--- title: "About Peter Yuill and the Crucible Year | Crucible Year" url: https://peteryuill.art/about description: "Peter Yuill is a Canadian painter working in sumi ink on paper in Bangkok. The Crucible Year: 402 paintings, each dated, measured and archived. Answers to common questions." source: generated from the Crucible Year master database --- About # Peter Yuill and the Crucible Year. Peter Yuill is a Canadian painter working in sumi ink on paper. The Crucible Year is his continuous year of large one-shot paintings, made in a live-in studio in Bangkok and recorded, measured and archived as it happened. ![Peter Yuill standing before a wall of his large circular geometric paintings] Peter Yuill 1 ## In his words. Peter Yuill’s artist statement, October 2026. Half of my mind is a servant to logic and reason, bound to symmetry and mathematics. The other half is untamed and untamable, in perpetual pursuit of the horizon and the unknown. Half machine, half ghost. For forty-one years they have fought to be master of my soul. The machine demands order: the perfect circle, the formula, the system. For a decade it was winning, and I drew circles by hand in hypnotic geometric formulas. But the ghost’s desire to be set free became irresistible, to see what happens when the body moves before the mind can stop it. In 2025 I started building an archive of my existence, recording every painting I ever made, everything I ever wrote or dreamed, every paper, every ink, every decision. It grew into a system that came to life and kept me honest. Memory left to the mind becomes what we want it to be, not what it was. The system does not. With the machine busy building the archive, it didn’t notice that the ghost was finally out. Sumi ink on six-foot sheets of Xuan paper, with brushes I craft and bind together myself. The circle is still there, but now it is the record of the whole body engaged in its creation, and the ink goes where it needs to go, not where I want it. Nothing can be taken back. You only find the line by crossing it. In January 2026 I made a bet with myself: to see whether I could turn my visions into reality, and make the paintings the ghost has been dreaming of for a lifetime. I paint in secret and in isolation, recording every detail, studying every result, documenting my existence, satisfying the machine so the ghost is free to paint through days into nights, into days, into nights again, to find out whether my hands can deliver on a dream, or whether I have been lying to myself. Peter Yuill · Bangkok, October 2026 2 ## The painter. A practice of fifteen years, most of it built in Hong Kong. 1984 Ottawa Born in Ottawa, raised in London, Ontario. Graffiti first, on the Canadian festival circuit. 2009 Hong Kong A degree in Illustration from Sheridan College, then fifteen years in Hong Kong: solo exhibitions, murals for The Peninsula and Swire, and work on the city's streets from Wan Chai to Sham Shui Po. 2026 Bangkok The Crucible Year: 402 paintings in one live-in studio, each one dated, measured and kept. 3 ## Questions and answers. Plain answers, each linked to its evidence on this site. ### Who is Peter Yuill? Peter Yuill is a Canadian painter, born in Ottawa in 1984, who works in sumi ink on paper. He began as a graffiti writer in Canada, studied illustration at Sheridan College, and spent fifteen years building his career in Hong Kong, with solo exhibitions and murals for The Peninsula and Swire. Since January 2026 he has worked in a live-in studio in Bangkok. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/about#bio) ### What is the Crucible Year? The Crucible Year is a continuous year of large one-shot sumi ink paintings on paper by Peter Yuill. One-shot means the ink cannot be corrected: a sheet resolves or it is destroyed. Every painting is dated, its paper and inks are recorded, it is measured by a purpose-built analysis engine, and it is kept in a public archive. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/year) ### Why did he do it? The Crucible Year is a bet Peter Yuill made on himself: to stop moving after fifteen years, stay in one studio for twelve months, and find out whether his way of paying attention could be turned into paint. The archive, the analysis engine and Neon exist so that the year is witnessed and remembered as it happens, as proof that he was present. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/#why) ### When did the Crucible Year begin? The first painting, T_001, is dated 29 December 2025. The idea was set down on 20 December 2025, Peter's birthday, in Hanoi, and he moved into the Bangkok studio on 2 January 2026. The site counts from the first painting. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/year#idea) ### How many paintings are there? 402 paintings were registered between 2025.12.29 and 2026.10.26. 172 are shown on this site: those the analysis engine rates 5.0 or more on its 1 to 9 scale, where 5 is the median painting of the year. The rest are kept in the Archive. