The same telephone as the second panel, six hours later, and the light has changed colour.
This is a small technical fact about how the floor was wired and it is the reason this painting exists. During business hours a waiting call showed amber. After the last agent logged off, the system moved into its overnight configuration and anything still arriving showed blue. Different queue, different routing, different light.
Nobody on the floor ever saw the blue one except by accident. I saw it because I stayed late to draw and looked up at ten past nine and the room had changed key.
I have painted this cold on purpose and painted it as the only source, the same as the amber panels, so that the two pictures are identical arrangements in opposite temperatures. Hang them beside one another and the difference is not in the composition or the objects or the handling. It is entirely in what the light does to the plastic. Amber makes that scuffed beige housing look worn and used and handled. Blue makes it look like something left in a field.
I have thought about why that is and I think it is only that we have four hundred years of paintings in which the small light in the dark room is a flame. A flame is amber. Every candle, every lamp, every taper in every side chapel. Blue light in a dark interior has no tradition behind it at all, or rather it has one, and it is about sixty years old, and it belongs to televisions and morgues and screens left on in empty rooms.
So the blue reads as abandonment and the amber reads as vigil, and it is the same telephone, and there is a person on the other end of both of them.
That is the thing I cannot get past. The call arriving at ten past nine is not a lesser call. Someone is on a night shift somewhere else, or cannot sleep, or has finally got a moment free after the day everybody else was busy having. They have a real problem and they have picked up a phone about it. The system has taken their call, given it a number, put it in a queue, and lit a blue light on an empty desk in an empty building.
Nothing has failed. This is the designed behaviour.
The handset is on the cradle. The cord hangs down and coils on the desk. The coffee ring is there beneath it, still, in the dark, unlit and barely findable, and I painted it in anyway.