T_140
The engine's readingBlack and grey slabs tilt and stack across a long sheet of cooked paper, while a thin black wedge drops in at upper right.
Record- Date
- 2026.03.24
- Dimensions
- 70 × 140 cm
- Rating
- 5.0
- Paper
- Qing Yi Cooked Xuan
- Ink
- Kuretake Shogei Kiwami, Yi De Ge Zhonghua, Boku-Undo Bokkou
At the top left the water dried in bands, and I know those bands. A tide does that on a flat beach in February: leaves its old edges one inside another, each a little fainter, each a place it gave up. Behind the beach is the cliff, heavy and black, the part the postcards crop out. Gulls do not land on it. The beach at least keeps its accounts open. It shows every time the water came in, how far it got, how soon it changed its mind. I would walk that strip in a coat that is too thin. Low tide, grey light, the sea gone somewhere past the edge of the paper and not coming back today.
The reading
Written by the engine after V23's reads, from the settled findings, and checked by hand before approval. It explains V23's numbers and may not change them.
- Structure
- tilted slabs at left, horizontal black band at right, tapering wedge top right
- Movement
- left slabs lean on a rising diagonal; right band lies flat against it
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- four tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- pale washes, grey blocks, black slabs; readable at top right and slab margins
- Edges
- crisp slab sides; ragged dry top on upper-left slab; soft wash edges
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- leftover strip along the top; narrow diagonal white gap at left
- Chance marks
- tide bands top left, milky patch lower left, blots above centre, creases in darks
- Frame
- ink runs off bottom, left and right; top stays mostly open
Dark slabs fill the lower sheet like stacked freight: two tilted bars on the left, a long black band on the right, and only a strip of bare paper left along the top. The tilt gives the left side a slight lean. The right side stops it flat.
The best mark is the smallest. At upper right a black wedge tapers to a point, the one shape here that follows the brush's travel instead of being filled in. Behind it a grey square still shows through, an earlier pass left readable. On the upper-left slab the top edge breaks into dry, ragged hairs, and the white gap below it gives the left half its one clean interval.
The cost is weight. The central block is painted in, its interior almost one even dark, and the right band repeats it at length. Cooked paper holds ink at the surface, so the blacks sit as covers, not depths. Water pooled the same way at top left and dried into cloudy tide bands. The creases in the darks are minor.
One clean stroke and a great deal of filling. The wedge is worth finding. The rest presses down and stays there.
The rating
T_140, rated 5.0
The combined score, out of 10: V23's reading of the photograph as the read half and V24's twelve tests on the 16-bit file as the measured half, added and divided by 10. The scale is relative to this archive. How each half is made is on the Method page.
- Form
- 1.0 · blunt
- Tonal depth
- 1.8 · modelled
- Layering
- 2.0 · legible
- Composition
- 1.0 · inert
- Material and surface
- 1.0 · flawed
- Mass
- 7.3 of 10
- Tone
- 7.6 of 14
- Void
- 6.4 of 8
- Flow
- 6.4 of 10
- Balance
- 6.4 of 8
How it was measured
What V24 measured.
Plain physical facts with no model involved. Across the year they track how the practice changes. On one sheet they cannot say whether a mark is any good. Millimetres read a few percent high, because the photographs are cropped just inside the paper's edge.
The width of the ink mask along its medial axis.
Optical density at the 75th percentile of the sheet.
The radius of the largest circle of open paper.
How far the marks align across the sheet. Lower means they run several ways.
Left and right asymmetry of the ink. Lower is more even.
Pixels to the millimetre in the TIFF these were measured from, with the studio light removed.
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.
4 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: 0.048 (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
“The sheet is built from slab rectangles and wedges, like R1 but darker and more crowded. The forms are blunt and the composition is jammed. Tone is modest and the layering legible. A cloudy, tide-edged wash at top left mars the surface.”
Principal marks are blunt rectangles and wedges of ink: the upper-left slab, the large central block and the right mass are bulky fills, not shapes that follow a brush's travel.
WEAKEST central dark rectangle, a bulky filled slab
STRONGEST tapering black wedge at upper right
The tone-stretched view shows grain in the upper-left and upper-right grey slabs and banding low in the right mass. The central block stays flat; the modulation of 0.048 is only just above flat.
WEAKEST central black block interior largely flat
STRONGEST upper-left slab graded from dark to grainy grey
There are two or three passes. The pale washes at top left and centre sit under the darker slabs, and the grey slab at upper right still reads beneath the wedge and the black band.
WEAKEST black masses cover underlying passes rather than layering
STRONGEST grey slab legible behind the black wedge, top right
About 79% of the sheet carries ink and the blocks sit side by side. The lower half is crowded, and the empty paper at the top is leftover space with little shape. There is little flow.
WEAKEST lower half jammed solid with dark blocks
STRONGEST diagonal white gap between the two left slabs
A cloudy, banded pale wash with tide edges sits against the upper-left slab. There is a milky patch at lower left, and crease lines run through the central and right dark masses. These are visible in the colour view.
WEAKEST cloudy, tide-edged wash at top left
STRONGEST dry-brush ragged top edge of upper-left slab
8 distinct places, 3 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 8 distinct places, 20 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: 7 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 28 edge segments, 43% crisp, 57% soft or bloomed, 0% broken.
V23's rules and arithmetic, and every figure under its own name, are in the Archive record.
Date
2026.03.24, day 86 of the Crucible Year, one of 12 paintings from that date (1 shown). 58 works were registered in the fourteen days before. Paintings are dated by the day their batch was registered and photographed; each was finished that day or within the few days before. Phase: P1 Warm-up (working title).
T_140 among all 419
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Qing Yi Cooked Xuan, Jingxian Sichijian Xuan Paper Arts & Crafts Co., Ltd., made unknown
- Ink MB1
- Kuretake Shogei Kiwami, Kuretake
- Ink MB2
- Yi De Ge Zhonghua, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB3
- Boku-Undo Bokkou, Boku-Undo