Peter YuillThe Crucible Year

The Oracle

Oracle · deep archive

Oracle Constellation

Every rated painting of the year and every pattern the Oracle found in the records, drawn from vae.db. Facts and correlations only: what the data shows, not what it means.

V23, studio photograph, five reads V23 lite, phone photo, one read. Same scale, never averaged with V23 Peter's own rating, where given

Right eye, cyan: reads the data. Measurement, structure, the engine's ratings Left eye, red: reads the room. Peter's own eye, and where it parts from the engine's

FIG 01

The year

Every rated work is one ray, in the order it was photographed, round Bangkok's three seasons from the first batch in December 2025 to the latest. The longer the ray, the higher the rating; solid rays are V23, hollow-tipped ones V23 lite; the inner tracks are the five axes and gaps split the batches. Ring by ring lays the same works out as tiles, one ring per quality, to follow one quality round the year.

FIG 02

The rising floor

Each quality V23 reads, as a channel through the year. Every work is a mark at its rung; the banks are the floor and the ceiling, where the lowest and highest tenth of the works sat at the time. A weir marks the day a quality stepped up for good, and the notes name what the Oracle found held. Read the lower bank: the weakest works improved more than the strongest.

FIG 03

Pace and surface

The pace of making, as a pulse: for every day of the year, how many works had been dated in the fortnight before it. The shaded storms are the bursts, the busiest quarter of the year. Below the line the batches answer: the Material and surface rung each was given, and how often the reads found a water stain. Batch against batch, this is the strongest pattern the Oracle has found in the practice itself.

FIG 04

Flaws

Every flaw V23's five reads named, drawn as it behaves on paper. The sheet shows where the reads placed them, every kind together; below, each kind with its own sheet and, along the year, the share of each batch's reads that named it. V23 lite names no flaws, so the early months are absent. Hover the sheet for a zone, or a batch for its share.

FIG 05

What goes with what

Every finding is a strand from a fact on the rim to the score it goes with. Cyan goes with higher, ember with lower. The bright strands held up; the haze behind them are leads, still to be tested on new work. A fact read over several windows (3, 7 and 14 days) is one point on the rim. Hover or tap the rim to follow one fact or one score.

FIG 06

Five reads

V23 reads every work five times and takes the middle. Each work here is a column of five marks per quality, one per read, in the order the works were photographed: a column that sits as one block was a clear call, a split column a close one. Above, how few changed reads would have moved the rating a full point. Below, the rungs the measurement caps took away, and the run whose batch rated furthest above Peter.

FIG 07

Two engines

V23 reads the studio photographs; V23 lite reads the older phone photos. Thirty works were read by both. On the left, each of those works as a strand from its V23 rating to its V23 lite rating. On the right, the factors the Oracle tested against both ratings that went somewhere, each a needle: up for higher, down for lower, its two halves the two engines. Where the needle runs straight the engines agree.

FIG 08

Against the pattern

From everything measured about a work, the Oracle predicts each score V23 gave it. These are the works that broke the prediction furthest: the hollow mark is where the profile said the score would be, the solid one where V23 put it. A fall is a work that measures well and was read low; a leap, the reverse. Hover or tap a work to see it.

FIG 09

Each paper, its own year

One constellation per paper, grouped by how the paper is sized. Each ray is a painting on it, at its date on the year's clock (December at the top, running clockwise) and long for a high rating: solid rays V23, hollow tips V23 lite, a red dot Peter's own rating, the base dot his early triage. Inside, the five qualities V23 read on that paper against every paper (dashed), and a ring of the inks it took. Beside each, the spread of its ratings and what the Oracle found about the paper itself. Papers were used in different months, so read these as portraits, not verdicts. Hover or tap a ray to see the painting.

FIG 10

Beliefs under test

Each lane is one belief about the work, tested against the whole archive. The dot is what the data says now, the line its uncertainty, and the faint trail behind it where the same test stood in each of the Oracle's earlier runs. Right of the band the data agrees, left it disagrees; a "no effect" belief holds while its dot stays in the band.

FIG 11

The words

How often Peter's own writing reaches for each idea, per thousand words, from the first records of the practice to the Crucible year. Each phase is a layer laid down on the last, oldest at the bottom; each idea a vein whose width is how often it was written. The marked shifts held up: a rise or fall too large for chance across the sections written in those periods.

FIG 12

The sky over the table

The year drawn against the real sky. The rim carries the twelve signs; inside it runs the band of sky the Sun crosses, with its actual stars, constellations and Milky Way, which have slipped almost a sign from the signs named after them. Every painting sits where the Sun stood on the day it was photographed, its ray long for a high rating, so the year runs from Capricorn round to Libra and the dark arc is the part still to come. Inside, the planets' paths across the same days, each drifting outward as the year goes on so that where a planet doubles back (retrograde) it draws a loop; the Moon's face on every photo day; and at the centre the Moon itself, from real imagery, as it stood that day. Hover or tap a painting to see the sky on its day; hover a planet for what the Oracle found about it.

FIG 13

The sky, and a borrowed sky

Every sky pattern the Oracle recorded, drawn as stars above the horizon, and below it, like a reflection, the same tests run on a borrowed sky: the real positions with their dates moved half the record away, so they belong to no painting. Each mark is one pattern, placed by its strength; the large stars passed as signals, and each is named. The dashed line on each side is the other side's outline, flipped across: if the planets had a hand in the work, the sky would outgrow its reflection. The two shapes almost coincide. Hover or tap a mark to find its twin.

