T_417
The engine's readingA great black fan swings across pale paper on a violet rim, with a block laid over its crown and a black slab in the lower corner.
Record- Date
- 2026.11.03
- Dimensions
- 97 × 180 cm
- Rating
- 6.3
- 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
The block in the corner is the stone, after. The sun had shut herself in a cave over a matter of insults, and the whole country went black, and the gods gathered at the door with no plan. One of them got up on an upturned tub and danced until her clothes came off, and heaven laughed so loudly that the sun opened the door a crack to ask what could be funny in the dark. They showed her a mirror. A strong god took the rock and threw it, and I am told it landed a long way off. I have seen it. It lies where it fell, square and embarrassed, while violet creeps back along the edge of everything.
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
- great black fan arc, smaller inner arc beneath, block across crown, separate corner slab
- Movement
- sweep from left over to lower right; top block, vertical band, corner slab run against it
- Coverage
- ink on about three quarters of the paper
- Tone
- five tonal steps, weighted dark
- Layering
- three kinds of pass, violet, translucent grey, black; readable at rims and lower centre
- Edges
- crisp on fan wall and blocks; soft in grey rims; broken at lower right and violet
- Feibai
- none
- Open paper
- pale band over the arc and upper corners; small pocket beneath the inner arc
- Colour
- violet, dragged around the outer rim and gathered in the lower centre
- Chance marks
- pale specks in corner slab; clotted pooling at vertical band's foot; fine spatter near rims
- Frame
- ink runs off left and bottom at the slab, top at the block; right stays open
A black fan the width of the sheet swings up from the left, crests under a block laid across its crown, and comes down hard at the lower right. Its outer wall stays firm the whole way round and its outline follows the brush, so all that bulk still reads as one swing.
The finest painting lies beneath it, in the lower arc. Greys step through one another there, thin over thinner, and a vertical band crosses them with both still legible. The alum size in this half-cooked paper keeps each pass apart. At the lower right the black breaks into bristle over dry violet, and the sheet finds its only real speed.
The great black gives less. It buries most of what lies under it, so the depth stays at the rims. The slab at bottom left costs most: flat, blunt, cut off by the corner, flecked with small pale specks, and tied to nothing in the sweep.
So this is good work, sure of its main move, with more black than it can use. The lower edges repay anyone who walks in close, and the corner slab sets the ceiling.
The rating
T_417, rated 6.3
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
- 2.0 · modelled
- Layering
- 2.0 · legible
- Composition
- 2.0 · working
- Material and surface
- 1.8 · sound
- Mass
- 8.7 of 10
- Tone
- 6.2 of 14
- Void
- 4.8 of 8
- Flow
- 8.8 of 10
- Balance
- 6.4 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.
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: 0.064 (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 bold, ordinary sheet: a huge black arc with a clear sweep and legible violet and grey rims, but its bulk, near-flat interior and blunt blocks keep it from the concentric depth of R3.”
Central arc holds firm curved walls and tracks the sweep, but reads as a bulky filled fan; top and bottom-left blocks are stiff, blunt slabs.
WEAKEST Blunt slab block cut off at bottom left
STRONGEST Great black arc whose outline follows the sweep of travel
Lower arc and rim bands step through greys; the main black shows faint arcs and a rightward deepening only when stretched; bottom-left block stays flat.
WEAKEST Bottom-left block, nearly flat black inside
STRONGEST Lower inner arc with stepped translucent greys
Violet, translucent grey and black passes read at the rims and lower arc, where the vertical stroke shows through; the dense centre hides the sequence.
WEAKEST Black arc covers most earlier passes across the centre
STRONGEST Vertical stroke and grey steps legible through lower arc
Arc drives across the frame and shapes the paper above and the pocket below; its sheer mass dominates, and the bottom-left block only loosely counterweights it.
WEAKEST Heavy central mass; detached bottom-left block feels parked
STRONGEST Sweeping arc carrying the eye from left to lower right
Ink is controlled with dry-brush fringes at lower right and violet rims; small pale specks at bottom left and fine crease lines at right stay minor.
WEAKEST Pale specks in the bottom-left black block
STRONGEST Dry-brush violet and black fringes along the lower right
3 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 3 distinct places, 12 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_417 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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