Eight telephones. Eight small amber lights. Two rows of four, stacked, in the dark.
This is the painting the series exists for and I made it before I made any of the others.
Here is what you are looking at. Every one of those lights is a person on hold. They called, they were placed in a queue, and they have put the phone down on the desk or the passenger seat or the arm of a chair and gone on with the afternoon, and their line stays open, and the light stays lit here in a room they will never see.
Now go and look at a votive rack. A stand of small flames in a dark side chapel, in rows, each one lit by a person who wanted something specific, paid a coin for it, and left. They are not standing there watching their candle. They are at work. The flame is doing the waiting on their behalf.
I put the two things side by side in my head one morning around the ninth week and could not get them apart again, and I have not tried very hard since.
The composition is straight from the racks. Rows, regular spacing, identical units, the light held at a consistent height across the whole grid, a shallow depth so the back row is only slightly dimmer than the front. That regularity is the entire visual pleasure of a votive stand and it is why they are built that way. It works exactly as well on telephones, which surprised me, and which I think says more about the telephones than about my abilities.
Look at the reflections. Each amber light throws a short highlight along the top edge of the phone below it and a longer one down the moulded curve of the handset, and because the units are identical the highlights repeat, and the repetition is what makes the grid read as a single object rather than eight things.
There is a coffee ring on the desk in front of the near row, and a coiled cord fallen off the edge, and a smaller cable running out of frame at the right which I left in because taking it out would have made this a decorative picture.
Eight people wanted something on the morning I painted this. I have no idea what any of it was. The building has since closed. The lights went out in March in the middle of a Tuesday when somebody pulled the service, and whatever those eight were asking for, they are still not going to get it, and there is no version of this in which anybody was cruel to anyone.