pay for CBS to trash the Republicans, but the idea that our tax dollars going to PBS trashing the Republicans just makes it twice as offensive,” Graham told SAN.
According to AllSides, a media organization that tracks the bias and leanings of news organizations, Newsbusters bias rating shows extreme conservative bias; Allsides reports that PBS leans left and has a high fact rating.
“I grew up on public television,” Bastian said. “It was the content in the educational programs, how to do things, how to cook, how to make things, how to paint. Frankly, it’s like the YouTube before YouTube.”
Graham added why he believes public TV leans left.
“It’s inevitable that if the government’s funding a news outlet, that the news outlet is going to quickly realize which party is more likely to fund them over the long term, and that would be the Democrats,” Graham said.
More than 36 million people watch PBS every month. In total, 58% of all American households tune in over the course of a year.
“Public television is the go-to where everyone can access it,” Jones-Litchfield said. “This is the point of public television. That it doesn’t matter whether you’re in a small town in Wyoming or in LA you can turn on your TV or go to your iPad and watch public television.”
