The light in this painting is a bulb the size of a walnut, and it is inside the machine.
I had the drum drawn and the hands drawn and I could not work out where the illumination was coming from until I put my head down to the level of the door and looked in. There it is, at the back of the cylinder, top dead centre, sitting in a shallow pressed housing: a bare incandescent bulb, unshielded, glowing orange, pointed straight down the axis at the load.
It is not bolted to the cabinet. It is bolted to the drum. When this machine starts, that bulb goes round with it.
I have thought about very little else since. A lamp in a room is placed for the people in the room. A lamp in a machine is placed for the work. This one is not even placed for a person leaning in to check that the work is done, because when the drum turns the bulb leaves the top of the circle and goes wherever the cycle sends it. It is lighting the load and nothing else, and it will keep lighting the load whether or not the door is open, whether or not anybody is standing there.
The interior is what surprised me second. I had expected the cold ringing white of new stainless. What is actually in there, after a few decades, is warm. The perforated wall of the drum has gone a deep brassy gold from lime and detergent and the endless polishing of wet cotton against metal, and the thousands of small holes catch the bulb individually, so the whole cylinder reads as a curved vault of hammered gold with light coming through it in points.
I did not paint a reliquary. I painted a drum. The drum has been doing this to itself for thirty years without any assistance from me.
Into that, from the bottom of the frame, two hands. They are bare and they are wrecked, the knuckles enlarged, the nails short and dirty at the edge, and they are pushing in a bundle of dark clothes. Navy, charcoal, a work jacket. Nothing about the gesture is careful. The load is being shoved to the back with the flat of one palm while the other hand holds the mouth of the bundle open.
That is the entire liturgy of this room and it takes four seconds.
I have painted hands entering a lit opening from below before, in a series about a doorbell, and I notice I have now done it twice in a month. I am not going to pretend it is an accident. Every one of these buildings works the same way: the person is admitted to the mechanism at exactly one point, briefly, by one part of their body, and then withdraws.
The difference here is that the mechanism is holding the light and the hands are in shadow. Look at where the brightness falls off. It stops at the wrists.