Peter YuillThe Crucible Year

The Oracle

Oracle · deep archive

Oracle Constellation

Every rated painting of the year and every pattern the Oracle found in the records, drawn from vae.db. Facts and correlations only: what the data shows, not what it means.

V23, studio photograph, five reads V23 lite, phone photo, one read. Same scale, never averaged with V23 Peter's own rating, where given

Right eye, cyan: reads the data. Measurement, structure, the engine's ratings Left eye, red: reads the room. Peter's own eye, and where it parts from the engine's

FIG 01

The year

Every rated work is one ray, in the order it was photographed, round Bangkok's three seasons from the first batch in December 2025 to the latest. The longer the ray, the higher the rating; solid rays are V23, hollow-tipped ones V23 lite; the inner tracks are the five axes and gaps split the batches. Ring by ring lays the same works out as tiles, one ring per quality, to follow one quality round the year.

FIG 02

The rising floor

Each quality V23 reads, as a channel through the year. Every work is a mark at its rung; the banks are the floor and the ceiling, where the lowest and highest tenth of the works sat at the time. A weir marks the day a quality stepped up for good, and the notes name what the Oracle found held. Read the lower bank: the weakest works improved more than the strongest.

FIG 03

Pace and surface

The pace of making, as a pulse: for every day of the year, how many works had been dated in the fortnight before it. The shaded storms are the bursts, the busiest quarter of the year. Below the line the batches answer: the Material and surface rung each was given, and how often the reads found a water stain. Batch against batch, this is the strongest pattern the Oracle has found in the practice itself.

FIG 04

Flaws

Every flaw V23's five reads named, drawn as it behaves on paper. The sheet shows where the reads placed them, every kind together; below, each kind with its own sheet and, along the year, the share of each batch's reads that named it. V23 lite names no flaws, so the early months are absent. Hover the sheet for a zone, or a batch for its share.

FIG 05

What goes with what

Every finding is a strand from a fact on the rim to the score it goes with. Cyan goes with higher, ember with lower. The bright strands held up; the haze behind them are leads, still to be tested on new work. A fact read over several windows (3, 7 and 14 days) is one point on the rim. Hover or tap the rim to follow one fact or one score.

FIG 06

Five reads

V23 reads every work five times and takes the middle. Each work here is a column of five marks per quality, one per read, in the order the works were photographed: a column that sits as one block was a clear call, a split column a close one. Above, how few changed reads would have moved the rating a full point. Below, the rungs the measurement caps took away, and the run whose batch rated furthest above Peter.

FIG 07

Two engines

V23 reads the studio photographs; V23 lite reads the older phone photos. Thirty works were read by both. On the left, each of those works as a strand from its V23 rating to its V23 lite rating. On the right, the factors the Oracle tested against both ratings that went somewhere, each a needle: up for higher, down for lower, its two halves the two engines. Where the needle runs straight the engines agree.

FIG 08

Against the pattern

From everything measured about a work, the Oracle predicts each score V23 gave it. These are the works that broke the prediction furthest: the hollow mark is where the profile said the score would be, the solid one where V23 put it. A fall is a work that measures well and was read low; a leap, the reverse. Hover or tap a work to see it.

FIG 09

Each paper, its own year

One constellation per paper, grouped by how the paper is sized. Each ray is a painting on it, at its date on the year's clock (December at the top, running clockwise) and long for a high rating: solid rays V23, hollow tips V23 lite, a red dot Peter's own rating, the base dot his early triage. Inside, the five qualities V23 read on that paper against every paper (dashed), and a ring of the inks it took. Beside each, the spread of its ratings and what the Oracle found about the paper itself. Papers were used in different months, so read these as portraits, not verdicts. Hover or tap a ray to see the painting.

FIG 10

Beliefs under test

Each lane is one belief about the work, tested against the whole archive. The dot is what the data says now, the line its uncertainty, and the faint trail behind it where the same test stood in each of the Oracle's earlier runs. Right of the band the data agrees, left it disagrees; a "no effect" belief holds while its dot stays in the band.

