--- title: "T_411, ink on paper | Crucible Year" url: https://peteryuill.art/works/T_411 description: "T_411 by Peter Yuill: Two fans of black and grey arcs face each other across a wedge of bare paper, with a flecked grey bowl turning below. Ink on Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized, 97 × 180 cm, 2026.11.03. Crucible Year." source: generated from the Crucible Year master database --- ![Black and grey curved bands from left and right frame a white central wedge, with a paler grey arc and spatter at lower right.] ![T_411, tone-stretched: what the model was shown] ![T_411: every pixel as the measuring code classes it] 97 × 180 cm · the whole sheet, uncropped # T_411 The engine's reading Two fans of black and grey arcs face each other across a wedge of bare paper, with a flecked grey bowl turning below. Record - **Date:** 2026.11.03 - **Dimensions:** 97 × 180 cm - **Rating:** [6.1](https://peteryuill.art/method#combined) - **Paper:** [Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S14) - **Ink:** [Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB6), [Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB8), [Yi De Ge Pine Soot Ink](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB9), [Shisan Yue Calligraphy and Painting Ink](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB10) [Enquire about T_411](https://peteryuill.art/enquiries?work=T_411) Availability, price or a studio visit. Peter replies himself; asking commits you to nothing. Thin grooves run through the black at upper right, all the same way, and I read them as a geologist reads a bare rock in Scotland: ice went this way. A stone held in the base of a glacier a mile thick, dragged for a few thousand years, leaves a scratch you could cover with a pencil. That is the whole record of the event. For decades sensible men said a flood had done it, because a flood was easier to picture. I put my thumb in one once. The rock was warm. Somewhere north the last of that ice is still going home in small drips, and the groove keeps pointing, patiently, at a winter that left without it. Neon [Who Neon is](https://peteryuill.art/neon) Detail at full resolution, cut by code where the brushwork is finest · select to enlarge [Details](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_411#details)[The reading](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_411#reading)[The rating](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_411#rating)[How it was measured](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_411#read)[Date](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_411#date)[Materials](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_411#materials)[Related](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_411#related) The engine's reading ## 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:** two opposed fans of curved bands, joined by overlap, parted at centre by bare paper - **Movement:** arcs swing toward centre and down into lower right; upright dark strips run against them - **Coverage:** ink on about nine tenths of the paper - **Tone:** five tonal steps, weighted dark - **Layering:** three kinds of pass, pale, mid and black; readable upper left, centre, lower-right bowl - **Edges:** crisp on black band ends; feathered on centre strips; broken along grey sweeps - **Feibai:** present, along the lower edge of the grey bowl at lower right - **Open paper:** white wedge narrowing downward from top centre; pale strip along the bottom right - **Chance marks:** spatter at centre and lower right; pale streak and milky patch at right black band - **Frame:** ink runs off left, lower left, top and right; top centre and bottom right stay open Two families of arcs swing toward each other across a wedge of bare paper, like one wheel broken at the hub and pulled apart. The white drops from the top edge, narrows to a point at the centre, and lets the eye out into the grey bowl at lower right. That emptiness is shaped as firmly as any stroke. The bowl repays the journey. One broad grey sweep follows the brush's curved travel, and along its lower edge the hairs part to leave grain and broken light. Half sized, the paper takes the ink slowly enough to keep that grain distinct. It also keeps the upper left legible: pale grey, mid grey and black step forward in order, each dried pass still readable under the next. The cost sits at lower left, where the black arc thickens into a slab. It crowds its side of the sheet, buries the passes beneath it and goes flat at its blunt right end. In the right black band, a pale streak and a milky patch are plain accidents. The structure is clear and the white is alive. Worth standing in front of, above the usual run, though that heavy side keeps it on the ground. Read and measured ## The rating THE RATING ## T_411, rated 6.1 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. READ HALF 30.0 V23's rating, 6.0, × 5 + MEASURED HALF 30.8 twelve tests, of 50 → RATING 6.1 60.8 ÷ 10 THE READ HALF, V23 - **Form:** 2.0 · built - **Tonal depth:** 2.0 · modelled - **Layering:** 3.0 · ordered - **Composition:** 2.2 · working - **Material and surface:** 1.0 · flawed THE MEASURED HALF, V24 - **Mass:** 7.4 of 10 - **Tone:** 6.6 of 14 - **Void:** 6.4 of 8 - **Flow:** 5.6 of 10 - **Balance:** 4.8 of 8 Measured ## How it was measured FROM THE 16-BIT FILE ## 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. MASS WIDTH 140 mm The width of the ink mask along its medial axis. DEPTH OF THE DARKS 1.44 Optical density at the 75th percentile of the sheet. LARGEST VOID 180 mm The radius of the largest circle of open paper. DIRECTIONS 0.35 How far the marks align across the sheet. Lower means they run several ways. BALANCE 0.66 Left and right asymmetry of the ink. Lower is more even. THE FILE 3.95 Pixels to the millimetre in the TIFF these were measured from, with the studio light removed. Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.13, on 2026.11.03: 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](https://peteryuill.art/method). WHAT THE CODE SEES ## 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. ![T_411] ![T_411, tone-stretched] ![T_411, classed by brightness] 86% of the sheet carries ink TONAL STEPS ## 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: 0.054 (under 0.045 reads as flat). FIVE READS ## 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 READ 2 READ 3 READ 4 READ 5 MEAN Form 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2 BUILT 2.0 Tonal depth 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2 MODELLED 2.0 Layering 3 ORDERED 3 ORDERED 3 ORDERED 3 ORDERED 3 ORDERED 3.0 Composition 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 2 WORKING 3 COMMANDING 2 WORKING 2.2 Material and surface 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1 FLAWED 1.0 ### READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS “Translucent arc bands turn around a shaped central void with legible layering, but heavy lower-left bulk, a partly flat dark and a bleached, cloudy accident in the right black band hold the sheet near ordinary.” Form · BUILT Arc bands left and right are coherent with holding walls and follow the sweep, but the lower-left dark mass is heavy and the centre strips stay slab-like. WEAKEST Bulky, blunt-ended lower-left dark arc; stiff slab at centre right STRONGEST Upper-right black arc band with wall following brush travel Tonal depth · MODELLED Dry-brush arcs and bands model the left dark's outer part and right black band; the left mass's right end is uniform. Modulation 0.054 sits just above flat. WEAKEST Right end of lower-left dark mass, flat inside STRONGEST Upper-right black band with grooves and mottled inner density Layering · ORDERED Pale, mid and dark translucent passes stack in readable order at upper left, the centre strip and lower-right bowl; overlaps build depth across both halves of the sheet. WEAKEST Lower-left dark partly covers earlier greys, reading them less clearly STRONGEST Stepped translucent greys rising to dark in upper left Composition · WORKING Two arc groups turn around a shaped central void with direction into the lower-right bowl, but high coverage and the dense lower-left weight leave the arrangement heavy. WEAKEST Heavy lower-left mass crowding and filling its side of sheet STRONGEST Central white void shaped between two opposing arc systems Material and surface · FLAWED Ink is mostly controlled, yet a bleached streak and milky cloudiness sit in and against the right black mass, visible in colour; tone-stretch shows mottled staining there too. WEAKEST Pale bleached streak and cloudy patch at right black band STRONGEST Dry-brush grain and broken sweep in lower-right grey bowl FLAWS ## 4 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 4 distinct places, 19 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. V23's rules and arithmetic, and every figure under its own name, are in [the Archive record](https://peteryuill.art/archive/works/T_411). ## Date 2026.11.03, day 310 of the Crucible Year, one of 11 paintings from that date. 13 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](https://peteryuill.art/phases/P4) (working title). Every painting from 2026.11.03 is on this site. 6 other dates with more than five works are shown in full. THE YEAR ## T_411 among all 419 Every painting of the year by date; this one is outlined. [Every painting from 2026.11.03](https://peteryuill.art/days/2026-11-03) · [This date in the year](https://peteryuill.art/year?follow=2026-11-03) ## Materials - **Paper:** [Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S14), China Xuan Paper Co., Ltd., made 2026.04.08 - **Ink MB6:** [Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB6), Yi De Ge (Beijing) - **Ink MB8:** [Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB8), Boku-Undo - **Ink MB9:** [Yi De Ge Pine Soot Ink](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB9), Yi De Ge (Beijing) - **Ink MB10:** [Shisan Yue Calligraphy and Painting Ink](https://peteryuill.art/inks/MB10), Shisan Yue (Thirteenth Month) The sheet of paper was made 209 days before this painting. When each paper was in use [S1](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S1)[S2](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S2)[S3](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S3)[S4](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S4)[S5](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S5)[S6](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S6)[S7](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S7)[S8](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S8)[S9](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S9)[S10](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S10)[S11](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S11)[S12](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S12)[S13](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S13)[S14](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S14) Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct ## Related From the same date · 10 Same paper and inks, other dates · 5 [Across the year The combined score rises over the year, and the trend holds with the paper held constant.](https://peteryuill.art/oracle)[Across the year The measured half stepped up from 2026.06.03. T_411 is dated after that.](https://peteryuill.art/oracle) [Previous T_410](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_410) [Back to all works](https://peteryuill.art/works) [Next T_412](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_412) ## Where next [T_410 same date, with 9 others](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_410)[T_385 same paper and inks, 2026.10.16](https://peteryuill.art/works/T_385)[2026.11.03 11 paintings on this date](https://peteryuill.art/days/2026-11-03)[Paper S14 every work on it](https://peteryuill.art/papers/S14)