We Signed Up for a Bob Ross Class and Didn’t Hate Each Other After
Life moves fast and finding things to do after 50 can be a fun challenge. My husband had been talking about wanting to try painting for years. Not the way people casually mention things they’ll never actually do, but genuinely, specifically, returning to the idea every so often the way you do when something is actually sitting in the back of your mind waiting for the right moment. He wanted to try something creative. He wanted to see what he could make with his hands in a completely different way than anything he’d done before. And one day he found a local instructor, looked at her schedule, and said: you want to do this with me?
I said yes immediately. Neither of us paint. I knit, I have spent years in the crafty corner of the internet teaching other people to make things. Hubby has his own creative outlets and his own hobbies. But we had never painted together, never sat down in front of a canvas together, never put ourselves in the position of being beginners at the same thing at the same time. That sounded like exactly the kind of Saturday we were looking for.
We have been married for twenty-five years. After that long, you know each other’s interests well enough that you stop accidentally booking each other into things the other person will spend the whole time tolerating. I am not getting dragged to a computer programming class. He is not getting dragged to a yarn exhibit. We have a good understanding of the map of what we each enjoy, and we have always liked doing things together when the thing is something we both actually want. The painting class was one of those things. We signed up, showed up, and had absolutely no idea what we were walking into.
What It Looks Like When You Walk In
The instructor’s name is Dianna, and she teaches out of a converted shed on her property outside Kissimmee. A few acres, a farmhouse, a backyard pool, and then this shed that from the outside you would walk right past without giving it a second thought. It looks like what it is, which is a large building in someone’s backyard. Then you open the door.
Every wall is covered in her paintings, floor to ceiling. The ceiling too, in places. Landscapes, waterscapes, mountains, palm trees, night skies, all in that lush layered style that makes you think of a show that used to air on Sunday mornings on public television. Little easels sit on each table already set up and waiting. Brushes laid out. Paints arranged beside each canvas. And up at the front, a sample painting of what the class will be making that day, displayed where everyone in the room can see exactly what they are working toward.
The room fills up fast. Dianna’s classes are popular and she has a following of people who come back month after month, so on any given Saturday you have a mix of total beginners like we were and people who have been doing this with her for a while. The class runs four hours with a break halfway through, and she provides everything: canvas, easels, brushes, paint, all of it. You show up. That is the entire ask on your end.
Our first class was the mountain painting. Snowy peaks, dark evergreens, a waterfall coming down through the rocks. Very classic, very much the kind of scene you would expect, and I sat down in front of my blank canvas and looked at that sample on the wall and thought: there is no version of today where what comes out of me looks anything like that. I was completely convinced of it. I was wrong, which turned out to be the first of several surprises.
Things to Do After 50: Four Hours of Learning Something You Have Never Done
Dianna walks the class through every step of the painting, demonstrating each technique and then moving through the room to check in with each student individually. She is calm and specific and encouraging in a way that makes it clear she has been doing this for a long time and genuinely enjoys the teaching part, not just the painting part. Those are two different skills and she has both. She would look at what you were doing, offer something useful and concrete, and move on without making anyone feel like they were behind or like they were the one person in the room who clearly did not belong there.
Hubby and I were side by side, working from the same sample, hearing the same instruction, and making completely different paintings. Not wrong in different ways, but interesting in different ways. His trees had a particular quality. Mine had something happening in the sky that his didn’t. His waterfall area came together in a way I couldn’t quite get in mine no matter how many times I tried. We kept glancing over at each other’s canvases the way you can’t help doing when you’re curious about what someone else is creating from the same set of ingredients you have in front of you.
Halfway through the class, Dianna has everyone take a break and walk around to look at all the canvases in the room. Ten people, ten paintings, one sample painting to work from. And what you see when you do that is that every single one is different in ways that actually tell you something about the person who made it. You start to see what happened in your own painting that you couldn’t quite see when you were standing right in front of it. And you start to see what someone else did that worked in a way yours didn’t, and the other way around too.
