T_225
The engine's readingA long black stroke climbs from the lower left to a splash at the centre, between pale grey planes and a fan of curved grey strokes.
Record- Date
- 2026.04.15
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi Edition, raw
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice, Boku-Undo Genso, Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan
Below the big stroke, a trail of black drops falls toward the bottom edge, smaller as it goes. I follow it down the way the old stories tell you to track a wounded thing: by what it lets fall. A village tells this one every winter. A beast came down the valley, bit a piece out of the sky, and was struck once by a hero whose name the village let slip. It bled in drops the size of plums, then peas, then seeds. Where the seeds landed, the farmers planted nothing for a year, out of respect or fear, which in that village is one word. The beast was never found. The last drop is still out in the field, round and black, waiting its turn.
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
- central dark arc over pale left planes, ending against a right-hand fan
- Movement
- rising sweep lower left to upper right; right fan curves downward against it
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- five tonal steps, weighted to the middle greys
- Layering
- pale washes, mid-grey sweeps, dark strokes, spatter; readable in centre and right
- Edges
- crisp on central stroke and spatter; soft at lower left; broken in right fan
- Feibai
- present in the curved strokes of the right-hand fan, lower right
- Open paper
- broad irregular field across top centre, smaller pocket at lower centre
- Chance marks
- spatter throughout; bloom at lower left; water stain left centre; creases in central greys
- Frame
- ink runs off left, bottom and right edges; top stays open across centre
One dark stroke does the travelling. It rises out of the lower left, swells into a ragged black head at the centre and hands the eye to a fan of curved strokes at the right. Pale grey planes lie behind it, and the top is left open.
The arc is the best thing here. Its walls hold, and the black inside carries grain and banding, a stroke with speed still in it. The washes beneath stay readable. At the right, the raw bark paper grips a drier brush, and the fan breaks into streaks of bare paper without losing its curve.
The cost sits where the arc begins. At lower left the passes run together, and on paper this absorbent the wet black spreads into a grey cloud with no edge, made more crowded by spatter. The blot at right centre is flat inside. The segmented bar at top left stays stiff and alone. A water stain and faint creases sink into the greys.
That leaves one gesture worth following, with a good deal of weather around it. It is the kind of day the year was mostly made of.
How it was read
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.8, on 2026.10.06: measured by code, then read 4 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.
5 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: 0.055 (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
“An energetic sheet of spatter and sweeps, close to R2. It has a working arc and legible greys, but the bottom-left is cloudy and crowded, and there are wash accidents next to the principal masses.”
The central dark arc and the right-hand fan of dry-brush strokes are coherent and follow the brush. The bottom-left dark area is diffuse and the top-left bar is stiff.
WEAKEST Diffuse grey cloud bottom-left lacks a clear wall
STRONGEST Central dark arc stroke rising to the right
There are five tonal steps and the dark-interior modulation is 0.055. The central arc shows grain and banding. The right dark blot and the top-left bar are fairly flat inside.
WEAKEST Dark blot at right centre is flat inside
STRONGEST Right fan of grey streaks with stepped density
Pale grey washes, mid-grey sweeps and dark strokes with spatter stay mostly legible. In the bottom-left the passes blur together into a cloudy mass.
WEAKEST Bottom-left overlaps get cloudy and harder to read
STRONGEST Pale grey arcs under the dark central stroke
A sweep carries the eye from lower left to upper right, and the paper at the top centre is shaped. Ink covers 83% of the sheet, which is busy, and the bottom-left is crowded with spatter.
WEAKEST Crowded, busy bottom-left quadrant
STRONGEST Sweeping arc from lower left up to the right
There is a milky, cloudy wash with blotchy texture across the left-centre greys and a soft grey bloom at the bottom-left. Pale tide-edged patches sit beside the right blot.
WEAKEST Cloudy grey wash patch at left centre
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaks in the right fan
5 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 5 distinct places, 11 mentions in all across 4 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: 3 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 8 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 20 edge segments, 60% crisp, 25% soft or bloomed, 15% 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
2026.04.15, day 108 of the Crucible Year, one of 11 paintings from that date (8 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: P2 The Switch (working title).
T_225 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi Edition, raw, China Xuan Paper Co., Ltd., made 2025.12.08
- Ink MB4
- Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB5
- Boku-Undo Genso, Boku-Undo
- Ink MB6
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
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