A hand comes in from the right and presses a button, and the button lights under the finger.
This is the only person in the series. Four inches of it.
I made a rule for these ten paintings before I started: no figure. An intercom exists to handle somebody who is not inside the building and not yet a guest and has no standing at the door beyond a voice, and I wanted the paintings to have the same manners. Nobody gets a face here. The building never sees one either.
But a hand had to appear once, because there is a moment in the operation of this object where a person and the mechanism are in physical contact, and that moment is short and it is the whole transaction, and leaving it out would have been a different kind of dishonesty.
So: the forearm, bare, entering at the right. The index finger extended and in contact. And under the pad of the finger the button glowing, the light coming out around the edge of the fingertip and through the flesh at the sides, which is a thing light does that I have wanted to paint for years and have never had the excuse.
The finger is lit from below and from underneath itself. That is the entire light source of the painting. Everything else, the plate, the wall, the arm past the wrist, falls off into black within a few inches.
It is midnight. I have painted the hour into the temperature rather than showing a clock. There is no daylight anywhere, no street lamp reaching this recess, no window lit above.
I have been asked why the gesture looks careful. It does. The finger is not jabbing. It has arrived and settled and is applying steady pressure, which is what you do at midnight, because the buzzer inside is loud and it is late and you are aware that you are about to make a noise in somebody’s apartment while they are asleep. Everybody presses gently at midnight. It makes no difference at all to the volume. It is a courtesy paid to a circuit that cannot receive it.
That is the picture. A person, reduced to the one part of themselves the building will accept, being polite to a doorbell.