T_406
The engine's readingA black ring cropped by the paper's edges, closing around a pale throat, a stack of grey panels and a small smear of blue.
Record- Date
- 2026.10.29
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Rating
- 6.2
- Paper
- Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu Bark, Exhibition Edition, half-raw
- Ink
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, Yi De Ge Pine Soot Ink, Shisan Yue Calligraphy and Painting Ink, colour inks
That blue is the pilot light. I know the hour it belongs to, when you come down for water because the other side of the bed has gone heavy and you have lost the argument about the blanket. The house is all furniture at that hour. You navigate by knee. You stand at the stove in somebody's shirt, and the smell of gas is faint, probably nothing, and you think about checking, and you think about the person upstairs breathing with their whole back. I lived a year in that kitchen. I was fond of it. The tap drips into yesterday's pot, the little flame keeps its cold opinion, and a strip of light from the hall lies along the floor, pointing at the stairs.
The reading
Written by the engine after V23's reads, from the settled findings, and checked by hand before approval. It explains V23's numbers and may not change them.
- Structure
- cropped ring of concentric arc bands around central grey blocks and a vertical seam
- Movement
- circular sweep over the top; squared blocks and vertical seam run against it
- Coverage
- ink on about nine tenths of the paper
- Tone
- two tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- three kinds: grey washes, dense black, small blue; readable at centre and upper right
- Edges
- crisp on arc walls and central blocks; soft around the blue; broken at outer rim
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- pale seam widening into a rounded throat at lower centre; both upper corners bare
- Colour
- blue, small patch at lower centre left, against the left black
- Chance marks
- creases across left black; cloudy bloom around blue; rings in central greys; spatter upper left
- Frame
- ink runs off left, bottom and right, touches top; upper corners stay open
A great black ring swings over the paper, cropped at left, right and bottom, and drops the eye down a pale seam into a rounded throat at lower centre. The sweep is the best idea on the sheet.
The rim at upper right is where the brush is most alive. Narrow bands follow its curved travel, band over band, and one begins in a dry rake of hairs before closing to clean black. Half-raw paper keeps those walls crisp and lets each grey sit on the last without sinking. The translucent panels around the seam stay just as legible, if stiffer.
Then the black takes over. The masses at left and lower right read as filled, their passes closing into a near-uniform dark that only creases interrupt. The lower-left slab ends in a blunt wedge. Against it a cloudy grey smear has dissolved around the blue. The blue itself is a clean, cold note. The murk beside it is an accident, and it shows at viewing distance.
So: a good ring, a well-made rim, and a great deal of weight. It sits in the middle of this archive, competent and unresolved.
The rating
T_406, rated 6.2
The combined score, out of 10: V23's reading of the photograph as the read half and V24's twelve tests on the 16-bit file as the measured half, added and divided by 10. The scale is relative to this archive. How each half is made is on the Method page.
- Form
- 2.0 · built
- Tonal depth
- 1.0 · thin
- Layering
- 2.0 · legible
- Composition
- 2.0 · working
- Material and surface
- 1.1 · flawed
- Mass
- 10.0 of 10
- Tone
- 9.2 of 14
- Void
- 3.2 of 8
- Flow
- 10.0 of 10
- Balance
- 8.0 of 8
How it was measured
What V24 measured.
Plain physical facts with no model involved. Across the year they track how the practice changes. On one sheet they cannot say whether a mark is any good. Millimetres read a few percent high, because the photographs are cropped just inside the paper's edge.
The width of the ink mask along its medial axis.
Optical density at the 75th percentile of the sheet.
The radius of the largest circle of open paper.
How far the marks align across the sheet. Lower means they run several ways.
Left and right asymmetry of the ink. Lower is more even.
Pixels to the millimetre in the TIFF these were measured from, with the studio light removed.
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.12, on 2026.11.02: measured by code, then read 9 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.
2 families of tone.
Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Two or fewer: Tonal depth is held at the bottom rung whatever the model reads. A dense sheet of many translucent passes can count low here, so Layering is left to the reads. Life inside the black: 0.042 (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
“Shares R3's concentric arc structure but is far heavier and flatter: massive near-uniform darks, layering legible mainly in centre and upper right, a strong sweep around the void, and a cloudy patch beside the lower-left mass.”
Arcs hold as coherent, curved forms with firm walls, especially upper right; the huge top and left masses read as bulky filled slabs, and central rectangles are stiff.
WEAKEST Bulky lower-left dark slab with a blunt, wedge-like end
STRONGEST Upper-right concentric arc bands following the brush's curved travel
Dark modulation measures flat at 0.042; top, left and lower-right masses read near-uniform in colour. Stretched view shows only faint stepping. Greys are confined to centre and upper right.
WEAKEST Near-uniform interior of the large lower-right black mass
STRONGEST Stepped translucent greys in the central passage and upper-right bands
Overlapping passes read clearly in the centre and upper-right bands, with blue as a distinct small pass; in the main darks later passes largely bury the sequence.
WEAKEST Overlaps within the dark masses merge into near-solid black
STRONGEST Translucent stacked rectangles and arcs in the central passage
Arc sweep carries the eye from left over the top to right around a shaped pale core; 89% coverage leaves little open paper and the bottom corners sit as dead weight.
WEAKEST Heavy lower-left and lower-right darks crowd the sheet
STRONGEST Great arc sweeping around the pale central void
Smoky, cloudy patch beside the left dark mass at lower centre is visible in colour, with small ring marks above it; crease lines cross the left mass. Ink elsewhere is controlled.
WEAKEST Cloudy smudged wash against the lower-left dark mass, around the blue
STRONGEST Dry-brush start and clean edges of the upper-right bands
7 distinct places, 2 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 7 distinct places, 37 mentions in all across 9 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.
V23's rules and arithmetic, and every figure under its own name, are in the Archive record.
Date
2026.10.29, day 305 of the Crucible Year, one of 6 paintings from that date. 19 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_406 among all 419
Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined.
Materials
- Paper
- Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu Bark, Exhibition Edition, half-raw, China Xuan Paper Co., Ltd. (中国宣纸股份有限公司), made 2026.01.14
- Ink MB6
- Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB8
- Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, Boku-Undo
- Ink MB9
- Yi De Ge Pine Soot Ink, Yi De Ge (Beijing)
- Ink MB10
- Shisan Yue Calligraphy and Painting Ink, Shisan Yue (Thirteenth Month)
- Colour
- colour inks, recorded together
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