Introduction

When I was a young boy in the early 1950s I enjoyed drawing, and I would often watch the John Gnagy show on our Sylvania black and white television, entranced by how easily he could conjure forms from within a framed blankness. Most of my friends were not interested in the show. If my friends did draw, they did so with the help of a kit that had begun to appear in the early ’50s. It was called “paint by numbers.”