Maybe painting rank desk (11)
I believe the answer is:
workstation
'desk' is the definition.
The definition and answer can be both man-made objects as well as being singular nouns.
Perhaps you can see an association between them that I don't see?
'maybe painting rank' is the wordplay.
I cannot really understand how this works, but
'rank' could be 'station' (station is a kind of rank) and 'station' is found in the answer.
The remaining letters 'work' is a valid word which might be clued in a way I don't see.
This explanation may well be incorrect...
Can you help me to learn more?
(Another definition for workstation that I've seen is " Powerful desktop computer terminal".)