T_370
The engine's readingA fan of broad ink arcs opens upward from a curved gap at the bottom, pale grey at its outer edge and nearly black at its heart.
Record- Date
- 2026.09.12
- Dimensions
- 100 × 90 cm
- Paper
- Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized from October 2026
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Kuretake Shogei Purple-Navy Black, Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated
In the old Chinese novel of the journey west, Princess Iron Fan keeps a fan of plantain leaf that can put out the Flaming Mountains, and with one stroke of it she sends the Monkey King tumbling through the sky for a whole night. This is the fan in the moment after the stroke: opened from its hollow at the base, black where the hand still grips it, paling to smoke at the far rim where the wind it made has already gone. Off to the right the last ribs tear into tips and the air is full of flung drops. Somewhere out there the Monkey King is still falling. The fan holds still, heavy at its heart, and the hollow beneath it waits for the hand.
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
- stacked fan-shaped arc bands turning on one pivot near the bottom centre
- Movement
- radial sweep upward and leftward; nothing runs against it
- Coverage
- ink on about three quarters of the paper
- Tone
- five tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- one kind of pass, broad translucent arcs; overlaps readable from top to centre
- Edges
- crisp walls along the arcs; ragged broken ends at right; softer pale edges at left
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- broad blank field down the right side, plus a curved notch at bottom centre
- Chance marks
- spatter and flung streaks right of the bands; creases across grey and dark arcs
- Frame
- runs off the bottom and left edges, top and right open
A fan opens from a curved gap near the bottom of the sheet and climbs in broad bands, palest at the top, nearly black at its heart. Each band is one sweep of a wide brush, with the paler bands laid first.
The upper arcs are the best of it. In the high grey bands the brush dragged and left streaked grain, so the tone moves inside itself. The half-sized paper holds each thin pass on its own surface, which is why every overlap keeps a clean wall. At the right the bands break into ragged tips, and the turn carries on past them.
The cost sits in the middle. The darkest wedge is a slab with stiff, straight sides, and the dark band at lower right goes nearly flat inside. At lower left, pale arcs sink half out of sight beneath it. Creases in the paper cross the darks and show. The bare right side is spattered and more leftover than shaped.
The climb survives all of it. From edge to core, every pass counts. The sheet is strong, and it carries a centre heavier than it needs.
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.
5 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: 0.059 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 4 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
“This is a single fan of stacked translucent arcs in R3's idiom, with clear ordered layering and fluent bands. But the dark centre is heavy and nearly flat, the composition is one-sided, and the paper has creases. Overall above ordinary, below R3.”
Each arc band follows the curved sweep of a wide brush with clean walls and dry-brush ends at right; the central darkest band reads heavier but still follows the stroke.
WEAKEST Bulky darkest fan band in the centre, heavy filled interior
STRONGEST Upper translucent arc band with dry-brush trailing edge
Five tonal steps across stacked arcs; upper greys show streaked grain. The central black band shows faint arcs only in stretched view and reads flat at viewing distance.
WEAKEST Darkest central band is near-uniform black in colour view
STRONGEST Upper grey arcs with streaked brush grain
Several translucent arc passes stack from pale top to dark centre; each overlap stays legible and the order of passes reads clearly across the fan.
WEAKEST Lower-left pale arcs partly buried under dark band
STRONGEST Stepped overlaps of translucent arcs, top to centre
Fan of arcs climbs from bottom centre to upper left with clear radial direction; mass is weighted left and centre, the right paper reads more leftover than shaped.
WEAKEST Right and bottom-right paper left largely inactive
STRONGEST Rising fan rhythm of concentric arcs
Ink controlled with no tide lines in dark masses; paper creases visible through the arcs and scattered splashes on right paper are minor.
WEAKEST Crease lines and stray splatter at right edge
STRONGEST Dry-brush grain on upper grey arcs
4 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 4 distinct places, 10 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 15 edge segments, 60% crisp, 40% soft or bloomed, 0% 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
2026.09.12, day 258 of the Crucible Year, one of 8 paintings from that date. 0 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: P4 S14 (working title).
T_370 among all 402
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized from October 2026, China Xuan Paper Co., Ltd., made 2026.04.08
- Ink MB6
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB7
- Kuretake Shogei Purple-Navy Black, Kuretake
- Ink MB8
- Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, Boku-Undo
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