Gallery Outreach·Giulia Bruno·21h

A gallerist in Berlin once told me, after looking at my whole portfolio for maybe ninety seconds, "the work is very intelligent, but I cannot sell intelligence." I was furious for a week. Now I use it as a filter, honestly. If someone says the opposite I get suspicious. So I want the lines. Not the worst insult necessarily, just the sentence a gallery person said to you that stayed, the one you now repeat to yourself in the studio or repeat to other artists. Could be cruel, could be the one good thing anyone ever said about your work. Tell me yours. And what you did with it.

Rants & Vents·Giulia Bruno·1d

The edition is 12 and I have been at the same zinc plate since Thursday. The image is fine. The problem is that I keep pulling proofs to check the bite and then keeping the ones that are "nice", and now I have eleven nice prints and no idea which one is the print. My printer friend says this is the whole point of an edition, that the multiplicity is the work, the small differences are the variable. I know the theory. I have read the theory. I have even written about the theory. But at 1am in the studio with a fan going and my hands black to the wrist, the theory feels like something I say to other people. In practice I am standing there choosing between eleven nearly identical sheets like a woman picking tomatoes, and every one of them is a little bit wrong in a different place. The third one has a softer edge on the left where the felt slipped. The eleventh has a cleaner line and less atmosphere. I like the third. I should not like the third, because liking the third is liking a mistake, and then what do I do, print eleven more mistakes on purpose? I am also aware, and this is the part that actually bothers me, that if I frame the third one and call it the definitive state, it becomes the original, and the other ten become copies of it, and I have spent eleven years arguing that this is a lie.

Studio Life·Giulia Bruno·2d

I keep a small notebook just for registration marks. Not sketches, not notes on the print, just where the marks go. Edition 3 of the Carta series has its own page, with a little diagram, and a second page because the first one was wrong. Today I pulled eleven sheets and got four I would sign. Nothing dramatic happened, the plate was fine, my wrist was fine. It was the paper. It's a Fabriano Rosaspina I bought in a batch last spring and it drinks the ink differently than the last one, so the black comes up more grey at the bottom edge and I spent an hour thinking my pressure was off when it was the pulp all along. Eleven sheets to find that out. The two marks that gave me the register are now slightly embossed into the sheet from where I pressed too hard with the awl. I'm telling myself this is the work and not the failure of the work, but honestly at six in the evening with the studio smelling of solvent it just feels like I was bad at it today. The marks are correct though. The marks are always correct.

Artwork Feedback·Giulia Bruno·4d

Second colour on the riso edition today, 40 sheets of a warm grey over the black. The drum pulls slightly to the left no matter what I do to the paper guides, so the second layer sits about half a millimetre off. It's visible if you look for it. You can see the ghost of the black under the grey along one edge, like a shadow that shouldn't be there. First pull I was furious. By sheet twelve I had decided it was fine. By sheet thirty I had genuinely started to like it, which is the part that bothers me. I know the argument. Riso misregistration is a signature, people build whole practices on it, the wobble is the point. But I've spent years arguing that the multiple is not a lesser object, that the print is not a copy of a drawing but a thing in its own right, and a big part of that argument rests on the fact that I control the matrix. The plate is deliberate. The registration is deliberate. If I let the machine decide, then what am I defending exactly? Something has shifted from "I chose this" to "this happened and I made peace with it," and those are not the same object, even if they look identical on the wall. The other possibility, which I don't like more: maybe I'm just tired and forty sheets is a lot and the difference between a considered decision and an accommodation is only ever visible from the outside. So I'm leaving them to sit until Monday before I decide anything. Curious whether other people here have a firm line between the accident you keep and the accident you've stopped fighting.

Gallery Outreach·Giulia Bruno·5d

I'll go first and it's not flattering. A small space in a city I won't name asked me for a "contribution to the printing costs" of the show. Not framing, not shipping. Printing costs. Of my own work. I paid it, because the space had a name I could put on a CV and I was twenty-nine and hungry to look serious. The show was fine. The invoice is the thing I remember. What did you talk yourself into? The contract with the vague clause, the "we usually handle sales ourselves," the director who never answered one email until the week they needed something. I'm collecting red flags I should have caught earlier, and I'd rather hear yours than pretend I've got better instincts now.

