T_351
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.06.14, day 168
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S10, Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu bark, Exhibition Edition
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P3 The Floor Rises
- 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
- 7
- Form
- 2
- Tonal depth
- 2.4
- Layering
- 3
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 2
- Ink cover
- 88%
- Dark share
- 58%
- Tonal steps
- 3
- Flaws named by the reads
- water stain 4, other 5, mud 1
Peter's own rating
- Rating
- 7
“There is always something that can be done better.”Peter Yuill · 2026.07.02
Older engine
- V10C
- 7
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: 0.066 (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 sheet is in the same radial-arc idiom as R3, with good layering and modelled tone, but it is denser and more crowded. The central slabs are blocky and the negative space is thin, so it falls below R3.”
Radial fan strokes and the right ring follow the brush's arc. The central dark slab and the lower-right wedge read as filled blocks with heavy outlines.
WEAKEST Bulky central slab, blocky and stiff at its joins
STRONGEST Right vortex ring arcs following brush travel
Modulation 0.066 and three tonal steps. Arc banding and dry-brush streaks run inside the central and left masses, with a wide range of greys between black and paper.
WEAKEST Top-right black mass dense, only grainy inside
STRONGEST Central slab with banded arcs and stepped greys
Many translucent arc passes overlap, and their order can be read across both vortices. Overlaps build depth. Some centre-lower overlaps are getting dense.
WEAKEST Centre-bottom overlaps thickening toward murky grey
STRONGEST Translucent stacked fans at left vortex
Two vortex centres at left and right set up a strong horizontal pull. Ink covers 88% of the sheet, so there is little shaped empty paper and the middle is jammed with slabs.
WEAKEST Crowded centre, almost no breathing paper
STRONGEST Paired vortex eyes linked by radiating fans
The ink is controlled overall. Faint cloudy patches in the upper-centre greys and small speckled spots in the lower centre are minor and away from the main dark cores.
WEAKEST Cloudy milky greys in upper centre
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain on the right ring
4 distinct places, 0 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 4 distinct places, 10 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.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 2 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 6 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 16 edge segments, 56% crisp, 25% soft or bloomed, 19% 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.
none namedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 2.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 7.0.
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.