T_372
The engine's readingA wide fan of black and grey ink arcs swings across pale bark paper and ends at the right in stepped grey edges, with drips rising off its rim.
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
Along the top edge the ink runs the wrong way, thin streaks climbing off the fan into bare paper, and I took them for virga: rain that leaves the cloud and gives up before it lands. I have stood under that. The air smells of wet stone, the light goes green, and nothing arrives. Here the storm is the whole dark wheel, turning low and heavy toward the right, shedding grey bands the way a front breaks apart over open water. The drips are its loose hair. Above them the paper stays dry, except for a few drops that made it all the way, small and black, landing hard on a pale field in September.
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
- one fan of concentric arcs, a dark central band nested inside paler outer passes
- Movement
- turning sweep from upper left down to the right; top drips run outward against it
- Coverage
- ink on about two thirds of the paper
- Tone
- six tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- several translucent passes, readable at the stepped right edges, muddled at top centre
- Edges
- crisp stepped ends at right and at the dark band's tip; soft greys outer left; broken top edge
- Feibai
- present in the outer left arcs and along the dark central band
- Open paper
- wide field at upper right shaped by spatter; leftover wedge at bottom left
- Colour
- faint pink at the fan's lower right edge
- Chance marks
- drips and spatter along the top edge and upper right; cloudy water stain above the inner arc
- Frame
- ink stays clear of all four edges; spatter comes close to the top
A single fan of arcs swings from the upper left, turns through the centre and comes to rest at the right in a row of grey steps. The whole turn reads at once, and then the eye drops into the black band at its core.
That band is the strength of the sheet. The brush grain runs along the curve in fine concentric streaks, and where the hairs parted, bare paper shows in thin bright lines. Its tail closes in a clean, rounded tip. To the right, each translucent pass stops at its own edge, so the layers stack in readable order. The half-sized bark keeps those ends firm and the greys separate.
The losses sit higher up. Above the inner arc the grey wash dried into a cloudy mottle with faint tide lines, and that stretch of tone goes flat. Along the top edge, runs and spatter fray the outline. The mass also settles heavy and low, leaving the bottom-left corner as leftover paper.
Those faults stay at the margins. The centre never wavers, and the fan finishes its turn with authority.
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.
6 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
“The single fan of layered arcs has fluent form and clearly stepped translucent passes, like R3. It falls short of R3 on tonal depth and composition, with a cloudy upper wash and a leftover bottom-left corner.”
Fan of arc strokes follows the brush's rotation; dark central arc ends in a clean curved tip; stepped right edges are exact, outer left grey softer.
WEAKEST Pale outer left sweep, edges softening into wash
STRONGEST Central dark arc with crisp curved tail
Dark arc shows fine concentric streaks and a pale ridge line; modulation 0.0496 only just above flat; upper grey interior cloudy rather than modelled.
WEAKEST Cloudy mottled grey in upper-middle wash
STRONGEST Concentric streaked banding in dark central arc
Several translucent passes fan out in visible steps on the right, dark arc laid over greys; order readable across the sheet, slightly muddled at top centre.
WEAKEST Upper-middle overlaps blur into cloudy grey
STRONGEST Stepped translucent fan edges on right
One large fan mass sweeps diagonally with clear rotation; top-right paper with drips shaped, but bottom-left empty space is leftover and single mass lacks tension.
WEAKEST Bottom-left corner paper feels leftover
STRONGEST Diagonal fan sweep from upper left to lower right
Ink controlled with dry-brush streaks in arc; upper-centre grey has cloudy mottle and faint tide edges; drips and spatter at top edge, pink tint lower right is colour.
WEAKEST Cloudy mottled patches in upper grey wash
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking in dark arc
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, 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), 2 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 14 edge segments, 57% crisp, 21% soft or bloomed, 21% 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_372 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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