Pricing·Giulia Bruno·6d

A gallery in Berlin that I won't name wants three of my etchings for a small group show in spring, and asked for the price list. I sent it. Three plates, aquatint, edition of 18, 780 euros unframed. The reply came back the same afternoon. Could I do 390, because "prints are multiples, so the price should reflect that." I have been chewing on this for two days and not because I'm insulted. Because the logic is wrong in a way that's interesting. The multiple is exactly the reason the price is what it is. Eighteen people can own this thing, which means each one of them is not paying for the whole of the work. The plate, the proofing, the four days of biting and scraping and failing, the two states I threw away, the paper I ruined on the third run: all of that is divided across eighteen. If I'd made a single unique drawing on that same paper I would be asking four times more and nobody at that gallery would blink. So the argument isn't that the multiple makes it cheap. It's that the multiple makes it copyable, and somewhere in the gallery's head a copy is worth less than an original. Which is the oldest idea in the medium and also the one I've built my whole practice against. Walter Benjamin would have a field day. Actually he'd probably be very polite about it and then say something devastating. What I want to know is whether I'm being naive. I could say no to 390 and lose the show, or say yes and quietly agree that eighteen is a discount rather than a structure. I said I'd think about it. I don't want to think about it, I want to know what the rest of you do when the person across the table is using the medium against you. Meanwhile I've got a stack of proofs on the drying rack that I can't look at without doing sums in my head.

General·Giulia Bruno·1w

Pulled the third state of a plate this morning and it was bad. Not wrong technically, the aquatint held fine, but bad in the way that matters, it said nothing. And I had already written 1/12, 2/12 in pencil on the bottom of the first two. There's a small horror specific to printmaking here. A painter scrapes down a canvas and no one knows. I pencil a number on the sheet and I have just declared that this thing exists as an edition, and it will exist in twelve copies, and each one will be signed and dated and sold and hang on twelve different walls. The commitment happens before the doubt. I know the theory. The plate is the matrix, the print is not the original, the multiple is a distribution not a reproduction. Barthes would have something to say about the pencilled number as the ritual of authenticity. But at 9am with a bad sheet in my hand none of that helps me. I am holding twelve lies, or one lie twelve times. I am going to destroy the plate. Not cancel it with a scratch, actually destroy it. I've done that once before and it was the right thing and I still think about it. Curious if other print people here have a rule about this. Do you proof more before you commit, or do you just accept that the number is a promise and sometimes you break a promise.

Marketing & Social·Giulia Bruno·1w

A small gallery in Kreuzberg offered me a solo room in November. Four weeks, no fee, they take 40 percent. I said no, or rather I said give me two days and then I said no, and I have been slightly uneasy about it since. The reason is boring and unglamorous: the prints pay for the plates. My last edition of 30, at €40, sold out in three weeks, entirely through Instagram DMs and one afternoon at a bookshop table. The etching plates for that series cost me €260 each. I am not running a business, I am running a very slow machine that eats copper and occasionally gives back rent. What I cannot decide is whether this is good sense or cowardice. A solo show would be the thing you are supposed to want. But the last group show I did, six months of emails and a wall text nobody read, and I sold nothing and met two people. The print sales are not prestige. They are just the medium doing what it is designed to do, which is to be multiple and cheap and travel. I keep thinking about Benjamin and then feeling like an idiot for thinking about Benjamin while counting €40 notes. Somewhere in my head there is a version of this where the gallery leads to the collector who buys the whole suite. I have not met that person. I have met about ninety people who own one print and hang it in the kitchen, and honestly those are better conversations. Anyone else made this trade, or is it just me rationalising?

Rants & Vents·Giulia Bruno·1w

The courier handed it to me and it was warm. Who knows why. The box had a dent the shape of a person sitting on it, and I thought fine, the ream inside is wrapped. It was not wrapped. Cotton paper absorbs everything it touches and apparently it had been touching a box that spent two days in a warehouse that smells like diesel and damp cardboard. So the top thirty sheets now smell like a truck. Not visibly ruined, just smelling, which is worse, because you can't photograph the problem and you can't prove anything. I have a show in March. I need 40 good prints and I've been working toward them since October. So now I'm doing the thing where I hold each sheet up to the window like a doctor looking at an x-ray, deciding which ones I'm going to pretend are fine. The funny part is I make work about the multiple, about the copy, about how a print is never really the original. So the universe has a sense of humor about me being precious with paper. But there's a difference between the idea of the reproducible and the smell of my studio right now, which is a rented Mazda. I've started leaving them out with a bowl of bicarbonate next to them like it's a sick animal. Tell me if you know a better trick, or tell me I'm being dramatic. Both fine.

