Feels like a Number

Anybody out there ever painted one of those Paint By Number kits? The kits were great. They included the brush, the paint and the canvas with the numbers on it. Each color had a number and you painted that color in the areas where that number was. There was no blending of colors. The result was a distinct work of art. And yeah, you would hang them around your house, ‘cause it was the baby boom, and there were so many people and not enough art. And you could claim that the art was not a Paint By Number, that you did it yourself, but everybody knew it was a paint by number ‘cause they all had the kits.

But who’s to say that Rembrandt and Van Gogh and guys like that didn’t use Paint By Number? Do we really know? Has anybody ever scraped back the paint on their paintings to see if there was a maybe a number back there? I bet there was Paint by Roman numeral…