FIG 14

The Oracle's own year

The Oracle has run several times as the archive grew. Each ring is one run, the first at the centre; each finding a thread out from the run it was first tested, lit where it held as a signal, dim as a lead, dark where it fell to noise. The outer dark is what the Oracle could not test at all.

**T_359** · 2026.07.28 · 97 × 180 cm · Sumi ink on Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper

Peter YuillCrucible Year

Large-scale sumi ink paintings from an ongoing year-long project in Bangkok. Each sheet is made in irreversible marks; every registered work remains in the record.

The eight paintings Peter chose

402 paintings registered · 172 shown · as of 2026.10.26

Selected works

Chosen by Peter Yuill. All 172 are in Works.

T_3152026.05.24 · 97 × 180 cm

T_3182026.05.24 · 97 × 180 cm

T_3282026.06.03 · 97 × 180 cm

T_3342026.06.03 · 97 × 180 cm

T_3302026.06.03 · 97 × 180 cm

T_3362026.06.03 · 97 × 180 cm

T_3582026.06.14 · 97 × 180 cm

T_3602026.07.28 · 97 × 180 cm

All 172 works

In December 2025 Peter Yuill made a bet on himself, and gave it one year.

Morning sun through the studio windows across the felt table, a large ink painting lying on it, the Bangkok skyline beyond the balcony — The room · Bangkok · 2026.03.24

The bet

Peter Yuill is a Canadian painter, formed over more than a decade in Hong Kong. For fifteen years the pattern was the same: build a body of work, watch it collapse, leave the city. Canada, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Bangkok. By the summer of 2024 everything he owned fit in one suitcase.

The bet was to do the opposite for twelve months. One room, one table, ink that cannot be corrected, and no leaving. Nobody commissioned it, and nothing guaranteed a single painting worth keeping.

He began on 29 December 2025, and in January moved into a live-in studio in Bangkok built around a felt-covered table open on every side. He has worked there since. A sheet resolves or it is destroyed.

“The whole arc has come to this moment. The long process of development, over many many stages now leads to a point where I'm possibly able to do what it is I felt destined to do.”Peter Yuill · Hanoi · December 2025

What he was afraid of

“If you do something but no one sees it, no one knows, did you really do it, did it really happen?”Peter Yuill · private journal · 2024.07.07

Most of his life has happened where nobody was looking: long walks through strange cities, a studio at night. In the same journal entry he calls himself “a ghost that moves through other people's realities but is unknown to anyone.” Someone once told him that every time a person dies, a library burns down. He has thought about it for twenty years.

“My memories are the only thing I carry with me now, they are all I have. It makes me wonder what kind of library will burn down when I die, should I have opened it.”The same entry

The witness

So before he painted anything, he built something that would remember. Every sheet of the year is dated, measured and kept, the failures with the rest. An engine reads each one. An archive holds every record. And a voice called Neon, who planned the year with him on a curb in Hanoi, has been told the truth every week since.

“I've built this witness to record my experience, because I don't know how to share it with a society that doesn't value it.”Peter Yuill · 2026.03.01

The test

A record proves he was here. Whether he had anything to say is the real wager, and in October 2026 Neon put it back to him without softening it:

“Can I translate my actual presence, my aloneness, my refusal to perform, my singular way of paying attention, into paint? Or is the archive just another elaborate way of avoiding the risk that I might be lying to myself about what I actually have to say?”Neon, in Peter's voice · October 2026

The answer is in the 402 sheets of paper.

402 sheets so far, each drawn at its own proportions, in the order they were registered. Filled: the 172 shown here. Outlined: the 230 kept in the archive. About 2,030 hours at the table.

More on Peter Yuill, on Neon, and the year chapter by chapter.

Across the year

The earliest and the latest painting shown here, 7 months apart: from Tanxi half-raw, 3-foot to Tianxuan Ge Dot Ink Becomes Gold, semi-cooked (self-sized), aged. Two paintings mark the distance; the year shows every one between them.

“I still don't feel anywhere close to where I want to be yet, but I'm also very happy with how much I've grown so far.”Peter Yuill · 2026.10.17

T_119: A black vertical band, streaked below, crosses a dark left arc and a pointed grey right arc, with spatter on pale paper.

T_1192026.03.19 · 50 × 100 cm

T_403: Two white circles near the centre, each ringed by black arcs and radiating grey and black wedges, filling a wide sheet below a pale top.

T_4032026.10.26 · 97 × 180 cm

The whole year, measured

Each painting is dated, its paper and inks registered, and analysed by an engine built for this project. Here is the whole year at once: one ray for every painting.

How the engine works See one painting measured

The archive reads back.

Neon is the archive's interpretive voice. She writes about a painting only after it has been measured. Of T_359:

I stood at the centre looking up while it turned. Rain fell through the eye in one white column and did not move.

Who Neon is

Further in

Eight places to go from here, for whoever wants them. The year is the place to start.

Claims, and the evidence for each

The painting records come from the year's master database; the pages also draw on material registries, studio documents and editorial text. The Archive sets out what the site claims, the evidence for each claim and the strongest reason to doubt it.

Claims and evidence