T_321
The engine's readingA wheel of dry-brushed ink bands curls around a small white arch at right, facing three blunt marks and a spray of spatter across open paper.
Record- Date
- 2026.05.31
- 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
The white arch under the great curve is the underside of a bridge, and I know who lives under a bridge. Asbjørnsen and Moe wrote him down in Norway: a troll with eyes as big as saucers, listening for the trip, trap of hooves overhead. On the left the goats are sorting out the order. The little one is that spattered knot, all bristle and nerves. The middle one stands square and dark and says nothing. The biggest is the grey one in front, freckled, patient, who has read the story. Black drops have come up over the parapet at the top of the arch, which is the troll looking. Past the bridge is the hillside where, the tale says, they got so fat they could scarcely walk home.
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
- concentric arc mass at right; three separate marks at left, unjoined
- Movement
- arcs sweep round the opening and face left; left marks stand upright against them
- Coverage
- ink on about three fifths of the paper
- Tone
- three tonal steps, spread across the range
- Layering
- translucent grey passes under dark ones; readable in the arcs only
- Edges
- crisp brushed ends on the arcs; soft bleeding at far left; feathered grey column
- Feibai
- present in the upper arc band and along the outer arcs' left side
- Open paper
- small white arch inside the wheel; wide open upper left and centre
- Chance marks
- spatter and ringed drops at left; grey bloom below slab; pale stain at arcs' edge
- Frame
- ink runs off the right and bottom edges; top and left stay open
A great wheel of brushed bands rises from the bottom edge at right and leaves the side of the sheet, curled around a small white arch. Across open paper, three blunt marks and a spray of spatter stand facing it.
The wheel is where the sheet lives. Raw bark paper gripped the drying brush so hard that each sweep combed grain along its curve, with streaks of bare paper flying through the upper band. Pale grey passes stay visible under darker ones, so the order of making reads from the rim in to the black ring around the opening.
The left side does not answer. The slab at left-centre is a stiff rectangle, nearly even inside. The grey column and the far-left knot are single passes with nothing beneath. This paper drinks fast, and loaded strokes spread and flatten. They sit as islands in leftover paper. Fine creases cross the arc darks, and the wheel absorbs them.
Where that leaves it: good, reliable work, with one passage of real quality and a left side that keeps the whole from rising to meet it.
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.
3 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: 0.062 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 3 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
“A strong layered arc on the right echoes R3. It is weakened by stiff, scattered marks on the left, a flat dark block, minor creases and a cloudy patch beside the arc.”
Right arcs follow the brush's travel fluently. Left-centre dark block is a blunt slab, and the far-left splash knot is lumpy; the walls hold but some marks are stiff.
WEAKEST Stiff dark rectangular slab, left-centre
STRONGEST Concentric arc bands sweeping around the right opening
Arc interiors show banding, grain and graded density, with modulation 0.062. The dark rectangle and left knot have little internal variation, and tonal steps are only 3.
WEAKEST Dark left-centre block nearly flat inside
STRONGEST Arc bands with dry-brush grain and stepped greys
Successive arcs overlap translucently. Grey outer bands sit under the darker inner and top-right passes, so the order can be read and builds depth across the right half.
WEAKEST Left marks are essentially single passes
STRONGEST Overlapping translucent arc passes in the right mass
The arc mass commands the right and leads inward. The left blocks and spatter feel scattered and weakly tied to it, and the upper-left paper reads partly as leftover.
WEAKEST Scattered left cluster and empty top-left paper
STRONGEST Arc spiral drawing the eye to the white opening
Dry-brush grain is well used in the arcs. Fine crease or crack lines cross the dark arcs, and a pale grey cloudy patch sits at the arc's left edge, mid-height.
WEAKEST Crease lines and pale cloud beside arc
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain in the arc bands
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, 13 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: 6 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 2 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 25 edge segments, 52% crisp, 12% soft or bloomed, 36% 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
2026.05.31, day 154 of the Crucible Year, one of 8 paintings from that date (6 shown). 10 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: P3 The Floor Rises (working title).
T_321 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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