# Set 2 critique

Read by the orchestrating assistant: drawings (contact.png) first, then studies and questions.

## The favourite against its counterexamples
- 2-1 (develop): the apple's shadow, the cup's interior and the cup's shadow make a chain of three darks. The cup's dark sits inside its rim; the apple's dark lies outside it, on the table. Readable as a cup and an apple without the caption.
- 2-2 (no hollow): with the cup capped, its top is left as paper and the cup disappears from the drawing. What remains is the apple and a dark lobe with a round bite taken out of it. What is lost, specifically: the inside dark. Every dark in 2-2 is a shadow, outside its object, so the rhyme of 2-1 (a dark inside one object, a dark outside the other) becomes repetition. The favourite survives this test.
  What 2-2 reveals instead: an object present only as the light it blocks (the bite in the shadow). Without the caption it does not read as a cup. Reserve.
- 2-3 (light moved to the apple): attention did not move. The cup's interior became one dark disc with a thin light rim and still holds the eye; the apple, mostly in shadow, became a small glyph. The cast shadow from the low light runs to the frame edge as a hard-edged band (the band habit from set 1, now made by a shadow). The hollow holds attention even when the light favours the apple: the cup's dark does not depend on the light's direction the way the apple's does.

## The other lines
- 2-4 (eclipse, lower and closer): the cup is hidden completely; what remains is a single lit apple against a dark wall, a one-object portrait. Concealment went past the point where the cup is present. Drop this line.
- 2-5 vs 2-6 (backlight vs side light, same placement): 2-6 reads more readily as objects (the near apple lit, everything else one dark mass with a long shadow). 2-5 puts the shadows in front of the objects, as a dark floor coming toward us, with light slivers between them and the light in the handle's opening. Backlight adds a specific thing (the shadows arrive before the objects), but both are still frontal rows. Reserve; it does not beat the hollow.

## Decision
Continue the hollow (2-1). Reserve 2-2 (object known by the light it blocks) and 2-5 (shadows first).
Not yet tested: whether the hollow survives a less diagrammatic view than straight down, a dark ground (the prompt's chiaroscuro: so far every favourite is dark shapes on light paper), a crop, and a change of marks.

## Set 3 plan (six): combine and challenge, and test mark/value
3-1 the hollow on a dark ground (table 0.22): light shapes in a dark field. Does the inside/outside rhyme survive when the field is dark?
3-2 the hollow from a three-quarter view (camera about 45 degrees): is top-down a gimmick the relation depends on?
3-3 the hollow cropped: the cup cut by the frame edge, the apple whole.
3-4 the chain extended: apple, cup, apple, the chain of darks leaving the frame.
3-5 2-1 with high restraint (0.8): does the relation survive economy of marks?
3-6 2-1 in another hand (Rembrandt pen): is the relation in the arrangement, or in Kollwitz's charcoal?