Nothing occurs in this painting and that took a long time to get right.
It is the middle of the afternoon. The tube is back on. The clock is where it was and is still unreadable. Eight seats, all empty, the floor still damp because that floor is always damp. If you put this panel beside the third one you would have to work to find the differences, and I want you to have to work.
There are two. The stain behind the clock has moved down the wall, and there is a fresh run of rust from the ceiling seam that was not there in the morning.
That is the whole event of the afternoon. The building leaked a little further.
I sat in this for hours. There is a particular quality to time in a room like this that I have not found anywhere else, including on the truck at four in the morning, which I always thought was the emptiest hour available to a person. Night has a direction. It is going to end. A municipal afternoon does not appear to be going anywhere and the room is not designed to help you with that. There is no reading material. There is no window. The clock does not work. Every feature of the space that might have let you measure your own position in the day has been either omitted or allowed to fail.
I do not think this is malicious. I think it is what happens when nobody whose day is measured in these hours has any say over the room.
Painting it was the hard part. An empty room with an even light and no incident is where composition goes to die. What saved it was the leak. Once I understood that the subject of the panel was a slow vertical event on a wall, everything organised around it, and the picture became about the only thing in the building that was still making progress.
The stain is the most alive thing in this series. It is going somewhere. It has been going somewhere for years and it will arrive.