FIG 11

The words

How often Peter's own writing reaches for each idea, per thousand words, from the first records of the practice to the Crucible year. Each phase is a layer laid down on the last, oldest at the bottom; each idea a vein whose width is how often it was written. The marked shifts held up: a rise or fall too large for chance across the sections written in those periods.

FIG 12

The sky over the table

The year drawn against the real sky. The rim carries the twelve signs; inside it runs the band of sky the Sun crosses, with its actual stars, constellations and Milky Way, which have slipped almost a sign from the signs named after them. Every painting sits where the Sun stood on the day it was photographed, its ray long for a high rating, so the year runs from Capricorn round to Libra and the dark arc is the part still to come. Inside, the planets' paths across the same days, each drifting outward as the year goes on so that where a planet doubles back (retrograde) it draws a loop; the Moon's face on every photo day; and at the centre the Moon itself, from real imagery, as it stood that day. Hover or tap a painting to see the sky on its day; hover a planet for what the Oracle found about it.

FIG 13

The sky, and a borrowed sky

Every sky pattern the Oracle recorded, drawn as stars above the horizon, and below it, like a reflection, the same tests run on a borrowed sky: the real positions with their dates moved half the record away, so they belong to no painting. Each mark is one pattern, placed by its strength; the large stars passed as signals, and each is named. The dashed line on each side is the other side's outline, flipped across: if the planets had a hand in the work, the sky would outgrow its reflection. The two shapes almost coincide. Hover or tap a mark to find its twin.

FIG 14

The Oracle's own year

The Oracle has run several times as the archive grew. Each ring is one run, the first at the centre; each finding a thread out from the run it was first tested, lit where it held as a signal, dim as a lead, dark where it fell to noise. The outer dark is what the Oracle could not test at all.

The Year · day 303

One year in one room.

A continuous year of large one-shot sumi ink paintings on paper, made in a live-in studio in Bangkok. One-shot means the ink cannot be taken back: a sheet resolves, or it is destroyed. This is the year as it was recorded at the time, week by week, with the numbers it left behind.

Every day since the first painting · marked: the 49 days paintings were photographed

402paintings registered, 2025.12.29 to 2026.10.26

573 m²of paper painted; 271 sheets have a side of 180 cm or more

~2,030studio hours: 1,010 logged in 28 weekly reports, then about 60 a week

14 · 10papers and black inks used, each one registered

The idea.

Three dates mark the start, and the record keeps all three rather than choosing the convenient one.

2025.12.20Conceived

On his 41st birthday, in Hanoi, Peter sets out a year of continuous one-shot painting on paper.

2025.12.29First painting

T_001, 100 × 200 cm. The year's count starts here, and so does this site.

2026.01.02Into the studio

The move to Bangkok; a studio is leased for the year and two large tables are surfaced in wool felt.

“The Crucible Year emerged as a need FOR stability as opposed to emerging from it.”Peter Yuill · 2026.03.01

The year is the ninth period of a practice that began in 2011, most of it built in Hong Kong. It is the first, in Peter's own account, that set out to build rather than to tear down. Why he staked a year on it is told on the opening page.

The room.

There are no sessions. Peter lives and works in the same space, and painting happens in fragments through the day and night, paced not by a schedule but by how many wet sheets the drying rack can hold.

The studio at sunrise: a long felt-covered table under a wall of windows, blank sheets stacked at one end and painted sheets drying at the other — The studio at sunrise · blank sheets, ink trays, work drying · 2026.03.31

THE TABLE

A felt table, open on every side.

Plan of the studio table, to scale: two 120 × 240 cm boards joined in an L, 80 cm high, upholstered in 5 mm wool felt and open on every side, so a sheet can be approached from any angle. A standard 97 × 180 cm sheet is drawn on it.

6 to 20paintings in progress at once

6 to 9wet sheets the drying rack holds: the real pace of the work

5 mmwool felt under every sheet: a firm base the paper floats just above, so ink that soaks through stays where it fell and the paper drinks it in, instead of spreading across the back

“I'm not working over it depositing ink onto it, I'm painting into it as if it's connected to me, a direct conduit or an extension of my being.”Peter Yuill · 2026.02.22

The output.

