(Dan Robbins did something quite remarkable and radical: he demonstrated that it is not necessary for any given artist to create something unique or deeply original in order to be an artist. Thus, Robbins may legitimately be compared to Marcel Duchamp, whose readymades demonstrated that, within the art world itself, an artist no longer needed to create anything in order to make art.)
I remember my own mother trying her hand at paint-by-numbers when I was a little kid back in south western Ontario. She was convinced of the virtue of following this bemusing prefab process. The stock images, harvested from popular culture, along with the user’s obedient application of coloured paints applied to hundreds of small pre-printed segments of a numbered map in the end created images without any inner life at all. These works revealed a world safe from the element of chance or struggle in regards to technical challenges or to any mental, emotional or physical effort whatsoever. Yet the paintings intriqued me because they did point to a private transitory moment from the domestic sphere. My stay-at-home mom with a bunch of kids to tend could find a no muss no fuss moment for herself alone with this inexpensive hobby. In the years after I would randomly pass these immediately recognizable paintings resting among other used goods pulled out of the attic or basement at garage sales and flea markets. For me they were symbols of a consumer passion for novelty and some fun without any higher goal concerning visual art whatsoever. I find I am still completely taken aback by the monumental indifference exuded by these serialized objects on the one hand and then the scale of collective enthusiasm by their fans on the other.
I understand the antipathy a working artist would have for this stuff. It is one of the bizarre things that happen on the margins of the professional art world, not unlike the “big eyes” paintings.
Yet, my connection to this has a minor and odd biographic resonance. When I was a kid, my sister gravitated to paint by numbers. She was considered to have drawing talent while I was considered to be a klutz. She did these things as an extension of her skill. Sibling rivalry demanded that I do one. It was onerous, but I was compelled to do it. I was determined to “stay within the lines” in order to prove I had some “competence”, something my sister, almost 4 years my senior and less fidgety, could do effortlessly.
I succeeded overall, except for one glaring anomaly. It was a scene of a small house in the country with a tree nearby, the colour palate predictable. Except right in the middle of the various greens of the tree’s crown, there was a blotch of bright orange. My parents were quick to point out the error. I insisted that this was the “number” that was demanded, but they didn’t take me seriously. I was proud of my success, my little house, but there was a rough edge……
I still have this artefact, as well as one of my sister’s “better” [i.e. well within the lines] efforts, inherited through the inertia that surrounds family treasures. Somehow, it is a statement about my childhood. I have even mildly mused that I might have imagined as a kid that the orange was the sun shining through the crown, thereby adding a touch of my “inner life” to this empty vessel.
There is a more cryptically significant feature about this object. It is hanging next to a proof quality aerial photo of the house in Alexandria a salesman gave me in the hopes of selling me the real thing. It was taken the first year I had the house, prior to renos and extensions. It is a scene of a tiny house in a country setting. Somehow, I cannot help but link the two images as forming a continuity in my imagination about my place in the world.