Painting against Numbers

Christopher Fritton is playing with the paint-by-numbers concept, and he's sent me a few digital examples of his progress. But my favorited of these is the one he has sent by mail. I'm not sure exactly how he created this card, but he has pasted a dark, small textured rectangle of card onto a larger, lighter-colored, textured card. Then he has somehow printed over that card. This produces a wonderful effect: the dark against the light, the orange outline and numbers upon both of them.


Christopher Fritton, Paint by Numbers (20 Jun 2005)
Here's what Christopher says about his project:

i've become obssessed with the idea that paint by numbers is its own genre - i'm going to undertake a little project where i mail poets and artists paint by numbers and make them complete the work and return it to me -

but i think these postcards are an attempt to push paint by numbers out of the realm of painting and force other possibilities on them - what if i didn't want to paint at all? what if i wanted to turn it into a poem? what if i wanted to erase parts of it, and construct via deconstruction? all of these things are possible, but the constraints imposed by paint by numbers, visually and psychologically, impair this freedom - even my extension of the paint by numbers' lines are guided by their 'intention' - so even freehand doodling cannot escape their influence -

there's an ethics here that i haven't even begun to examine. the ethics of paint by numbers.

So now I have to change this card into something else.

un violon d'ingres