Bob Ross Painter

Some bail out in north downtown

With flood threats lurking and stressed storm sewer systems spewing water each time it rains, businesses and office tenants in north downtown are abandoning ship.

As of Monday, most of the small businesses with offices in the Mastercraft building at 13th and Nicholas Streets had left. And by midday, some artists with studios in Hot Shops were walking out with their pieces and paintings in tow. Along the streets, sandbags were scattered in front of garage doors and business entrances. The streets were caked with dried mud and remnants of the gushing sewers.

The flush from the area just north of TD Ameritrade Park stems from repeated sewer backups, business owners said Monday. Each time it rains, the streets of north downtown flood and bring business to a halt.

“It's unfortunate, unavoidable, but not surprising,” said Marty Grate of the city's Public Works Department. He said the storm drain system in the north downtown area worked as expected and the areas that were expected to flood did.

No major property damage was reported.

On Saturday, when water bubbled and sprayed into the streets, most tenants at the Mastercraft building started packing up shop while making flood preparations. The building houses small creative businesses, including branding and design firm SecretPenguin, web design business What Cheer, co-working space CAMP and Minorwhite Studios.

Dave Nelson, creative director and principal of SecretPenguin, said everyone in his office moved out and plans to work from home for at least the next week.

Just before a torrential downpour hit the metro area Sunday night, Alex P. Gates and John Henry M�ller of What Cheer removed one last van-full of office equipment from their space. The firm's four-person team also plans to work from home this week, Gates said.

“That's our plan for this week as we wait to see what is next with the levees and the rain,” he said. “We don't have any plans at this point to find a temporary space.

“We'll just wait it out and hope for the best.”

Nearby, at Hot Shops, Jean Mason, a painter, walked out Monday afternoon with her arms full of paintings she didn't want destroyed by flooding, specifically the moisture that builds up from standing water.

No floodwater has reached the interior of the building, said Tim Barry, a managing partner at Hot Shops, but business has been stagnant because each time it rains it takes at least eight hours for the surrounding streets — Nicholas, parts of 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, Cuming and Izard — to be pumped clear.

Tolstoy and “Happy Trees”

As a child of the eighties who spent a sizable amount of my formative years watching television with my grandmother, I have vivid memories of Bob Ross’s PBS program The Joy of Painting. It must be said that my grandmother only got three channels on her 1970s-era set, so it was either Bob Ross or local news. However, I was always quickly entranced by the dulcet tones of the “happy trees” artist (his rockin’ white-man ‘fro was mesmerizing in its own way). Not an artist myself, his natural way with brush and paint was impressive, and the resulting paintings, to my five-year old eyes, were masterworks.

Twenty-odd years later, I gained both a BA and MA in art history, traveled to Italy, France, Germany, and Turkey during the course of my research, and saw many of what are considered to be the greatest artworks in the world. In the course of all the newly-acquired “high art” knowledge, I forgot all about dear Bob Ross and his “happy trees” until a friend jokingly asked about the topic of my MA thesis. “Bob Ross, right? The ‘happy clouds’ guy?” Although my first response was derisive laughter, his sass-pot suggestion did get me thinking about where artists like Bob Ross fell in the accepted artistic canon.

Anyone with even a passing interest in the art world knows that Bob Ross paintings aren’t considered “high art,” or even “art.” They don’t hang next to Renoir’s in world-renown museums and don’t come up for auction at Christie’s for record-setting amounts. Bob Ross himself once said:

I was initially attracted to art history because of my fascination with man’s drive to create. As soon as our ancestors became recognizably human, they began to make pictures – scratched on the walls of caves, carved into rocks, traced in the mud. Even today, the meaning of these images can only be guessed at – magical images meant to ensure a successful hunt, symbols pertaining to fertility or a prodigious harvest – any number of options. What is known is that humans are alone in their urge to create art – to paint, to draw, to sculpt. The drive to create aesthetic objects that operate as conduits for emotion is one of the surprisingly few characteristics that are specific to man. Leo Tolstoy (author of such light reads as Anna Karenina ) once wrote that, “If the spectators or audience are infected by the feelings that the author felt, it is art.” Although this view if not what is taught in most classical art history programs, it has always stuck with me as my personal belief about what art really is.