Paintings are photographed in batches, so each bar is one photo day. April has 113 paintings and 189 m² of painted paper, the most of any month. Nothing is dated in August: the studio paused.

THE YEAR

Every photo day, and what happened.

Each photo day is a stack of its own sheets, one tile per painting, lit where the painting is shown on this site. The cyan line climbs with the total area of paper painted. Amber pins mark the turning points the weekly reports recorded.

BY MONTH

The year, hung on the wall.

Every painting at its true size and proportion, hung month by month in the order it was photographed: the area of paper is the area you see. Paintings shown on this site carry their photograph; those kept in the Archive hang blank, face to the wall. The April switch to premium paper was also a switch to larger sheets. Hover a sheet for its size; select it to open it.

The record.

For the first 28 weeks, every Sunday, Peter wrote a report with fixed sections: a raw account of the week, hours and works, steps, energy, the habits he was avoiding, what came next. 28 reports, kept unedited. The share of paintings destroyed fell from 100% to 24% as the work found its footing. From Week 28 the record changed rather than stopped: Neon asks him questions through the week and keeps a daily roundup, and his answers are kept word for word. Hours were no longer logged; Peter puts those weeks at about 60 hours each.

45 WEEKS

About 2,030 hours in the studio.

Each week is one brush column, drawn from Peter's own brush lines to the length of the hours he worked that week, and titled as that Sunday's report titled it. Solid where the report logged the hours; dry brush from Week 28, where they are Peter's estimate of about 60. In violet, the share of all paintings made so far that had been destroyed, kept while the reports recorded it. Hover a week for its report.

