T_373
The engine's readingA dark horseshoe of ink swings over the top of the sheet and around stepped grey rings, closing on a keyhole of bare paper that opens downward.
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
Open wide, say ah. The pale keyhole at the centre is what the doctor saw with her torch: the dark arch of the mouth, ring inside ring, and at the back the soft pale door where the throat goes on into everything else. I was small and had tonsils like plums. She held my tongue down with a wooden stick that tasted of a tree, and looked in for a long time, as if reading something. Then she said they would have to come out. They did, in the spring, and afterwards there was ice cream and a sore white quiet where they had been. Some mornings I still swallow carefully, testing the door, and find it open.
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 dark arc around stepped grey rings, white keyhole at centre
- Movement
- circular sweep from lower left over top to lower right
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- four tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- grey and dark passes; readable at inner rings and outer left bands
- Edges
- crisp on inner rings; ragged at right of keyhole; squared arm ends
- Feibai
- present at the frayed ring ends, right of the keyhole
- Open paper
- keyhole, round head at centre, widening to bottom edge
- Chance marks
- small drips lower left; smudges in outer left band; paper creases
- Frame
- ink runs off top, left and right; bottom right corner open
A dark horseshoe fills the sheet. It climbs from the lower left, rolls over the top and comes down the right, closing around a keyhole of bare paper that drops to the bottom edge. The eye rides the curve and falls through the white. The movement reads from across a room.
The sheet's best work happens at the rim of that opening. Stepped grey rings sit inside the dark, each pass dry before the next, and the half-sized bark paper keeps them apart, so every overlap stays legible. Their edges are clean where the brush dragged and frayed where it lifted, at the right of the keyhole. The pale bands at the outer left repeat the same order more quietly.
The cost is the black itself. Across most of the arc it is one even, sealed tone holding only paper creases, and it buries the passes beneath it instead of building on them. Both arms end in squared slabs at the bottom. The mass presses on the top and sides, and the top left corner is left over. Small drips at the lower left sit outside it and do no harm.
That leaves a clear shape, a good opening and a fine small passage, carried by a broad, plain field. A typical sheet of the archive, plainly made, with its best moment in its smallest rings.
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: 0.036 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 2 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 confident concentric arc in R3's idiom, with well-shaped strokes and legible stepped inner rings. The dominant black mass is flat inside and crowds the sheet, so it falls below R3. The surface is clean apart from minor spots.”
The great dark arc and the inner stepped rings are concentric brush-travelled forms with holding walls. The ends at the lower left and lower right are cut square but still read as made.
WEAKEST Blunt square-cut terminals of arc at lower right
STRONGEST Sweeping dark arc whose walls follow the brush travel
Dark interior modulation of 0.036 is flat. The big black arc shows only faint paper-wrinkle texture. The inner grey rings and the outer left bands give four tonal steps.
WEAKEST Interior of the main dark arc is flat
STRONGEST Stepped grey rings around the central keyhole opening
The grey passes at the inner ring and outer left bands stay legible where they overlap. The dominant black pass mostly blankets what lies beneath it, so the order reads only at the edges.
WEAKEST Dark arc covers earlier passes rather than building on them
STRONGEST Translucent stepped rings at the inner edge
The arc carries the eye around to a shaped white keyhole at the bottom centre. With 0.84 ink coverage the dark band fills the frame and leaves little breathing room above.
WEAKEST Heavy dark mass crowds the top and sides
STRONGEST Keyhole of white paper opening downward
The ink is controlled throughout. Small spots sit at the bottom left and a dark smudge streak lies in the outer left band, all away from the main dark mass.
WEAKEST Small drips and smudge on lower-left outer band
STRONGEST Clean dry-brush edges on the stepped inner rings
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, 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.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 3 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 15 edge segments, 47% crisp, 53% 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_373 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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