Classic Concept of Painting A couple weeks before I dropped out of art school I had an assignment to team up with a fellow student, exchange an object, and make a painting about it. My classmate gave me a crumpled-up old piece of paper with a quickly drawn diagram consisting of a few pencil lines. He said it had been in his car for over a year. I went to Kinkos to laminate it. Holding the now plasticcoated page I imagined a super-duper, fast-motion time lapse of its life: pulp hot smashed flat, chopped, stacked and stark white, packaged, shipped, unwrapped, scribbled on, folded, unfolded, pocketed, dash boarded,collecting dirt, loosened fibers, shuffled around, handed to me. Then in real time, I just witnessed it pass leisurely into the machine. I captured it in the act of transforming, halted its deterioration. The moment was hermetically sealed. The classic notion that pictures capture a slice of life (maybe a delicate or violent moment) was transformed for me that afternoon. I now see any act of picture making to viscerally belong to a world of stillness.