Description
“Portrait of the Number Painter and the lost number 1”
Size: 450 x 600mm
Media: Acrylic on Board, 2024
Price: $903
The Number Painter, also known as The Mad Painter, was the title character of a series of comedy live-action short films produced for the children’s television program Sesame Street.
As a nod of the (bowler) hat to the actor Paul Benedict, and his influence on me as a child of the 70s/80s, I have painted the lost number 1.
There were ten “Number Painter” skits produced in the series, one each for the numbers 2 through 11. The number 1 skit was not produced, since it was not featured in individual Sesame Street segments during the era when the films were produced and aired. Although the numbers showcased up to 12 in this same era, the number 12 film was not produced either, with the number 11 being the last segment in the “Number Painter” series.
1 (one, unit, unity) is a number, numeral, and glyph. 1 is the first and smallest positive integer of the infinite sequence of natural numbers. 1 is the unit of counting or measurement, a determiner for singular nouns, and a gender-neutral pronoun. Historically, the representation of 1 evolved from ancient Sumerian and Babylonian symbols to the modern Arabic numeral.
The most commonly used glyph in the modern Western world to represent the number 1 is the Arabic numeral, a vertical line, often with a serif at the top and sometimes a short horizontal line at the bottom. It can be traced back to the Brahmic script of ancient India, as represented by Ashoka as a simple vertical line in his Edicts of Ashoka in c. 250 BCE.
The number 1 is commonly regarded as a symbol of unity, often representing God or the universe in monotheistic traditions. The Pythagoreans considered the numbers to be plural and therefore did not classify 1 itself as a number, but as the origin of all numbers. In their number philosophy, where odd numbers were considered male and even numbers female, 1 was considered neutral capable of transforming even numbers to odd and vice versa by addition..
Painting measures 450 x 600mm and is an original painting by Andy Heyward.
