T_375
The engine's readingA quarter of a black wheel, banded in stepped greys with a pink fringe at its crown, swings up from the lower left of bare bark paper.
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
That blush of pink at the crown is the last sun on the top deck of an interchange, the only concrete high enough to still be in the evening. Below it the ramps come round grey over grey, lane over lane, each one poured while the one beneath was curing. I walk under there often. It is the quietest room in the city: traffic up in the weather, the dark underside solid enough to lean on, and the bay of open ground beside it where the pigeons gather and the fences give up. When the pink goes it goes from the top down. The pigeons lift all at once and come down again along the left, scattered like thrown gravel.
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
- quarter-fan of stacked arc bands around a central black slab
- Movement
- clockwise sweep from lower left over top to right; squared band ends cut across
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- four tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- translucent grey passes, pink pass, final black; readable at top left and lower left
- Edges
- crisp band walls along right arc; soft bleed at pink crown; broken lower right
- Feibai
- present at the outer right arc edge and lower right of the fan
- Open paper
- curved bay down the left side, narrowing along the top
- Colour
- pale pink fringe along the top edge of one upper block
- Chance marks
- spatter and stray dots across the left margin; fine creases in the black
- Frame
- ink runs off bottom and lower right; top and left stay open
A quarter of a great wheel swings up from the lower left and fills the sheet, its rim sweeping over the top and down the right. Grey bands step out from a black core, each squared where the brush lifted, and the bare paper at the left becomes a curved bay.
The rim is where the painting lives. Along the right the bands hold their walls through the whole sweep, and at the lower right the brush opens into flying white without losing its curve. At the top left the grey passes stack, translucent, and the half-sized bark keeps each apart so their order reads. A pink fringe at the crown glows behind the grey like a lamp behind a blind.
The cost is the centre. The last black went down as a filled slab, dense enough to seal the paper, burying the passes beneath it. Its tone hardly moves, and its blunt corner crowds the right and bottom edges. Spatter in the left margin is a nuisance the open paper absorbs.
Still, that rim is drawn with a sureness few sheets reach, and the black gives it something to turn around.
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: 0.055 (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 stepped-arc fan in the manner of R3, but one dense, flat black slab dominates it, covering the layering and crowding the right edge. An ordinary, sound sheet: rung 2 throughout.”
Outer arcs on the right and lower left follow the curve of the stroke. The central black quarter-fan is a heavy filled block with a stiff square corner at the lower right.
WEAKEST Bulky central black fan slab, filled rather than drawn
STRONGEST Outer right arc bands following the brush's sweep
The upper-left and outer-right bands show grain, streaks and stepped density. The large central black reads almost flat; the stretched view shows only faint creases (modulation 0.055).
WEAKEST Central black mass, nearly uniform in colour view
STRONGEST Grey stepped bands in upper left and outer arcs
Translucent grey passes step outward legibly at the top-left and lower-left arcs. The final dense black covers most of the earlier layering in the centre.
WEAKEST Central black pass covers the earlier passes beneath it
STRONGEST Stacked translucent grey bands at the top-left edge
One fan form fills about 79% of the sheet and pushes against the right edge. The curve leads the eye to the open lower-left corner, but the dark centre sits heavy and static.
WEAKEST Crowded, heavy right side; mass presses the edge
STRONGEST Arc sweep curving toward the open lower-left corner
The ink is controlled throughout. The pink edging at the top is deliberate colour. Small dots and spatter sit on the left paper, away from the masses. No tide lines inside the black.
WEAKEST Scattered spatter and dots in the left margin
STRONGEST Dry-brush streaking at the right and bottom arc edges
2 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 2 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, 20% crisp, 80% 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_375 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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