T_157
The engine's readingA dark swell of ink rolls the length of a long sheet. At the right it lifts into a grey crest of streaked brushwork, with splashes scattered above.
Record- Date
- 2026.03.28
- Dimensions
- 70 × 180 cm
- Paper
- Tanxi Thickened Grade A Special Jing Pi Small 6-Foot (raw)
- Ink
- Kuretake Shogei Kiwami, Yi De Ge Zhonghua, Boku-Undo Bokkou
The long dark swell is a belly late in a pregnancy, seen from the side, the way you see the horizon from a boat. At the right it lifts into a grey crest and curls back on itself, and that is where the kick came. My mother let me keep my hand flat there one evening. Nothing happened for so long I gave up, and then the whole hill moved under my palm, like something turning over in deep water. I took my hand away as if burned. Above the swell, small and dark and upright in the pale strip of light, is what it turned out to be: my brother, all elbows, already trying to stand.
The reading
Written by the engine after the painting was rated, from the settled findings, and checked by hand before approval. It explains the numbers; it may not change them.
- Structure
- low black swell, grey crest rising right, loose splashes above
- Movement
- left to right along the swell, the right arc curling back against it
- Coverage
- ink on about nine tenths of the paper
- Tone
- four tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- pale splashes, grey arcs, black base; readable at left and right overlaps
- Edges
- ragged crisp top to the black at left; soft crest edges at right
- Feibai
- present in the sweeping arc and crest, upper right
- Open paper
- thin light strip across the top centre, above the swell
- Chance marks
- spatter upper left and centre; water stain centre; white nick right
- Frame
- ink runs off left, bottom and right; top mostly open, touched upper left
A long dark swell fills the lower half of the paper and rolls from left to right. At the right it rises into a grey crest that curls back over itself. Above it, pale splashes and a dark upright splash hang in a thin strip of light.
The right arc is where the sheet comes alive. One fast sweep has split into fine parallel streaks of bare paper, and the thick raw paper, which grips a dry brush hard, has kept every hair. Beneath that arc the greys step down in clear bands, so the crest has a front and a back.
The lower left gives little back. The black there is a filled slab with a stiff left wall, almost the same dark from edge to edge, and it buries the passes laid under it. A milky water stain sits on the band's edge at centre, and a white nick shows in the black to the right. The sheet absorbs both, though they show how little else happens inside that dark.
The wave moves and the crest breathes, but half the paper is weight without incident. The sheet is competent and readable, with one passage of real life and a heavy floor holding it down.
How it was read
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, one answer.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“Landscape-like wave of layered grey and black bands with good horizontal flow and a fine dry-brush arc at right, but a heavy, flat lower black mass and small water accidents near centre keep it ordinary.”
Wave bands follow brush travel through centre and right; lower-left black mass is a heavy filled slab with stiff vertical left edge.
WEAKEST Bottom-left dark slab, bulky and filled-in
STRONGEST Right sweeping arc wave with dry-brush striations
Stretched view shows stepped greys and arcs in right wave and upper-left band; lower black band is largely flat; modulation 0.048 just above flat.
WEAKEST Lower dark band interior nearly uniform
STRONGEST Right arc grey with striations and graded density
Pale splash layer top, grey wave bands, then black base; overlaps readable at left and right, but bottom black largely buries what is beneath.
WEAKEST Lower black band covers earlier passes
STRONGEST Grey upper-left band overlapping dark band, legible
Wave line gives clear horizontal flow; 89% coverage leaves little shaped paper; top-left splashes scattered; lower half dead weight.
WEAKEST Bottom half crowded, heavy dark mass
STRONGEST Undulating horizon wave carrying eye left to right
Cloudy pale patch and ring near centre at dark band edge, white nick mid-right in black, vertical streak marks in lower black; visible in colour view.
WEAKEST Pale milky blotch at centre on dark edge
STRONGEST Dry-brush striations in right arc
5 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 5 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.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 9 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 17 edge segments, 18% crisp, 47% soft or bloomed, 35% broken.
The rating these readings produce, the rules applied and the arithmetic, with Peter's own rating where he gave one, are in the Archive record.
Date
2026.03.28, day 90 of the Crucible Year, one of 4 paintings from that date (2 shown). 80 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_157 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Tanxi Thickened Grade A Special Jing Pi Small 6-Foot (raw), Anhui Jingxian Tanxi Xuan Paper Art Products Co., Ltd., made 2015.11.19
- Ink MB1
- Kuretake Shogei Kiwami, Kuretake
- Ink MB2
- Yi De Ge Zhonghua, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB3
- Boku-Undo Bokkou, Boku-Undo
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