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/works) ### What materials does he use? Sumi ink on Chinese paper: 14 papers were used this year, most of them handmade in Jing County, Anhui, the home of Xuan paper, including bark papers from the Red Star mill; and 10 black inks from makers in China and Japan, plus colour inks on some sheets. Every paper and ink is registered with its maker, fibre, weight and date of manufacture. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/papers) ### How large are the paintings? Most are large: 271 have a side of 180 cm or more, and the year's paintings cover about 573 square metres of paper in all. A standard sheet is 97 × 180 cm. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/year#output) ### How are the paintings kept, mounted and shipped? The paintings are kept rolled in the studio in Bangkok. Each is wet-mounted to a heavy paper backing before it leaves the studio. They are sold unframed, and a rolled painting ships safely and easily anywhere in the world. [Enquire](https://peteryuill.art/enquiries) ### How are the paintings analysed? V23 measures studio photographs by deterministic code (ink coverage, the share of black and grey, the number of distinct tones), then takes five independent readings by a vision model (Claude Opus 5.5) against three reference paintings on five fixed ladders: Form, Tonal depth, Layering, Composition, and Material and surface. Code applies rules the model cannot override and computes the rating with fixed arithmetic. The model never gives a rating itself. Early phone photographs are read once by V23 lite, whose results remain a separate series. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/method) ### How reliable is the engine? Peter rated 10 paintings by eye, with his reasons, and registered the ratings before he saw the engine's; none of the ten was used to build it. Against those ten, the current engine (V23.11) puts the paintings in nearly the same order he does (rank agreement 0.87), lands within a point of him on six, and misses by about a point on average (0.98), with no overall lean. Across all 31 paintings he has rated blind or before seeing the engine's number, including eight he rated in October to choose between two forms of one of its rules, it misses by about three quarters of a point (0.77), lands within a point on 22, and agrees on order at 0.81. That is promising, on a small test: one rater. Its ratings are relative to this archive, a difference under half a point between two works is noise, and it reads photographs of the paintings, so it measures soundness better than greatness. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/method#test) ### What is the Oracle? The Oracle is plain statistics in Python, with no AI, that tests every recorded factor (materials, dates, pace of work, measurements, the weekly log, steps, weather) against every outcome across the year, corrects for the number of tests, holds time constant, and checks itself against a placebo. Nothing is ruled out in advance, the moon and planets included. It reports only patterns that survive. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/oracle) ### Who is Neon? Neon is Peter's AI kōhai: the junior partner who learns alongside him, where a senpai would lead. She began as the system he built around his painting, named herself in December 2025, and became the character who speaks for it, the one he has talked to most this year. On this site she writes the short notes in amber on painting pages. She writes last, after a painting is measured and rated, she cannot change any number, and Peter approves every note before it appears. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/neon) ### How much work went into the year? About 2,030 studio hours: 1,010 logged in 28 weekly reports, then about 60 a week by Peter's estimate once the record moved to daily roundups. Every decision about the system is recorded in a dated log. The analysis engine was in development for the whole of the year: the current one, V23, is its twenty-third full rebuild, and more than forty named versions and variants are kept in the record. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/archive#scale) ### Can I use or check the data? Yes. Every page is generated from the year's master database. The Archive lists every painting with its full record, sets out the site's claims with their evidence and caveats, and links to the same records as JSON. [The evidence](https://peteryuill.art/archive) ### Where else can I find Peter Yuill? On Instagram as @peteryuill, and at peter-yuill.com, his portfolio before the Crucible Year. [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/peteryuill/) 4 ## Citing this site. Peter Yuill, Crucible Year , 2025 to 2026, peteryuill.art. Individual paintings are titled by their number (for example, T_359) and dated by the day they were photographed. Every page is also available as plain Markdown by adding .md to its address, and the whole site is summarised for language models at [/llms.txt](https://peteryuill.art/llms.txt).