Charity has shelving, and the shelving is perforated steel, and the light above it is one bare bulb that the manager has never once considered as a compositional element. I have. The fifth station is the back room of the donation depot on Perth Street, where small appliances are staged before they go out to the floor, and where our toaster now stands in a row of its own kind: a blender base at the left with its collar of dust, a coffee urn behind, a kettle at the right with the handle turned away. This is the only painting in the testament in which the subject has company, and the viewer should notice how little comfort that turns out to be. They are not a congregation. They are inventory. Each of them was somebody’s morning for a decade and each of them is now a category. The bulb reaches the toaster and stops; everything behind it goes brown, then umber, then out. I have painted crowds before and I have learned that a crowd is only a crowd if the members are looking at one another, and here nobody is looking at anything. The scorch is turned outward, toward the aisle, toward whoever comes. It is the one honest label in the room. Inter vasa, expectatio.
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