This book sets out to replace a much used model for conceiving of painting?s temporality, drawn from the scopic regime of the photographic, with one provided by digital imaging. It proposes an approach to time in painting that moves away from a preoccupation with absence and mourning, a Freudian position of return, aligning itself instead with Proust?s ?time regained?, reflecting more fully a lived experience of time. It is argued that in such a repositioning, a dialogue with digital imaging offers contemporary painting an expanded topography, and as such contributes to its ability to ?think? time in these terms. The project?s route-map is Deleuzian, taking painting into the territory of the rhizome, smooth space and the cinematic time-image. It proposes shifting painting?s mode of address towards one that can offer an ?image of thought? as a form of 'haptic time'. The analysis addresses the nature of practice-based research and theorizes studio practice, documented through ?process notes?. The project might shed light, for practitioners and researchers, on issues of dialogue between mediums and the articulation of the sometimes uneasy relationship between theory and practice.