T_357
The engine's readingBroad grey bands of ink swing in a deep horseshoe around a rounded window of bare paper, their ends stacking into dark squared columns at the centre.
Record- Date
- 2026.06.14
- 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 stack of squared blocks down the middle is a spine, and the dark arches swinging out from it are ribs, the whole cage seen from behind, as if someone has bent forward to touch their toes. That is how the school nurse looked at us, one by one, in a cold room that smelled of floor polish: bend over, arms loose, while she ran her thumb down the knuckles of the back to see if they leaned. Mine leaned a little, like this. She said nothing, wrote something, and called the next name. I still feel it some mornings, the small sideways drift. At the top the white opens where the head has dropped, and the neck gives way to the cool air of the hall.
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 bands in a horseshoe, meeting stacked rectangular blocks at centre
- Movement
- sweeping round the horseshoe; centre columns drop straight down against it
- Coverage
- ink on about nine tenths of the paper
- Tone
- three tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- one kind, broad translucent bands; order readable at right and in outer rings
- Edges
- crisp along band walls; streaked at band ends; squared at centre blocks
- Feibai
- present at band ends, lower right and along the outer left arc
- Open paper
- rounded rectangle at top centre, a narrow vertical seam below it
- Chance marks
- speckled flecks near the bottom-right edge; a dark scratch on the left
- Frame
- runs off top, left and right edges; bottom stays largely open
A horseshoe of ink takes nearly the whole paper. Bands of grey wheel down the left, under, and up the right, around a rounded window of bare paper. Down the middle the swing stops, and the bands drop as squared columns beside a thin white seam.
The right arc is the surer. Pass lies over pass, each wall crisp, the grey beneath still showing. On half-sized paper every layer sits on the surface, so the order of the brush reads from outer ring to inner. At lower right the hairs part into flying white and the band leaves at speed.
The left pays for its weight. Its core stacks until the greys close into one flat dark, faintly brown inside, with no paper left to breathe. At the centre its bands end in blunt slabs that read as filled in rather than drawn. Specks at the lower right edge do no harm.
The sweep governs anyway. The sheet stands well above the archive's run, carried by its open half and held down, at a real cost, by its closed one.
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: 0.040 (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
“This is a concentric arc construction in R3's family with good translucent layering. It falls short of R3 through a flat, heavy left dark core, stiff stepped blocks in the centre, and crowded coverage that leaves little shaped empty paper.”
Arc bands follow the stroke around the horseshoe, but the central column ends are blunt stepped rectangles and the stacked blocks feel stiff and filled in.
WEAKEST Stepped rectangular block ends in the centre columns
STRONGEST Curving arc bands following the brush travel
The outer rings step through greys, but the measured dark-interior modulation (0.040) is flat and the left dark core reads as an even, uniform block.
WEAKEST Dense dark core of the left arc
STRONGEST Graded grey bands in the outer rings
Many translucent passes overlap in arcs with a readable order, especially on the right; the left core's stacking thickens towards an opaque dark.
WEAKEST Dense overlaps in the left dark core
STRONGEST Translucent overlapping arcs on the right side
The horseshoe sweep and the central slot give it direction, but 87% ink coverage crowds the frame, and the left dark mass is heavy compared with R3's open space.
WEAKEST Crowded heavy left mass with little breathing paper
STRONGEST Horseshoe sweep around the open top-centre void
The ink is controlled, with clean band edges. There is a small smudge and some speckles at the lower right, away from the principal masses, and faint paper creases.
WEAKEST Smudged dry patch and specks, lower right
STRONGEST Grainy brush edges on 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, 11 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: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 4 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 14 edge segments, 64% crisp, 29% soft or bloomed, 7% 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
2026.06.14, day 168 of the Crucible Year, one of 8 paintings from that date (7 shown). 31 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_357 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
