T_413
The engine's readingTwo black arches rise from the foot of the paper, split by a channel of bare white, under stepped grey bands and a spatter of red.
Record- Date
- 2026.11.03
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Rating
- 6.2
- Paper
- Half-Cooked Red Star Mo She 6-Foot Bark Xuan Paper, self-sized
- 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
I was small once, in the way of looking up at coats. My parents stood in a doorway with their backs to me, shoulders enormous, and between them ran a strip of lit room I was not allowed into. Whatever was happening happened there. That pale gap in the black is the same height, the same width of news. I remember the wool better than either face. I remember scratching at it low down, near the hem, to be noticed, and the scratch not lasting. Up by the collar on the right, some red had dried to brown: a shaving cut, I decided. I am still deciding. Their shoulders are still up. The light comes in lowest, at the height of my chin.
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 arched black masses, left and right, parted by a channel, stepped bands above
- Movement
- arcs sweep up and over from the foot; channel descends against them
- Coverage
- ink on about nine tenths of the paper
- Tone
- two tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- grey, black and red passes, readable along upper rims and channel edges
- Edges
- crisp on black walls; broken at channel-side band ends; soft where red bleeds, top right
- Feibai
- present in the pale grey sweep at top centre-left
- Open paper
- pale channel widening downward to a white opening at lower centre
- Colour
- red and brown-red at top right; pink-red on the left mass's channel edge
- Chance marks
- spatter and a blot along the top; pale scratches in the black, lower right
- Frame
- ink runs off left, right and bottom; top edge stays mostly open
Black comes first, and nearly all of it. A pair of huge arches rises from the foot of the paper, parted by a pale channel that falls to a white opening. The eye climbs the great right curve and goes out over its rim to a flare of red at the top corner.
The best of it lives along that rim. The outer edge swings in one long sweep of the brush, and above it grey bands step up in visible density. Half-sized paper slows the ink enough for each pass to keep its border, so the greys stack in readable order. The channel, too, gives bare paper a shape as exact as any stroke.
The left mass is where it goes wrong: a slab with a blunt inner edge, its black nearly uniform, pass sealed over pass until the earlier layers are gone. Movement stalls there, and the right black is barely livelier. Pale scratches at the bottom right stay small. The red, fused brown against grey at the corner, is an accident the sheet can afford.
Good bones under too much black. A middling sheet, alive only at its edges.
The rating
T_413, 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
- 2.0 · sound
- Mass
- 9.4 of 10
- Tone
- 6.6 of 14
- Void
- 6.4 of 8
- Flow
- 6.4 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 23.13, 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.
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: 0.058 (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
“A strong arc structure around a pale central channel, but two heavy, nearly flat black masses dominate. Layering and colour stay legible mainly at the upper edges, leaving an ordinary sheet with thin tonal life.”
Concentric arcs hold as nameable forms with firm walls, especially the right curve; left and right black masses stay bulky, and upper-right patches break into stepped blocks.
WEAKEST Left black mass, a bulky slab with a blunt inner edge
STRONGEST Right mass's long outer arc following the brush's sweep
Two huge black masses dominate, reading flat in colour; modulation of 0.058 is barely above flat. Only faint stretched-view gradients and inner arcs; life stays in upper bands and edges.
WEAKEST Left black mass, nearly uniform in the colour view
STRONGEST Upper grey arc bands with visible banding and stepped density
Translucent grey arcs, darker bands and colour read in order along the upper edges and lower inner arcs, but the blacks swallow most overlaps across the sheet's centre.
WEAKEST Black centres, where later passes largely cover earlier ones
STRONGEST Upper-right stepped grey and colour passes overlapping legibly
Two arcs turn around a shaped pale channel and open circle, giving direction, but massive blacks fill most of the frame and movement stalls inside them.
WEAKEST Heavy lower masses crowd the sheet; large areas sit dead
STRONGEST Pale central channel opening into the lower-centre arc
Ink is controlled with firm edges and deliberate colour; small scratch-like marks at bottom right and brown fused colour at upper right stay peripheral. Black interiors show little material behaviour.
WEAKEST Inert black surface across the big masses
STRONGEST Dry-brushed ragged edges along the central channel
5 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 5 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.
V23's rules and arithmetic, and every figure under its own name, are in the Archive record.
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 (working title).
T_413 among all 419
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, China Xuan Paper Co., Ltd., made 2026.04.08
- 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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