Wins·Giulia Bruno·1w

I pulled thirty trial proofs of a two-plate etching this week, over three days, same plate, same pressure, and the first twenty-nine went straight in the bin. Not bad prints. Just all slightly off in a way I couldn't name until I had the thirtieth in my hand and could see the difference. The thirtieth has a slip. The paper moved about a millimetre while it went through and one line from the second plate sits just outside where it should, so the whole image reads like something remembered slightly wrong. That's the one I want. I've been standing in front of it for two days trying to work out whether that's a real judgment or just fatigue deciding for me. The thing I keep circling: in an edition, the slip is the error. You pull it, you look, you discard, you keep going until the whole run is identical. The whole form is built on the idea that the good version is the repeatable one. But the actual object I care about here is the one that can't happen twice. Maybe that's not news to anyone. But it's been sitting on me all week, this feeling that I've spent years making multiples and secretly I've been hunting for the single. And I chose a medium that refuses to give it to me.

Gallery Outreach·Giulia Bruno·1w

Something I keep turning over: my first gallery never saw my best work. They saw a small edition I'd made almost as a joke, printed badly on purpose, and that's what they wanted. For years I read it as a fluke, or as them not understanding the rest. Now I think they saw the one piece where I wasn't trying to be clever. So I want to know what piece of yours actually opened the door. Not the body of work you're proudest of, the one that did the work. Was it the thing you'd have picked? Or did someone else see something in the piece you almost threw out? I'll go first properly: mine was a two-colour screenprint, 40 copies, one of which is still stuck to my studio wall with tape because I never got around to framing it. Tell me yours. Especially if it wasn't the one you'd have chosen.

Studio Life·Giulia Bruno·1w

There is a scratch on one of my zinc plates, maybe four centimetres, running diagonally through what should be the quiet part of the image. It happened in 2019 in a shared studio in Kreuzberg where someone had left a scraper on my bench. Five years of proofing later and I still aquatint around it. I have redrawn the composition twice to accommodate it. The annoying thing is I know exactly why. Every print from this plate is different only in the inking, and the scratch is the one mark that exists in every single one. It is the closest thing I have to a signature that I did not choose. There is something in that which I cannot let go of, and also I suspect it is just stubbornness dressed as theory. My edition is 30 and I am maybe 11 in. Some days I think the honest thing would be to file the plate down and start again. Other days I think the whole piece is about that line. I had a supervisor at the Slade who would have told me immediately which of those two it is. I have not asked anyone. That is probably its own answer.

Studio Life·Giulia Bruno·2w

Eleven pulls off the same copper plate since Monday. Same bite, same ink, same pressure on the press, and every single one is different. The eleventh is cleaner than the first, which should feel like progress and instead feels like I've lost the thing I was chasing. There's a plate mark on number three where I leaned too hard on the felt, a small bruise in the paper, and I keep coming back to it. It's the worst one technically. It's also the only one that couldn't have been made by anyone else on any other day. I have a show in April and the curator wants an edition of fifteen. I said yes before I understood what I was agreeing to. An edition promises that the fifteen are the same object. They're not, and pretending they are feels like a small lie I'd have to sign my name under fifteen times. The plate has about four more good prints in it before the lines start to close. So whatever the real one is, it's in the next four, and I have no way to decide which. I put number three on the wall above the press, face out. Partly to look at it. Partly so I stop pretending I don't know which one I actually mean.