I told Hubby I thought his waterfall area was better than mine. He told me he liked my trees better than his. And then we went back to our easels and kept going, and that exchange stuck with me more than almost anything else from the whole afternoon. There is something genuinely good about being in a room where the only measure of success is whether you tried the thing and kept going.
The Drive Home and the Problem We Had Not Thought Through
We finished the mountain painting, said goodbye to Dianna, walked out to the car with our canvases, and immediately realized we had made a significant logistical error.
Oil paint does not dry in the car. It does not dry for approximately two weeks. We had two freshly painted canvases that were going to slide around in the trunk and transfer wet paint onto everything they touched, and we had brought absolutely nothing to protect them. No plastic, no paper, no garbage bags, nothing. So we drove home carefully, talking about how much fun the class had been, how much we had actually learned in four hours, and how smart the all-inclusive setup was.
Dianna provides everything, which meant we didn’t have to go buy supplies before knowing whether we even liked painting, didn’t have to figure out which brushes or which paints or how much canvas to get. You just show up. The value for what the class costs is genuinely hard to argue with.
We were already talking about going back before we pulled into our driveway.
The second problem arrived when we got home, which was: where in a house with cats do you put two wet oil paintings for two weeks? If you live with cats, you already understand the scope of this question. Cat hair does not respect wet surfaces. Cat hair finds things that are sticky, things that are damp, things on shelves the cats have never shown any interest in before and will never show interest in again, as long as those shelves currently have something on them that needs to stay clean. The idea of setting two freshly painted canvases anywhere accessible in our house was simply not going to work.
We have a “junk” room where the door stays closed. We laid out paper on top of boxes and brought each painting in one at a time, set them flat, and left them there until they were dry enough to handle. By the second class we had a proper system. Garbage bags under each painting in the trunk, everything transported with the kind of care you give something that cannot be replaced, because it can’t be.
Six Paintings on the Wall
We have taken three classes now. The mountain. An ocean at night, all dark water and a full moon and clouds in deep purple and pink. And a tropical sunset with palm trees silhouetted against a sky that goes from orange into yellow into the kind of warm color that makes you feel like you are standing somewhere better than wherever you currently are.
Six paintings. After each one dried we tried different spots around the house, but eventually we moved them all together on one wall in the living room. We experimented with a staggered arrangement, his and mine alternating, but something about that felt like it was setting the paintings against each other in a way that didn’t feel right. So we settled on two rows. His on top, mine underneath, three pairs across.
Same class each time, same instructor, same sample painting to work from, and you can look at the two rows and see clearly that these are two people who see things a little differently. His have a quality that is his. Mine have something that is mine. Neither row is trying to be the other one. They are just what they are, and I love having them up there. I love walking through that room and noticing something in one of the paintings I hadn’t registered before, a color that worked, a moment where the brush did something unplanned and it turned out fine anyway.
Why We Keep Going Back
Dianna posts each month’s upcoming painting on her Facebook page and her website, and Hubby and I check it when it goes up. We do not sign up for everything. Some subjects just are not pulling either of us in and that is fine, the whole point is that we both want to make the thing. When we see one that we both actually want to try, we sign up. It is a simple system and it works because we are both choosing it every time.
After twenty-five years together, finding something genuinely new that you both want to do is not a small thing. You think you have the map of each other’s interests pretty well covered by this point in your life. And then you walk into a shed near Kissimmee and find out there is a whole room on that map you had not visited yet, and you both like it, and you come home with wet paintings and nowhere obvious to put them and you are already looking at the calendar to figure out when you can go back.
I went to Dianna’s website a few days ago to get her information for this article. While I was there I saw that she has an eagle painting on the June schedule. My sister has been wanting to try one of these classes since I started talking about them. So I sent her a text, and we may be signing up later today!
That is sort of how this works. You say yes to one Saturday, and it turns out there is more room for it than you thought.
Want to follow along and read more Articles about my life after 50? Go check out Taking Care of Yourself After 50: Before Someone Has To Do It For You.
Dianna teaches at Art Studio STC in Kissimmee, Florida. Her schedule and upcoming painting previews are on her website and Facebook page. Classes run four hours, all supplies are included, and no painting experience is needed
