T_414
The engine's readingA black fan swings over rose and grey dry-brush streaks, answered by a black wedge in the lower-left corner and a slate bar at upper right.
Record- Date
- 2026.11.03
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Rating
- 5.2
- 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
A moth made the pale speck in the black, or the cat: it is a hole in the blackout curtain. We hung that curtain the winter we moved in, a hand too short, and swore we would replace it. We did not. Before the alarm, a grain of day comes through and lands on whatever is there: your shoulder, the water glass, the cold side of the bed. I have lain awake and put my hand in it, a small coin of light that buys nothing. You sleep on. Downstairs the boiler ticks and goes quiet. The grain climbs the blanket and stops at your ear.
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
- large black fan with inner arc band; separate corner wedge and detached upper-right bar
- Movement
- wide arc from upper left to lower right; wedge and bar cut against it
- Coverage
- ink on about four fifths of the paper
- Tone
- two tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- three kinds of pass, pink, grey and black; readable at fan margins and lower right
- Edges
- crisp at bar and band ends; soft at grey overlaps; broken along the dry-brush tails
- Feibai
- present in the pink and grey tails at the fan's upper left and lower right
- Open paper
- pale diagonal channel between fan and wedge, widening into the top-left corner
- Colour
- rose and hot red dry-brush at left, beside the wedge, and along the lower right
- Chance marks
- spatter above the wedge and at lower right; faint warm stain near the bottom edge
- Frame
- wedge runs off left and bottom; fan reaches the top; right edge stays open
A black fan swings across the paper from upper left to lower right, its rim pressing against the top edge. Rose and grey strokes fray out from under it, and a black wedge pushes back from the lower-left corner, leaving a pale channel of paper between them.
The life of the sheet sits low and at the rim. The inner arc bends with the travel of the brush, walls steady, a rust-tinged band stepping over the black above it. At right, grey panels show grain and stepped density. Half-sized paper keeps the passes from sinking together, so at lower right the red stays red beside the grey.
The middle gives far less. Black seals most of what lay beneath, and its interior barely shifts, so the largest area on the paper is the least eventful. The evenness shows up a vertical fold, hairline cracks and a white pinhole. The corner wedge is blunter still, a filled slab adding weight where weight is already plentiful.
The arc is clear and the rim alert, but mass outweighs incident across most of the sheet. Go for the lower band and the red hem. The rest is black at size, competently laid, and it repays little looking.
The rating
T_414, rated 5.2
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
- 1.0 · flawed
- Mass
- 7.4 of 10
- Tone
- 7.4 of 14
- Void
- 3.2 of 8
- Flow
- 8.4 of 10
- Balance
- 4.8 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: 0.056 (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 large black fan with a lower-left wedge and pink dry-brush tails: ordinary, working structure, but heavy dark masses hide layers and tone, and creases in the central black mar the surface.”
Fan segments, inner arc and top-right bar are coherent forms with holding walls; the central fan and lower-left block remain heavy, filled-in masses with stiff straight joins.
WEAKEST Huge central fan and lower-left wedge read as bulky slabs
STRONGEST Inner arc band following the curved travel of the brush
Right segments and arc bands show stepped density; central black shifts only subtly, its modelling mostly visible when stretched. Modulation clears flat, but darks dominate with limited mid-grey range.
WEAKEST Lower-left black wedge, nearly flat inside in colour view
STRONGEST Stepped greys of the right-hand fan segments and inner arc
Pink dry-brush, grey-mauve and black passes read at the fan's edges and lower right; overlaps stay legible there, but the heavy black hides most of the sequence.
WEAKEST Central black pass largely covers earlier passes beneath it
STRONGEST Grey arc overlaps at lower centre and right of fan
Fan sweeps top right to lower centre, countered by lower-left wedge and top-right bar; the paper channel between is shaped, but the dominant black mass sits heavy and dead.
WEAKEST Central black fan crowds the sheet with heavy, static mass
STRONGEST Fan sweep answered by lower-left wedge across shaped paper
Crease and crack lines cross the central black fan, visible in colour at centre; a white speck pierces it, and a pale patch breaks its top edge. Dry-brush handling elsewhere is controlled.
WEAKEST Creases and cracks across the central black mass
STRONGEST Dry-brush pink and grey tails along the fan's edges
3 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 3 distinct places, 25 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.
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_414 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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