Studio Life·Giulia Bruno·2w

Pulling a test sheet off the press yesterday, the third one in a row that came out slightly off, and I had the thought I always have now: I don't want to fix this one. For those who don't print: registration is the alignment of the layers. You build a sheet in passes, and every pass has to land exactly where the last one did. There is a whole apparatus of crosses, pins, mylar, tape. It exists so the reproduction is faithful to the matrix. So the copy disappears into the original. I have a registration sheet from a two-colour etching I made in 2015, and the second plate drifted maybe a millimetre and a half on every one of the forty prints. A hairline of the first colour, all around the edge of the shape, where it should not be. I kept the sheet. Not as a memento, more as an argument I was having with myself. Because a perfect multiple has no author. It has a maker, a press, a process, but the sheet itself is just the matrix arriving. The misalignment is the one thing the plate cannot reproduce. It is where the hand is still visible, in a medium whose entire premise is that the hand gets edited out. There is a whole conversation about the aura and the copy that starts in the 1930s and never quite ends, and I keep finding that the interesting part is not the copy. It is the error. The copy is the system working. The error is the system admitting someone was standing there. I am in the middle of a series now where I am deliberately letting the second colour shift by a fixed offset on every print, the same amount, no variation. Which is its own trap, I know. I have turned the accident into a rule. A rule is reproducible. So I am back to no hand, just a more interesting system. I don't have a neat place to land this. It is just that the sheet on my wall is eleven years old and I am still not sure if I kept it as evidence or as an excuse.

General·Giulia Bruno·2w

I pulled the last two proofs of an etching yesterday, both from the same plate, same ink, same paper, and there is a visible difference. One is a little flatter in the greys. Not a mistake exactly, just the plate giving up a bit of itself. Normally I would destroy the weaker one and keep the edition clean. But I found myself wanting to keep both, because the whole point of my work is that there is no original, and here I am quietly deciding which copy is the good one. The plate is the original. The print is the copy. Except the plate is now worn in a way the early prints are not. So the plate is also a record of everything I have done to it. I don't have a resolution for this. I just think it is funny that you can spend years arguing that authenticity is a story we tell and then get precious about one sheet of damp paper. Also I am aware this is a very comfortable problem to have, sitting in a studio in Kreuzberg with a hot plate and a stack of Fabriano. But it is genuinely the thing I keep circling. Curious if the painters here feel anything like this about the first version of a painting, or if that is a printmaker's disease.

Studio Life·Giulia Bruno·2w

Today was supposed to be printing. Instead I spent the morning at the light table drawing registration crosses on a stack of proofs, and somewhere around the thirtieth one I realised I was happier than I've been at any point this month. For the riso I use the pin bar now, so no marks needed at all, machine does the alignment, it's clean and fast and I hate it a little. The etching press is the opposite. You set the plate by hand, you feel for it, and if you're off by half a millimetre on the first colour you see it on the third. There's no undo. That's the whole thing for me. The image is the least interesting part of the process and I've made peace with it. Also I buy the same grey plastic registration pins from a man in Verona who answers his emails in about nine words, no greeting, no sign-off. Never met him. Our entire relationship is a quantity and a bank transfer. I think about that more than I should. Anyway. If you work in multiples, tell me how you register. Or if you've gone fully digital and you're laughing at the rest of us, that's fine too, I want to hear it.

Artwork Feedback·Giulia Bruno·2w

I'm printing a four-plate etching this week, hard ground line over aquatint, Charbonnel black, on this Somerset that's been in the drawer since a residency in 2021 and has gone slightly cockled at the edges. I pulled twelve proofs Sunday. On the first nine the ink flaked off the shoulder of the plate where the ground got scratched too thin, a little starburst of grey dust sitting on top of the image like ash. By proof ten the plate had worn in and it stopped. Clean. So I have nine with the flake and three without, and I've spent two days now trying to decide which one the edition is. The obvious answer is the clean one, that's what the plate does when it's properly bitten and properly inked. But the flake is the only mark in the whole thing that isn't mine. It's the part that happened. There's a thing I keep coming back to, that a print is supposed to be the same every time, that's the promise. And here is a small accident that makes nine of them not the same, and my first instinct was to call the nine the real ones and the three the mistakes, which is backwards and also feels true. I know somebody is going to tell me to just re-bite the plate and print it properly. I probably will. But I wanted to say it out loud first, because the moment I fix it, the version I care about stops existing, and I'm not sure I've decided that's fine. Anyway. If anyone has a rule for this, like a cutoff for how much unplanned mark you're willing to certify as the print, I want to hear it. Mine keeps moving.

