T_234
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.04.18, day 111
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S10, Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu bark, Exhibition Edition
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P2 The Switch
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SHP: save, has potential (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 5
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 2
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1
- Ink cover
- 81%
- Dark share
- 36%
- Tonal steps
- 6
- Flaws named by the reads
- bloom 5, water stain 5, other 6, tide line 3
Older engine
- V7
- 8
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.
6 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: 0.045 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, one answer.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“A gestural sheet whose curved black sweep shapes the light centre. The blocks are bulky, the dark interiors fairly flat, the left side crowded, and a bloomed grey wash sits against the right dark mass.”
Bottom curved stroke follows the brush's travel with a split dry-brush tail. Left dark wedge and right vertical block are bulky and slab-like, with stiff edges.
WEAKEST Blunt slab of the right-centre dark block
STRONGEST Sweeping curved black stroke along the bottom
Six tonal steps and a good range of greys. Dark interior modulation 0.0454 is barely above flat. The bottom black sweep reads mostly uniform; the blocks show some banding.
WEAKEST Lower curved black stroke interior largely flat
STRONGEST Right dark block with vertical banding
Grey washes sit under the black strokes and still read where they overlap, especially at right-centre. The left grey layers blur together, so the order of passes is less clear.
WEAKEST Left grey washes merge into murky texture
STRONGEST Black sweep over translucent grey arcs at right
The large curve carries the eye from the left mass to the right block around a shaped light centre. The left side is congested with overlapping greys, and the top-right splatter is diffuse.
WEAKEST Crowded, heavy left half
STRONGEST Bowl-shaped curve framing pale central void
The right grey wash beside the principal dark block carries cloudy blooms and dark spots, visible in the colour view. The left grey is mottled, and the paper has a yellowish tint.
WEAKEST Mottled spotted grey wash right of the dark block
STRONGEST Dry-brush split edges on the curved stroke
6 distinct places, 2 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 6 distinct places, 19 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: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 17 edge segments, 29% crisp, 47% soft or bloomed, 24% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
6 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
5 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 5.0.
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.