T_237
The engine's readingA black band bending over a wider grey arc on bark paper, with clouded washes to the left and a white bowl of paper beneath.
Record- Date
- 2026.04.18
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu Bark, Exhibition Edition, half-raw
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice, Boku-Undo Genso, Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan
The left side dried the way the ceiling over my childhood bed did: one hard rim inside another, a new ring every wet winter. I lay under it with fevers and gave it names. A continent. A sheep. My grandmother's face the day the cake went missing. My mother said it was only the roof, and she was right, and it made no difference. Paint went over it every spring, and every autumn it came back, browner at the edge, sure of where the water had been. That house is sold. Somewhere above that bed the roof still lets the dark in, slowly, and a child with a hot forehead is counting rings.
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
- black band laid over a wider grey arc, both curving, joined by overlap
- Movement
- left to right and falling; nothing runs against it
- Coverage
- ink on about nine tenths of the paper
- Tone
- four tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- pale wash, grey arcs, black band; clear at top and right, fused at left
- Edges
- crisp on the black band's walls; soft and tide-lined at left; feathered lower left
- Feibai
- present, lower edge of the black band, right of centre
- Open paper
- pale bowl at bottom centre under the arcs; thin strip along top
- Chance marks
- tide lines and blooms in left washes; drips across bottom centre; stain in right arc
- Frame
- ink runs off left, top and right; bottom edge stays open
A black band bends across the upper sheet like a lintel sagging under its weight, over a wider grey arc that swings from the left edge down to a squared end at lower right. The sheet makes one long falling curve, left to right, and that curve shapes a pale bowl of paper at bottom centre.
The grey arc on the right is the liveliest passage. Its banded grain keeps the brush's travel, and the half-sized bark paper holds each pass crisp, so the black sits cleanly on top. Along the black band's lower edge, right of centre, the hairs part into fast parallel streaks of white. It is the one place the big stroke shows its speed.
The black gives little back. Inside it is nearly flat, and its left end stops in a blunt square. Past that end the left third crowds: grey washes dried with hard tide lines and bloom rings, their order lost in cloud. A line of drips across the white bowl pulls the eye off the curve.
The shape is clear and the right side has real grain, but a heavy, uniform black and a muddy flank keep the sheet in the middle. It reads at a glance, and a long look adds little.
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: 0.049 (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 strong sweeping black arc over grey bands gives the sheet a working structure. The black interior is fairly flat, the left side is crowded and blotchy with tide-line blooms, and drips mar the bottom. Ordinary, near R2.”
The main black arc holds and curves with the brush, and the right descending band is coherent. The left slab and lower-left washes are bulky and blotchy.
WEAKEST Left grey slab and blotchy lower-left wash forms
STRONGEST Upper dark arc band following the brush's sweep
Modulation is 0.049, just above flat. The right band and upper-right greys show arcs and grain. The central black band is mostly even, with dry-brush streaks only at its lower edge.
WEAKEST Main black band interior is largely uniform
STRONGEST Right descending grey band with circular arcs and grain
Four tonal steps. The black arc sits legibly over a grey arc, and the right band crosses the earlier greys. On the left, the passes clump together and are harder to read.
WEAKEST Lower-left overlaps blur into cloudy wash
STRONGEST Black arc over grey arc, upper band order legible
The large arc gives clear movement, and the white lower-centre paper is shaped by the bands. Ink covers 86% of the sheet, which crowds it, and the left side is congested.
WEAKEST Crowded, murky left third
STRONGEST Sweeping arc carrying the eye from left to lower right
Hard tide-line blooms and cloudy patches in the upper-left and left greys sit against the principal masses and are visible in the colour view. A drip trail runs across the bottom centre.
WEAKEST Tide-lined blooms in the left wash masses
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking at lower edge of black band
5 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 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. 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), 6 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 16 edge segments, 25% crisp, 69% soft or bloomed, 6% 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
2026.04.18, day 111 of the Crucible Year, one of 12 paintings from that date (8 shown). 56 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_237 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu Bark, Exhibition Edition, half-raw, China Xuan Paper Co., Ltd. (中国宣纸股份有限公司), made 2026.01.14
- 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)
Related