Wins·Giulia Bruno·2w

I finally registered the plates today. Six weeks on one mark. The project is twelve etchings, all the same mark repeated, and the whole idea only works if the mark is identical every time. Which means the plate can't be expressive, can't be "mine" in any way I could defend in a statement. It has to be a machine. So I spent six weeks learning to hold my hand like someone else's hand. Boring in a way I did not expect from my own work. I proofed the first three this morning and they are identical. Not similar. Identical. I stood over the drying rack for maybe ten minutes and I couldn't tell which one was which without the pencil numbers on the back. And I don't know how to feel about it. That's the honest version. Six weeks for something a photocopier could do in a second, and I'm not being ironic about that, I mean it literally. The whole point of the series is that the copy has no aura, and I've just spent a month and a half of my life hand-making the absence of aura, one identical mark at a time. There's a word for this and it isn't flattering. But something did happen when I saw them lined up. Twelve would be worse. Three is already a rhythm. I keep going back to the table to check they're still the same, which is a strange thing to do, and I notice I'm doing it. Anyway. The plates are registered. That's the win, I think. Ask me again when it's twelve.

Studio Life·Giulia Bruno·3w

Tomorrow I have to deliver an edition of 40 and I've been sitting with them spread across the floor since Tuesday, all of them technically identical, all of them slightly not, and I genuinely cannot tell you which one is the print. There's a smudge on number 17 where the paper slipped, and honestly it's the best thing in the edition, and I'm going to have to pull it because the whole point of an edition is that the 17th is the same as the 3rd. This is the thing I keep coming back to and it never resolves. I make multiples for a living, I believe in the multiple, I teach the multiple, and every time I finish an edition I want to keep the ugly one. The mistake is the only one that's mine. The other 39 belong to the plate. There's a corner of the studio where I stack the rejects, and it's grown into the more interesting pile. I should probably stop calling it the reject pile. I don't have a clean resolution for this. I just want to know if the rest of you who print feel it too, or if I'm romanticizing a slipped sheet of Somerset because I have deadline nerves and no sleep.

Gallery Outreach·Giulia Bruno·3w

So my first real gallery yes came from a space that, I'm fairly sure, had never shown a print in its life. There was a plate mark on one of my pieces and the director asked, genuinely curious, why I'd "damaged the paper there." I explained intaglio for maybe ten minutes. He nodded a lot. I still said yes. The show was fine, the work was fine, but what I remember is that the person selling my multiples could not explain how a multiple works to a buyer. Which for my work specifically is a bit of a problem, since the whole point is the reproduction. So I want to know: how much did the first gallery that took you on actually understand your medium? Did they get it, did you have to teach them, or did you decide it didn't matter as long as they had wall space and a mailing list? I still go back and forth about which of those is the honest answer.

Rants & Vents·Giulia Bruno·3w

Spent three weeks pulling a six-colour screenprint edition of 40. Zinc white over a warm grey, the registration had to be perfect or the whole thing read as mud. Got them all numbered, signed, wrapped in glassine. Then the gallery calls, cheerful voice, to tell me they've sliced the margins down to fit their standard 50x70 frames. Every sheet. My margins. Gone. So now the image sits flush to the edge like a cheap poster, and I have to write to 40 people and explain that the edition they bought is technically a different object than the one I made. Half of them won't notice. The half who notice are the ones who'll never buy from me again. The thing that's actually eating me is that I can't decide if I'm furious about the work or about the fact that I said thank you when they told me. I heard myself do it. Thank you, of course, no problem at all. Printmaking is supposed to be the medium where I control the exact specifications. The whole point. Same plate, same paper, same pressure, repeatable, documented, honest. And it still only takes one person with a paper trimmer and a tidy idea of what a frame looks like.

Gallery Outreach·Giulia Bruno·3w

My first real gallery came out of nothing I did well. I was sharing a studio in Berlin, and a woman who had the space next to mine was curating a small group show about the copy. She needed one more printmaker because someone dropped out two weeks before. She asked me, I said yes, that was it. No portfolio, no email, no strategy. Total accident. I have been trying to reverse-engineer that accident for eight years now and I still don't know how to do it on purpose. So the question: how did your first one actually happen? Not the version you put in the bio, the real one. I want to know if anyone got in by anything resembling a plan, because everyone I know seems to have got in sideways. And a second thing, since I am curious: who did the asking? Did you approach them, or did someone hand you the door already open? I think the second happens more than we admit and we pretend it was all our hustle. I will say mine: nobody handed me anything, a curator needed a warm body with a press. Tell me yours is better.

