T_345
The engine's readingA vault of overlapping grey and black arc bands spans the long sheet above a doorway of bare white paper, with dark rectangles stacked at lower left.
Record- Date
- 2026.06.06
- Dimensions
- 70 × 140 cm
- Paper
- Qing Yi Half-Raw Xuan
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Refined Ink Juice, Boku-Undo Genso, Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan
The white under the arch is the kind of door the old stories warn about. You step under the hill for a single reel, and when you come out your village is a ruin and your name is a ballad. I have stood at its threshold all evening. The black stone over the opening hangs crooked, as if the giant setting it was called away mid-lift and never came back. Someone has piled blocks at the left, a mortal's wall, too heavy, raised in a hurry against whatever lives inside. It will not help. The door is already open, the fiddles are already tuning, and the grass at my feet has started counting years.
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
- great arch of curved bands over a white opening; rectangle stack at lower left
- Movement
- arch sweeps up from left, over the top, down at right; left blocks stand vertical
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- four tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- pale, mid and dense passes; readable across top and right, muddier at left
- Edges
- crisp squared stroke ends; dry, ragged band ends; faint tide lines along arcs
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- arched doorway at bottom centre, diagonal white lane at left, both upper corners
- Chance marks
- spatter and hairline drag at top left; pooled blots in lower-left blocks; faint creases at right
- Frame
- ink runs off top, bottom, left and lower right; upper corners stay open
A vault of ink rises from the left, crosses the top of the paper and comes down hard at the right. Under it the bare paper stands as a doorway, and the eye goes up and over before it settles. Below the left shoulder, a stack of dark rectangles keeps to itself.
The vault is made of short curved bands, each laid over the last in translucent grey, and across the top centre you can read them back through one another. Half-sized paper lets each band keep its wall and dry to a faint tide line rather than bleed into the next. Where the brush ran dry at the band ends, the grain shows in fine drag, and those ragged ends keep the arch turning.
The lower left pays for all this. Its slabs are blunt and crowded, out of step with the arch, and ink pooled inside them into soft dark blots. On the right, the inner dark band is laid so dense that its interior goes nearly flat.
These costs are real, and they sit at the margins. The vault and its white door are built with full command of the paper. A fine painting, well above the common run.
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: 0.050 (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
“An arch of layered translucent arc bands, close in kind to R3, with ordered passes and a shaped central void. It falls below R3 because the lower-left blocks are stiff and heavy and some dark interiors are flat.”
Arc bands follow the brush's curve with clean, held walls; the lower-left cluster of rectangular blocks is stiff and filled in, and its joins are clumsy.
WEAKEST Left stacked rectangles, blunt and slab-like
STRONGEST Concentric arc bands sweeping across the top right
Grain and stepped greys run through the upper arcs; the dark inner right band and the lower-left darks are nearly uniform. Modulation of 0.0496 is barely above flat.
WEAKEST Inner dark right arc band, near-flat interior
STRONGEST Upper arcs with dry-brush grain and banding
Several translucent passes overlap in a readable order across the arch, building depth; the left blocks stack less clearly.
WEAKEST Left block cluster, overlaps partly covering each other
STRONGEST Overlapping translucent arc bands in the top centre
The great arch carries the eye around the white central void, which has a strong shape; the lower-left mass sits heavy and somewhat apart.
WEAKEST Crowded lower-left block cluster detached from the arch
STRONGEST Arch framing the shaped white void at centre
Ink is controlled, with dry-brush edges on the arcs. Small dark blots sit in the lower-left mass and minor spatter at top left; neither damages a principal area much.
WEAKEST Dark pooled blots inside the lower-left mass
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain at the edges of the arc bands
3 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 3 distinct places, 12 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: 2 principal ink masses traced (cyan), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 19 edge segments, 63% crisp, 32% soft or bloomed, 5% 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
2026.06.06, day 160 of the Crucible Year, one of 11 paintings from that date. 30 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_345 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Qing Yi Half-Raw Xuan, Jingxian Sichijian Xuan Paper Arts & Crafts Co., Ltd., made unknown
- 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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