Robert Indiana’s life-long interest in numbers derives from their range of significances and potential as loaded symbols. Indiana credits his penchant for numbers and their inherent symbolisms to his experience living in twenty-one different homes before he was seventeen years old. As Indiana has stated, “Numbers fill my life. They fill my life even more than love. We are immersed in numbers from the moment we're born. Love? Love is like a cherry on top of the whipped cream. Numbers surround us...[they] are seething around us...” As indicated by these two portfolios, Indiana’s fascination with numbers in some ways eclipses his interest in text, including the seminal Love, the central word in his best-known works.
In Decade: Autoportraits Vinalhaven Suite, Indiana crafts a self-portrait through his personal language of colors, numbers, shapes, and words. Many of the words and numbers appearing throughout the series have autobiographical associations, with each print corresponding to a year in his eventful 1970s. Personal connections abound within both series, with numbers corresponding to previous home addresses and important dates, but also the numeric cycles of life and progress. These bold, hard-edged images were deftly handled by the printers in the Domberger workshop, rendering the opaque graphics with care and precision.