I’d been working on it for about a month. It’s acrylic paint on an 18 x 24 canvas, and it’s a painting of the lounge on my dorm floor.
I had the idea back when the days were cold and clear and the sun set at 4 PM, when I came back from classes on Mondays and Wednesdays. The windows in the lounge faced west, and we got these really spectacular sunsets. The other dorms and the towers from the factory are silhouetted against this orange sky, and clouds get tainted a dull pink as they stream by.
The effect only lasted for about five minutes, and only for a small window of seasonal time every year. But it was astoundingly beautiful.
I decided to try to reproduce that effect to the best of my ability. I got out my art supplies, found the biggest canvas I could, and started painting. I began with the sunset, then the brick walls and the tiled ceiling surrounding the windows. Then came the bars that make up the windows, and the furniture in the room.
I’ve spent up to ten hours at a time working on this painting. I mostly did it on Friday and Saturday nights when few people were in the lounge. Security officers who walked through the buildings at night stopped and said it was pretty cool. One guy altered his routine so he could check on how it was coming along.
I finally finished it tonight, and unveiled it at the floor meeting we had about half an hour ago. Ironically, the painting was inspired by how miserable I am at Beloit. I wanted to capture a fleeting ray of freedom and otherworldly beauty that shone in an ugly, burned out, and boxed-in world.
I think I captured the moment pretty well. I especially captured the vomit-stained floor and the scorch marks on the couches. 
I feel bad keeping it locked in my room, but the last time I did something artistic for my floor, I hung paper airplanes from the ceiling, and this wake-n-bake bastard wouldn’t stop setting them on fire. I know this painting is going to get messed with if I leave it in the lounge. And if anyone put out a cigarette on this thing, I really would kill them.
Originally I was going to just talk about the painting, but I ended up scanning it and assembling the pieces in Photoshop. The parts don’t quite match up and the image quality isn’t very good, but still.
I’ll share it with all of you, since you can’t set it on fire. 
Full-size painting. Warning: Filesize is over 1 M.
