T_371
The engine's readingA black fan swings across the paper over a stack of grey arc bands, with a semicircle bitten from its top and spatter flying off to the right.
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, colour inks
The fan is a wedge sawn out of a very old trunk, and the bite at the top is where the heart was. The black is heartwood: dead wood, darkened, holding the tree up long after it stopped carrying water. The grey bands outside it are the living rings, still turning after the black has stopped, a wide one for every wet year, a tight one for every drought. I read them the way you read a long letter from someone patient. Out in the corner, faint as breath on glass, the rest of the stump goes on ringing outward into the paper, centuries of weather laid edge to edge, and the sawdust lies where it fell.
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
- black fan sector over concentric grey arc bands; stepped grey sectors right; grey block top left
- Movement
- rotation from upper left round to lower right; squared radial ends cut across it
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- five tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- grey arc passes under one opaque black; readable at right and bottom edges
- Edges
- crisp squared ends on black and grey sectors; soft bloom at top; broken outer arcs
- Feibai
- present in the lower grey arcs, streaking along the sweep
- Open paper
- large top-right corner crossed by faint rings; smaller wedge at bottom left
- Colour
- faint warm brownish cast in the black mass and the top bloom
- Chance marks
- spatter top right; cloudy grey bloom above the inner semicircle; creasing through the black
- Frame
- grey runs off the left edge; top, right and bottom stay open
A fan swings across the paper from the upper left and comes round towards the lower right. It is a black sector laid over grey bands that keep turning after the black has stopped. A semicircle bitten from the top gives the whole thing a hub, and the eye reads rotation before anything else.
The grey is where the painting happens. Along the lower arcs the brush has parted into fine parallel streaks of bare paper that follow the sweep. The half-sized bark paper holds each pass at its own density, so the bands step down cleanly in tone. At the right edge the grey sectors fan out in translucent layers, each still visible through the next.
The black undoes much of that. It is dense and sealed, and the only event inside it is the paper's own creasing. It buries the earlier passes rather than building on them. Its squared ends are blunt, and it pushes the empty paper out to the corners as leftovers. The cloudy bloom above the hub reads as a spill.
Where that leaves it: a clear idea of rotation, well made at the margins, overruled at the centre by a mass with little to say.
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: 0.038 (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 fan of concentric arcs related to R3, but it is dominated by one flat, slab-like black wedge that covers the earlier passes. The grey outer arcs give it movement and some layering. It is ordinary overall, with thin tonal depth.”
Concentric fan arcs read as made forms with holding walls; the central black wedge is a heavy filled slab with stiff straight radial edges.
WEAKEST large dark fan slab is bulky, filled-in
STRONGEST outer grey arc bands following brush travel
Dark interior modulation 0.038 is flat; the dominant black wedge shows only crinkle texture. Grey outer arcs have streaks, but the principal mass is dead.
WEAKEST central black fan interior flat
STRONGEST lower grey arcs with streaked banding
Several stepped arc passes legible at right and bottom edges, but the large black pass mostly obliterates what lies beneath rather than building translucently.
WEAKEST black slab covers earlier passes
STRONGEST stepped grey arcs upper right and bottom
Fan arc gives a clear rotational direction and the inner semicircle shapes paper at top; the black mass dominates and the ink fills 82% of sheet.
WEAKEST heavy black mass crowds centre-left
STRONGEST sweeping arc movement from left to right
Ink controlled; spatters top right and a cloudy grey patch near inner arc top are small; paper wrinkling visible across black wedge.
WEAKEST creased cockled texture in black mass
STRONGEST dry-brush streaking in lower grey arcs
3 distinct places, 1 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, 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. A major flaw holds Material and surface at rung 1.
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, 36% crisp, 64% 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_371 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
- Colour
- colour inks, recorded together
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