Robert Indiana: . . . I’m just fascinated with numbers, I’m not even sure I would go so far as to call it numerology: it’s just that numbers have fascinated me all my life. It all comes from a childhood preoccupation. I had a mother who couldn’t bear to live in a house for more than a year at a time so that by the time I was 17 I had lived in 21 different houses. During the Depression one of our pastimes was to travel around the countryside revisiting each of those houses and they all had numbers.
Adrian Dannatt: Are you superstitious about numbers?
Indiana: Not really, I have my favorites just out of the form and design of the number. I know that four is my least favorite number, it’s very square; also, in the life of man it represents adolescence and adolescence is certainly one of the more obnoxious phases of one’s life.
Excerpt from Adrian Dannatt. “Love, Pop, Words and More.” Art Newspaper (London) (February 2003).
