A man in a cubicle with his hand on his headset, looking up.
I want to deal with the pose immediately, because it is the entire painting and because anyone who looks at a lot of pictures will recognise it inside a second.
The upward gaze. Head turned three quarters, tilted back, eyes rolled slightly up and away from the light source so the whites catch, one hand raised toward the head. That is how the tradition paints a person receiving something from outside the world. Saints do it. Martyrs do it at the worst moment. Musicians do it in the middle of playing. It is the standard notation for a human being at the exact instant of being addressed by something they cannot see.
I have put it on a man in coveralls waiting for a transfer to come back.
Now, the obvious reading is that I am making a joke about how we mistake small things for large ones. I am not. Look at what is actually in front of you. He is entirely still. His hand has gone up to the earpiece, which is a real gesture, and everyone who has worn one of these does it, and it is done in order to hear better, and it does not help. His attention is complete. He is doing nothing else with his mind or his body. He has been in this state for some minutes and he is prepared to remain in it.
I have painted a great many people over the last few years and I have never painted anyone attending to anything that hard.
That is what stopped me. The posture of religious attention is not a costume you put on when the thing you are attending to is worthy. It is what a human body does when it is waiting to be addressed and does not know when. Put a person in a small room, remove everything else, tell them a voice is coming and do not tell them when, and you will get this face. The tradition did not invent it. The tradition found it, in exactly these conditions, and put it on saints.
So a call center produces it two hundred times a day per floor, at scale, with quotas.
The light is from the monitor at his left, cold on the cheekbone and the wet of the eye, and there is a mug on the desk and a partition behind and a strip of the neighbouring cubicle at the frame edge. The coveralls are the ones I wore on the truck. They were not the uniform. Nobody ever asked me about them, which I took at the time as a kindness and now understand as something else.