Nostalgia is a bizarre concept with no place in the postmodern discourse. I'll elaborate and promise not to smother with a pretentious harangue.  Dictionary.com defines nostalgia as "a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time," which makes perfect sense.  When applied to art, however, those artists we dismiss as "nostalgic," or worse "romantic," have a skewed sense of the present and an impossible penchant for some sort of historical contextualization that forces a contrived meaning rather than a probe of the persistence of now.  After all, when Morrissey, asked "How soon is now?" he simply meant that the present is indeed a series of contiguous nows and questions that retrospectively preclude solid introspection. 
My point is about Bob Ross.

I've been thinking about nostalgia and how easy it is to get all consumed by it.  Bob Ross painted his "happy little trees" not because he was a kitschy romantic who wanted to emulate some crappy bygone era of idyllic landscape but because he was a giant hippie who seized the moments of happiness in the very process of creating each little bush, river, and mountain in the span of half an hour.  I was reminded of him by David Smith, an artist who had a brilliant piece about Bob Ross and the color field paintings of the minimalists in the exhibition Squaring the Circle, curated by Summer Guthery.  Ross wasn't striving for his big solo show or gallery gig.  It's funny but someone so not integral to the art historical discourse is such a renegade.  Bob Ross's voice still makes me smile.  Smith's piece was a darkened room, not unlike Bob's studio, where Bob's voice resounded over projected color circles that overlapped to create simple fields, just like Bob once did. 
Funny how everything comes full circle but not to poke you in the eye with a jolt of memory but to make art with references that point to the heightened perceptions of the now, for whatever that means.  Thanks, David, for such a great piece!