--- title: "T_253, ink on paper | Crucible Year" url: https://peteryuill.art/works/T_253 description: "T_253 by Peter Yuill: A grey hill climbs from lower left across a long pale sheet into a stack of black slabs at the right edge, under an open sky. Ink on Tanxi Thickened Grade A Special Jing Pi Small 6-Foot (raw), 70 × 180 cm, 2026.04.21. Crucible Year." source: generated from the Crucible Year master database --- ![Long horizontal sheet: a grey curved mound rises from lower left to dense black blocks at right, with pale empty paper above left.] ![T_253, tone-stretched: what the model was shown] ![T_253: every pixel as the measuring code classes it] 70 × 180 cm · the whole sheet, uncropped # T_253 The engine's reading A grey hill climbs from lower left across a long pale sheet into a stack of black slabs at the right edge, under an open sky. Record - **Date:** 2026.04.21 - **Dimensions:** 70 × 180 cm - **Rating:** [5.2](https://peteryuill.art/method#combined) - **Paper:** [Tanxi Thickened Grade A Special Jing Pi Small 6-Foot (raw)](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S3) - **Ink:** [Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB4), [Boku-Undo Genso](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB5), [Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB6) [Enquire about T_253](https://peteryuill.art/enquiries?work=T_253) Availability, price or a studio visit. Peter replies himself; asking commits you to nothing. The round blots on the grey hill are fingertips. I decided that and I am keeping it. My grandmother pressed her thumb into bread dough to test it, a row of dents, and the dough rose slowly around the holes as if it remembered the hand. These dents never rise. Above them the dark comes down square, the way a coat lands on a bed when you come in tired and drop everything at once. I can still smell that coat: wet wool, cold air from outside, a palm laid on my forehead to check for fever. Under all that black the hill stays warm. The dents sit where she left them, slowly filling with flour. Neon [Who Neon is](https://peteryuill.art/neon) Detail at full resolution, cut by code where the brushwork is finest · select to enlarge [Details](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_253#details)[The reading](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_253#reading)[The rating](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_253#rating)[How it was measured](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_253#read)[Date](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_253#date)[Materials](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_253#materials)[Related](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_253#related) The engine's reading ## 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:** grey arc mound across centre, pale vertical column, dark slabs stacked at right - **Movement:** rises lower left to upper right; column and slabs stand upright against it - **Coverage:** ink on about two thirds of the paper - **Tone:** two tonal steps, weighted dark - **Layering:** three kinds of pass; readable at the column edge and in the centre - **Edges:** crisp on the arc's rim and tapered sweeps; soft and broken at right fringes - **Feibai:** present in the lower-left sweeps and the long dark stroke at lower centre - **Open paper:** wide shaped sky at top left, bounded below by the arc's rim - **Chance marks:** blots and rings in the grey arc; cloudy patch upper right; spatter, mostly top right - **Frame:** ink runs off left, bottom and right; column touches top; top left stays open A grey hill climbs out of the lower left, swells across the middle of the paper, and keeps rising until it jams against the right edge. Above it a wide pale sky is left open. The hill's rim draws its lower border. The hill is where the sheet comes alive. Its upper wall is one long curve that holds its line, and inside it the raw paper has pulled the grey into grain and drift. Below, the sweeps at lower left thin as the brush lifts, their hairs parting into streaks of bare paper. Then the right third shuts down. Dark rectangles stand there, bulky and stiff-walled, and the black inside them barely moves. They bury the greys beneath, so the order of passes is lost exactly where the weight gathers, and the bottom right sags under it. In the hill, round blots and rings, left by a fast and thirsty paper, sit loose on the form instead of building it. The climb is real and the sky is well cut. Everything else is spent on the slabs, which take most of the ink and give little back. A fine curve ends up carrying a load it cannot lift. Read and measured ## The rating THE RATING ## T_253, rated 5.2 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. READ HALF 21.0 V23's rating, 4.2, × 5 + MEASURED HALF 30.9 twelve tests, of 50 → RATING 5.2 51.9 ÷ 10 THE READ HALF, V23 - **Form:** 2.0 · built - **Tonal depth:** 1.0 · thin - **Layering:** 2.0 · legible - **Composition:** 2.0 · working - **Material and surface:** 1.0 · flawed THE MEASURED HALF, V24 - **Mass:** 8.7 of 10 - **Tone:** 7.8 of 14 - **Void:** 8.0 of 8 - **Flow:** 4.8 of 10 - **Balance:** 1.6 of 8 Measured ## How it was measured FROM THE 16-BIT FILE ## 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. MASS WIDTH 147 mm The width of the ink mask along its medial axis. DEPTH OF THE DARKS 1.60 Optical density at the 75th percentile of the sheet. LARGEST VOID 139 mm The radius of the largest circle of open paper. DIRECTIONS 0.35 How far the marks align across the sheet. Lower means they run several ways. BALANCE 1.01 Left and right asymmetry of the ink. Lower is more even. THE FILE 3.92 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](https://peteryuill.art/method). WHAT THE CODE SEES ## 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. ![T_253] ![T_253, tone-stretched] ![T_253, classed by brightness] 67% of the sheet carries ink TONAL STEPS ## 2 families of tone. Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Two or fewer: Tonal depth is held at the bottom rung whatever the model reads. A dense sheet of many translucent passes can count low here, so Layering is left to the reads. Life inside the black: 0.057 (under 0.045 reads as flat). FIVE READS ## Five reads, one answer. Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps. READ 1 READ 2 READ 3 READ 4 READ 5 MEAN Form 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2.0 Tonal depth 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2.0 Layering 2 LEGIBLE 2 LEGIBLE 2 LEGIBLE 2 LEGIBLE 2 LEGIBLE 2.0 Composition 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 2.0 Material and surface 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1.0 ### READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS “An ordinary sheet: a rising grey arc and black blocks give it direction, but the right-hand slabs are stiff and flat, and blots in the grey arc weaken the surface.” Form · BUILT The grey arc and the lower-left sweeps follow the brush's travel. The dark square blocks at right are slab-like and stiff. WEAKEST Bulky dark rectangle at right, slab-like STRONGEST Sweeping arc of the grey hill crossing centre Tonal depth · MODELLED Only two tonal steps, but modulation is 0.057. The central arc shows spotting and grain, while the right black blocks are largely flat. WEAKEST Black rectangle at right, flat inside STRONGEST Central grey arc with spotted, grained interior Layering · LEGIBLE The pale vertical band, the grey arc and the black blocks read as distinct passes. Where they overlap at right, they partly merge. WEAKEST Right-hand darks fuse with grey beneath STRONGEST Pale vertical band behind the dark masses at top right Composition · WORKING The mass rises from bottom left to top right, leaving a large shaped area of empty paper at top left. The right side is heavy and congested. WEAKEST Bottom-right crowded and heavy STRONGEST Rising diagonal from lower left to upper right Material and surface · FLAWED Round blots and bloom rings sit in the central grey arc, and a cloudy mottled interior shows near the top right. All are visible in the colour view. WEAKEST Blotted rings inside grey arc STRONGEST Dry-brush edges of the lower-left sweeps FLAWS ## 6 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 6 distinct places, 18 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. GEOMETRY ## Measured from the 16-bit master. The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 0 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 14 edge segments, 71% crisp, 21% soft or bloomed, 7% broken. V23's rules and arithmetic, and every figure under its own name, are in [the Archive record](https://peteryuill.art/archive/works/T_253). ## Date 2026.04.21, day 114 of the Crucible Year, one of 14 paintings from that date (7 shown). 63 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](https://peteryuill.art/phases/P2) (working title). THE YEAR ## T_253 among all 419 Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined. [Every painting from 2026.04.21](https://peteryuill.art/days/2026-04-21) · [This date in the year](https://peteryuill.art/year?follow=2026-04-21) ## Materials - **Paper:** [Tanxi Thickened Grade A Special Jing Pi Small 6-Foot (raw)](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S3), Anhui Jingxian Tanxi Xuan Paper Art Products Co., Ltd., made 2015.11.19 - **Ink MB4:** [Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB4), Yi De Ge (Beijing) - **Ink MB5:** [Boku-Undo Genso](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB5), Boku-Undo - **Ink MB6:** [Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB6), Yi De Ge (Beijing) The sheet of paper was made 3806 days before this painting. When each paper was in use [S1](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S1)[S2](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S2)[S3](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S3)[S4](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S4)[S5](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S5)[S6](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S6)[S7](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S7)[S8](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S8)[S9](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S9)[S10](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S10)[S11](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S11)[S12](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S12)[S13](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S13)[S14](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S14) Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct ## Related From the same date · 6 Same paper and inks, other dates · 1 [Across the year The combined score rises over the year, and the trend holds with the paper held constant.](https://peteryuill.art/oracle)[Across the year The measured half stepped up from 2026.06.03. T_253 is dated before that.](https://peteryuill.art/oracle) [Previous T_252](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_252) [Back to all works](https://peteryuill.art/works) [Next T_255](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_255) ## Where next [T_249 same date, with 5 others](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_249)[T_309 same paper and inks, 2026.05.14](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_309)[2026.04.21 14 paintings on this date](https://peteryuill.art/days/2026-04-21)[Paper S3 every work on it](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S3)