Close enough that the housing fills the canvas, because I wanted to know what it actually looks like and nobody ever gets this close to one.
You cannot look at these things properly in life. They are above head height by design, and the moment you stop and study one you become a person studying a camera, which is a category of person the camera exists to notice. So I painted it from a photograph taken with my arm at full stretch, and then I went back nine or ten times to check the colours, quickly, the way you check something you are not supposed to be checking.
It had rained. The dome is beaded all over, and the drops are doing what drops on curved plastic do, which is to act as several hundred small lenses all disagreeing about where the light is. The grey of the housing goes almost silver along the top edge and nearly black underneath. There is a screw at the upper right with a bloom of rust already starting around the head.
And inside, behind the wet, the red.
That was the difficulty of this painting and it took the longest. The diode is not on the surface. It is a small hard source sitting some distance behind a curved translucent shell that is covered in water, so it does not read as a point. It reads as a point with a soft body around it, and it stains the plastic outward in a way that is nearly impossible to keep from looking like a smear or a flare. I repainted that passage more times than I have repainted anything since the ribs of the umbrella.
Here is why it mattered. I have called this panel The First Red Witness, and I mean witness in the old legal sense, a party present at an event who can afterward say what occurred. This one is present. It is present in all weather, at all hours, without complaint, at a level of attention no human being has ever sustained. The medieval church would have understood the appeal of that immediately. So would any judge.
What I did not know when I painted this, in the second month, was that the red light and the witnessing are two separate facts that happen to be in the same object, and that they come apart later, and that when they do the light does not change at all.