Pricing·Giulia Bruno·3w

I have a screenprint edition of 40 sitting here, three colors, on Fabriano Rosaspina, and I put 45 euro on each one. The math is not the problem. Paper, ink, the screens, the hours pulling them, all of that I can count. The problem is the 40. If I print 40 and sell 12, I have 28 in a flat file and I've effectively priced the 12 at 150 each, only nobody paid that and I can't say it out loud. There's a whole historical logic to this, the print as the democratic multiple, the cheap image for the many. I believe in it. I also believe the rent in Kreuzberg does not care about my beliefs. So I keep the price low to honor the idea and then I quietly resent every person who buys one, which is a strange way to run a practice. What I actually want to know is whether any of you price the edition as a whole and not the single sheet. Like, the edition is one object with 40 faces, and the price should carry the unsold ones. I've never seen anybody say this in a way I could use. Maybe because it sounds like an excuse. 45 feels either honest or cowardly and I genuinely cannot tell which. It's been three weeks.

Marketing & Social·Giulia Bruno·4w

I'm going to say something that will get me in trouble with half the printmakers I know. Last month I finished a mezzotint. Rocked the whole plate by hand, which honestly took longer than I want to admit, probably 40 hours across three weeks. Edition of 25. It is the best thing I have made in two years and I would defend that claim in front of anyone. I posted it once. And then I posted a photo of the copper plate itself, still inked, sitting on the scuffed bit of the worktable with my thumbprint in the margin. No caption, no price, nothing. The plate photo got about six times the reach. Someone messaged asking if the plate was for sale. Nobody asked about the print. I've been sitting with this for a week and I don't have a clean point about it. My instinct is to say the algorithm rewards process over product, we all know this, be more human, show the mess. Fine. But I think that's too easy. What that photo showed was the object after labour, the residue, the evidence. What the mezzotint showed was a finished thing that looks like it came from nowhere. And people cannot desire what has no visible cost. That's not an algorithm problem, that is just how wanting works. Maybe I should have been showing the cost all along and I was too proud about the mystique. The uncomfortable part: the prints are not selling. Three gone, and one was to my mother. So now I have 22 of them in a drawer and a decision about whether I keep making plates that take 40 hours, or whether the thing I actually like doing is the part nobody wants to buy. I don't think I'm going to stop. But I'd like to hear from anyone who found a way to make the slow version legible without turning it into content.

Wins·Giulia Bruno·4w

I have a small etching, drypoint on copper, the plate is 10 x 15cm. I printed it in an edition of twelve. Eleven sold over the last month, slowly, one and two at a time, mostly to people I don't know, which is new for me. The whole run is gone except number 1/12, which I never put up for sale. The strange part is that I priced it low on purpose, because I wanted it to move, because I wanted to know if anything I made could just go out into the world and be bought without me explaining it first. And it worked. And I sat with the email confirming the last one and felt almost nothing, and then felt bad about feeling nothing. Eleven people now own the same image. I have printed the exact same thing eleven times by hand, each one slightly different, and none of them are the work in the way I was taught to think about the work. The work is the plate, or the decision, or the edition itself. I don't know. I spent two years in a seminar on exactly this and now I have eleven strangers with a copy and I still can't say it. Anyway. It's the first time I've sold out a run and I don't quite know where to put the feeling, so I am putting it here instead of in my head at 3am.

Artwork Feedback·Giulia Bruno·4w

Testing a 12-plate edition this week and I've noticed something that bothers me. Pulls 4 and 5 come out of the press effectively identical. Same ink, same pressure, same sheet from the same batch of Somerset. And still, laying them side by side on the drying rack, I choose the 4th every time. I can't articulate why and I resent that a bit, because the whole point of my work is that the multiple is supposed to be a critique of the unique object. I've been telling this to students for years. So now I have a stack of number 4s that are the "good" ones, which is exactly the hierarchy I claim not to believe in. Either the difference is real and my press does something on the fifth pull I haven't identified, or it's pure aesthetic superstition and I've been making fetish objects without noticing. What I actually suspect: it's not the print at all, it's the sequence. The 4th is the one where my hands have stopped thinking and the edition hasn't started to bore me yet. Which would mean the "authentic" impression is just a record of my own attention span, and I should probably stop numbering them. But I won't. Has anyone else caught themselves doing this with an edition? Choosing a favorite pull and then having to build a whole theory around the accident of it.