0Crucible Baseline Capture2025.12.20 · 0 h · 0 works
1Infrastructure and Ignition2025.12.28 · 5 h · 0 works
2Move and First Contact2026.01.04 · 10 h · 1 works
3Permanent Studio Secured2026.01.11 · 10 h · 0 works
4Sciatica Crash and Domestic Hold2026.01.17 · 5 h · 0 works
5Ignition Under Constraint2026.01.25 · 25 h · 12 works
6Infrastructure While Making2026.02.01 · 30 h · 16 works
7White Paper and Institutional Alignment2026.02.09 · 40 h · 27 works
8Masterpiece Refactor and Somatic Scaling2026.02.15 · 40 h · 4 works
9The Theory Lands and The Surface Confirms2026.02.22 · 40 h · 15 works
10The Architect's Holiday2026.03.01 · 20 h
11The Judgment Architecture2026.03.08 · 20 h · 0 works
12The Return2026.03.15 · 30 h · 28 works
13Self-Hosted2026.03.22 · 50 h · 30 works
14The Warm-Up Ends2026.03.29 · 50 h · 26 works
15The Red Star Lands2026.04.05 · 55 h · 23 works
16First Fatigue2026.04.12 · 40 h · 35 works
17The First Fives2026.04.19 · 55 h · 28 works
18S3 Breaks Out2026.04.26 · 50 h · 27 works
19The Body Wins2026.05.06 · 40 h · 3 works
20T_3002026.05.10 · 50 h · 28 works
21The Site Dies2026.05.17 · 40 h · 9 works
22The Eureka Week2026.05.24 · 55 h · 10 works
23Simon Says2026.05.31 · 40 h
24The Technology Fast2026.06.07 · 60 h · 23 works
25The First Sale2026.06.14 · 60 h · 8 works
26Nothing Survived2026.06.21 · 40 h · 0 works
27The Agent Wakes2026.06.28 · 50 h · 0 works
28Hong Kong, and the New Laptop2026.07.05 · ~60 h · 0 works
In Hong Kong 29 June to 4 July. The new laptop arrives on 1 July and becomes the centre of the work.
29Setting Up the Nerve Centre2026.07.12 · ~60 h · 0 works
The laptop is set up to run the work and the archive. No paintings photographed.
30Neon Comes Online2026.07.19 · ~60 h · 0 works
Neon starts answering on WhatsApp on 16 July; the Weekly Roundup group opens the next day.
31Photographing the Archive2026.07.26 · ~60 h · 0 works
Every painting is photographed again in raw format with a white balance meter, for archive and analysis.
32Eleven on a New Paper2026.08.02 · ~60 h · 11 works
Eleven paintings on a new batch of bark paper, photographed on 28 July.
33Raw Files, Edited by Hand2026.08.09 · ~60 h · 0 works
The photography goes on: lighting checked, each image edited as a 16-bit TIFF and saved in its analysis version.
34The Long Shoot2026.08.16 · ~60 h · 0 works
The archive photography takes far longer than expected. No paintings photographed.
35A Second Brain2026.08.23 · ~60 h · 0 works
Peter builds a second brain for the whole system on the laptop, so every record can be found and read.
36The Vault2026.08.30 · ~60 h · 0 works
The archive becomes one vault: decisions, materials, the weekly log and every painting's record in one place.
37Questions, Not Reports2026.09.06 · ~60 h · 0 works
Neon is wired into the vault. The weekly report gives way to a daily roundup and questions through the week.
38A Night with Simon2026.09.13 · ~60 h · 8 works
Painting resumes on the new paper: eight photographed on 12 September. A night out with Simon Birch talking about art.
39Two Days Asleep, Then a Clean Studio2026.09.20 · ~60 h · 3 works
Burnout, then two days of sleep. The ten-year-aged S13 gasses him out of the studio. Every bucket and brush cleaned; a visit to Simon Birch's studio.
40Wet Mounting, and the Flood2026.09.27 · ~60 h · 4 works
He teaches himself to wet-mount paper onto archival backing. Bangkok floods. A slower week by choice, about eight works on the go.
41The Engine Works2026.10.04 · ~60 h · 0 works
V23 is built, works, and rates the whole archive. The Oracle is started.
42The Site Goes Live2026.10.11 · ~60 h · 0 works
The Oracle's full run, and this site goes live on 10 October. S13 needs its own coat of alum size before painting.
43Sized by Hand2026.10.18 · ~60 h · 12 works
His own alum glue sizes S13 to about three-quarters; about ten S13 and ten S14 in progress. Twelve photographed on 16 October.
44Roundup to come2026.10.25 · ~60 h · 2 works

“This week was the first time in the Crucible Year I can see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as creating work goes.”Peter Yuill · 2026.02.22

The turn.

At the end of May, in the week his mentor told him he was a better artist than he was showing, Peter looked back over the work and saw what the counting had done to it.

“I had the realisation that I've been rushing works to try to get higher numbers because I was more excited about collecting the data than I was about actually making paintings.”Peter Yuill · 2026.05.31

Months afterwards the Oracle, which knew nothing of this decision, found the same thing in the record: busier fortnights, rougher surfaces. A lead that agrees with him, not proof.

“It's just proved you can't mathematically map out what good work looks like.”Peter Yuill · 2026.05.31

Stronger, then steadier.

Read by one engine throughout, the studio-photographed paintings rise month by month into June, then settle. March 4.1, April 4.7, May 5.6, June 7.1, July 6.1, September 5.7, October 6.1: the average V23 rating of each month with eight or more paintings. June, the first month after the decision to slow down, is the year's highest, 7.1 across 30 paintings.

EVERY RATING

Every painting, every month.

Every painting's engine rating by date. Lines: the weakest tenth and the best tenth of each month with eight or more paintings. Both climb through spring: the weakest tenth from 2.5 in March to 5.7 in June, the best from 5.4 to 8.2. Within each system later paintings rate higher (rank correlation with date: V23 0.60, V23 lite 0.45). The early months rest on V23 lite, read once from phone photographs and about 0.8 of a point rough per painting, so read its line as a trend, not a measurement. The scale is relative to this archive, and a difference under half a point between two paintings is noise. Most early works exist only as phone photographs, so the two systems are kept apart and never averaged.