The brightest object in this building is a metre and a half from his face and none of it reaches him.
That is not a mood I decided on. I sat in that chair myself for an hour to check, and it is a fact about the geometry. The bulb is at the back of a steel cylinder pointing along its own axis toward the load. What escapes through the door glass leaves at a shallow angle and goes down and out. It lands on the tiles in front of the machine. It lands on the flaked paint of the cabinet beside it. It picks out the rust on the hinge and the wet shine of the grout.
The chairs are set against the opposite wall, back from the machines, at the height of a seated person, which puts a human head well above the cone and well behind it. So the man in this painting is a shape. Shoulders, the curve of a hood or a heavy collar, the line of one arm, a knee. I have him at ninety per cent black and I have resisted every instinct to find a rim light for him, because there is no rim light. There is nothing there. He is the darkest thing in a painting that contains a lamp.
I want to be careful, because it would be easy to make this cruel and it is not.
Nobody set the chairs badly. They are where chairs go, out of the traffic, so that a person carrying a full basket can pass. Nobody aimed the bulb away from the seating. A bulb that lit the room instead of the drum would be a bulb that failed at its job. Every single decision that produced this arrangement was correct, and each one of them was an improvement on whatever came before it, and the result is a man sitting in the dark watching the only lit thing in the building do something that does not require him.
He is not sad. I have painted his posture accurately and it is not slumped. He is upright, forward slightly, the way you sit when you are attending to something. He is watching the drum turn. People do this for twenty-eight minutes at a stretch without a phone in their hand, and I have never once seen anybody look away from it for long.
The chair is the ordinary white stacking chair, the one that exists in every waiting space in the world, and here it has gone the colour of tea. Plastic yellows. It has a crack across the seat lip and a scuff on one leg. Under the light from the drum, its edges catch just enough to place it in the room, so that the chair is legible and the man in it is not.
I did paint a man in a chair in a municipal waiting room a few weeks ago and he was lit. That room had overhead light and a wall clock and a number display, and it wanted to be able to see who was waiting in it.
This room does not want anything. It has no way to want. It has a bulb inside a drum, and it spends it on cotton.