T_197
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.08, day 101
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S11, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, raw
- Inks
- MB1, MB2, MB3
- Phase
- P1 Warm-up
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SA: save, archive (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 5.5
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1.6
- Ink cover
- 52%
- Dark share
- 34%
- Tonal steps
- 3
- Flaws named by the reads
- bloom 5, other 5, water stain 3, tide line 1
Peter's own rating
- Rating
- 6
“There is always something that can be done better.”Peter Yuill · 2026.07.02
Older engine
- V7
- 6
How the number was made
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.8, on 2026.10.06: measured by code, then read 5 times by Claude Opus 5.5 against three reference paintings (R1 to R3), each read independent of the others. How the engine works.
Three views of one sheet.
Left, the photograph. Centre, the tone stretch the model is shown beside it: the darkest 45% of tones spread over the whole range, so flat black, banding and stains show. Right, every pixel as the measuring code classes it: cyan black ink, deep teal translucent grey, stone the palest ink, near black bare paper.
3 families of tone.
Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Life inside the black: 0.051 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 4 of 5 qualities.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps. Where reads differ, they differ by one rung; close calls resolve down.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“This is an ordinary, energetic sheet with a strong rising diagonal and a fluent wedge. A bulky lower dark mass, a cloudy mottled right panel with soft blooms, and loose spatter keep every ladder at a working average.”
Upper-left wedge tapers fluently; the long curved boat-form holds its walls but the lower-left mass is slab-like, and the right grey panel's edges dissolve into drips.
WEAKEST Bulky lower-left dark slab with ragged blunt end
STRONGEST Tapering dark wedge at upper left
Dark lower mass shows horizontal streaks and banding; the central arc has bristle grain; right panel is a mid-grey mottle without real range. Modulation 0.051, just above flat.
WEAKEST Mottled right grey panel reads cloudy, little depth
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaked grey arc sweeping centre
Black boat-form and wedge read clearly over and beside the grey sweeping arc; about two to three passes, legible where they meet, without a built sequence across the sheet.
WEAKEST Right panel's dark blots sit ambiguously in grey
STRONGEST Dark boat-form over translucent grey arc, centre
A clear rising movement carries the eye from the dark lower left up through the arc; top-left paper is shaped, but lower-right drops and the right panel feel loose.
WEAKEST Scattered spatter and drips in the lower right
STRONGEST Rising diagonal sweep from lower left to upper right
Ink is controlled in the dark masses and the dry-brush arc; the right panel has reticulated mottling and two soft dark blooms, though these sit away from the principal black mass.
WEAKEST Dark blooms inside the right grey panel
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain in the central arc
3 distinct places, 1 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 3 distinct places, 14 mentions in all across 5 reads; the number in each ninth is how many times a flaw was named there. Reads agreeing on a place strengthen the evidence for one flaw; they do not multiply it. A major flaw holds Material and surface at rung 1.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 4 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 7 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 18 edge segments, 56% crisp, 0% soft or bloomed, 44% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
3 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
2 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.6A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.5.
Engine v23.8, 5 reads. Fixed arithmetic, the same for every painting; the constants were set on 24 randomly chosen paintings so the median sheet scores 5. The scale is relative to this archive, not to painting in general, and a difference of less than half a point between two paintings is noise.