1242. At the end of the session Charles' painting looks like a big tarp placed on the floor in a room where autopsies are preformed all day long, and Emma's painting is completely blank, because all the things she did that morning did not measure up to her exacting standards of perfection and she had to scrub everything out and prepare to start over again in the next session.
1243. You would think that the professor for this painting class would treat Charles and Emma in different ways, since they had such divergent approaches to their work, but you would be wrong. The professor lumped them both into the category of old fashion people who still thought art should involve painting with paint on canvas. Even though it was a painting class, the professor only considered installation and performance art seriously.
1244. The things Charles and Emma were trying to do seemed to him about as relevant to his idea of art as cutting out snowflakes in napkins in third grade. When it came time to criticize Emma's paintings he tried to make fun of her in a good natured way saying, "There are some painters more precise than you are, their paintings have such fine detail that you can't even see the brush strokes under a microscope."
1245. "But with Charles he took the opposite sort of ridiculing tone saying, "This would be a good cutting-edge painting if this was 1956 and you were Willem de Kooning." He felt he could take this dismissive attitude to his students because his own work was very far advanced. He was working on an installation. He did not have an opportunity to exhibit yet and his installation was in his back yard.
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