I have given a whole panel to a damp patch and I would do it again.
This is the wall above the seats, taken close and slightly from below, with the tube raking across it on a diagonal instead of sitting level as it does in the rest of the series. That change of angle is the reason the panel exists. Straight-on light flattens a stain into a brown mark. Light coming across it at ten degrees finds every ridge where the plaster has swollen and dried and swollen again, and the thing turns out to have relief. It is not a mark on the wall. It is a low landscape.
The seats are at the bottom of the frame, small, dark, unlit. I have demoted them on purpose.
Everything else in this room was specified by somebody. The chairs were ordered from a catalogue. The clock was chosen. The dispenser was mounted at a regulation height and the display above the door was wired to a queue system that a committee approved. Every object in every one of these ten paintings arrived because a person filled out a form.
This did not. Water got in at the roof at some point in the nineteen nineties and has been coming through in wet seasons ever since, and it has produced, over thirty years, the only thing in the building nobody designed. It has edges like a coastline. It has a dark centre where the saturation is worst and a series of pale rings around it where each successive flood dried and stopped. It is a record of every wet autumn this building has had, laid down in order, the way a tree does it.
I am aware that a certain kind of viewer will find a face in it, or a figure, or a shroud. I looked at it for a long time and I saw a few things too, and then I stopped, because that is the cheap way to make this painting matter and it does not need the help.
The wall is the only surface in the room that has been allowed to have a history. Everything else has been wiped, replaced, bolted down, or worn smooth. Whatever has happened to the people in those chairs across thirty years has left no mark anywhere except three feet above their heads, where the roof failed and the building started keeping notes.