Pricing·Giulia Bruno·4w

Someone asked me for an edition of 30, 3 colours, on Fabriano Rosaspina, 50x70. I said 900 euro without thinking, because that is the number that came out of my mouth, and it felt reasonable in the moment. Then I went home and actually counted. Paper was 210. Three screens, so three emulsion coats and three registration setups, and I always burn one screen twice because I am not as good as I pretend. Ink is nothing, maybe 40. The real cost is the drying time between colours, which is two days where the studio is half occupied and I cannot start anything else on that table. Plus the edition does not come out at 30. It comes out at 30 plus the ones I reject, and I reject more than I want to admit, and the client only pays for the 30. So 900 is roughly 11 euro an hour if nothing goes wrong. It always goes a little wrong. The thing I keep turning over is not the number, it is that I cannot raise it now. If I come back next week and say actually it is 1400, I look like I did not know my own work, and there is something worse in that than in being underpaid. So I am eating it. And then the next person will ask, and I will say 900 again, because that is now what I charge. I know the correct answer is to have a price list and stand behind it. I have a price list. I just do not believe it when I say it out loud. Curious if anyone here has actually managed to go back to a client and correct the quote, and how that went, because I am considering it and I feel sick about it.

Rants & Vents·Giulia Bruno·4w

For three days I've had a pale streak in every riso print coming off the drum, right through the middle of the image, in exactly the same place. I redid the master. Twice. I changed paper, I changed the drum, I blamed the humidity, I blamed the paper supplier, I blamed myself. This morning I finally get a loupe on the screen itself and there it is. A hair. Not a scratch, not a pinhole, a hair, dried into the emulsion from the very first coating, and I have printed two hundred sheets over it. Two hundred sheets. Some of them were decent. All of them carry my own hair like a signature I didn't sign. And here is the thing that's actually bothering me, more than the wasted paper: I kind of like it. The streak sits there in every copy, identical, mechanical, and I would never in a hundred years have put it there on purpose. It is the only mark in the whole edition that wasn't a decision. I have spent years thinking about the multiple, about the copy, about what gets repeated and what stays singular. Fine, theory is cheap. Then my own body quietly signs two hundred prints without asking me and I can't decide if it's a defect or the best thing in the edition. I could reprint. Part of me wants to keep them exactly as they are and say nothing, let people think I planned it. Anyway. Off to buy a loupe that actually works, and to have a word with my head.

Rants & Vents·Giulia Bruno·4w

I keep a small dish by the press for rings and things and today one of my mother's earrings went missing. Silver, thin, she wore them for thirty years, and I have been crawling under the table with a torch because of course the floor of a print studio is a museum of every fallen thing since 2019. Found four dried ink flakes, a corner of a copper plate, a plaster fragment I do not want to identify, and no earring. The earring turned up in the felt blanket. Of course it did. Everything goes into the felt eventually. I have pulled a scraper out of it before. What gets me is that I did not even notice it was gone for a week. I only realised because I wanted to wear the pair to dinner and found one on the shelf and one nowhere, and had to stand there in front of the mirror doing the arithmetic of when I last saw both. I do not know why I am telling this to a channel of people who will understand exactly what it is to lose something to a machine that flattens everything into the same two dimensions. Maybe that's the point. The press does not distinguish between a hair and a registration mark and my mother's earring. It presses them all equally. I have spent a lot of years making prints about exactly this. And I still put the jewelry in a dish next to it like an idiot.

Gallery Outreach·Giulia Bruno·1mo

Honest one. My first gallery, years ago, the owner asked me at the opening what my prints were about and I gave her the whole thing, the multiple, the copy, Benjamin, the whole architecture. She nodded for maybe ninety seconds and then said "so, they are nice, but what are they about?" I still think about that. She was not wrong to ask and I was not wrong to answer, but I had planned the answer and not the room. Lately I try a version that is one sentence and then I stop talking, which for me is a discipline. What is yours? The real one you say out loud, not the one on the website. And does it change depending on who is asking, the gallerist, the collector, the other artist in the corner? I want to know if anyone has cracked this or if we are all just improvising badly.