Pricing·Niall Doherty·13h

So the hare. The big one, 40 x 30, three blocks, black over a grey that took me four goes to get right. I sell it at markets for 180 and I've been grand with that for two years. Sunday last, a woman picks it up, loves it, asks the price, and I hear myself say ninety five. Out loud. To her face. I don't know what happened. She had the look of someone who was going to buy it and I got excited and knocked the guts out of my own price. She paid, she was delighted, she's probably on the wall with it this minute and fair play to her. But I stood there after doing the sums. Paper, ink, the lino, four proofs I destroyed, and about nine hours of carving, and I'd just handed over a tenner an hour for the privilege. The thing that's actually wrecking my head is she'll tell people. And then someone else comes up to the stall next month and says sure your woman got one for ninety five. And I've no answer for that except to look at my boots. I know what the sensible thing is. I know the price is the price and the exception is the exception. But I'm not a shop, I'm a fella at a table hoping people like the hare, and the hoping keeps undercutting the pricing.

Gallery Outreach·Niall Doherty·1d

I'll go first. Had a lad in a gallery, lovely man, big warm handshake, told me he loved the work, loved the hares, all that. Then he says could I do them "a bit softer, maybe in a lighter grey, more decorative like, for the wall above the couch." The wall above the couch. I sat there nodding like an eejit and then went home and carved the same hare twice as black out of pure spite. Never did sell him a thing and I'm still glad. So go on, what's the maddest thing a gallery has asked you to change? Colour, size, style, take the swear word out, put a nicer sky in? Or the reverse, has anyone ever asked you to make something and they were dead right and you were too stubborn to see it at the time? I'm genuinely curious, because half the time I think the requests are nonsense and the other half I think I'm just too fond of my own way. Tell me I'm wrong.

Gallery Outreach·Niall Doherty·2d

Not the rejections, they're grand, you get over them. I mean the one sentence that got in under the skin and stayed there. Mine was a woman in a city gallery about six years back. She looked at a stack of my hare prints for a good long while, then said "these are lovely, but where's the pain in them?" I drove home fuming, giving out yards about it to herself at the kitchen table, and then about a week later I realised she was dead right and I'd been carving safe. Changed how I work entirely. I still don't know whether to thank her or not. So go on, what's yours? Could be a slag, could be a compliment, could be something so odd you couldn't make sense of it for months. The one you caught yourself repeating to other people.

Marketing & Social·Niall Doherty·3d

Had a meeting last Thursday with a gallery crowd up in Dublin. Nice people, real interest, they want six or seven pieces for an autumn show. Grand, I'm delighted. Then one of them asks about my "reach." Not followers, like, but reach. Offline. And I sat there like a lad asked to spell a word he's never seen. Because what do you say. I sell at the Saturday market in Galway, I've about 400 people on the mailing list I keep on paper in a shoebox with stamps, and my best bit of marketing this year was a woman called Breda telling her sister. That's the reach. Breda's sister. Ended up saying something about footfall and they wrote it down, so now I'm a man with footfall. Genuinely though, does anyone else find that the language changes when you go up a level and you're suddenly meant to have a system for something you've been doing by hand for fifteen years. Half of me wants to go back to them and say look, the numbers are small and the prints sell and I'd rather that than a big number that doesn't.

General·Niall Doherty·5d

So the auld roller finally gave up last week, splitting right along the edge, and I went and got a proper one. Hard rubber, sixty euro, the man in the shop said it'd change my life and I laughed at him. It has, in the wrong direction. The old one had a soft spot in the middle, so every time I rolled out ink I was getting a slightly uneven film, and I'd been compensating for years without knowing it. Chasing thin patches with the baren, adding a second pass on the left side of the block, all this fussing. Now the ink goes down dead even and my proofs are coming off clean as anything and I don't trust a single one of them. All that fizzing I did on the hare's ear last month? Not the carving at all. It was the roller. Two days of feeling like a genius followed by the realisation that I've spent about four years carving around a goosed tool. The hare looks the same, like. The hare always looks the same, that's the whole problem. Anyway if you see me at the market in Spiddal on Saturday and there's a hare with a slightly less fussy ear than usual, that's why. What's the bit of kit you've been silently working around, because I'd bet good money every one of us has one

Studio Life·Niall Doherty·6d

Not a metaphor, it's actual lino dust and ink and the same two feet in the same spot for eleven years. The floor is that cheap grey vinyl stuff and there's two pale patches about the size of my boots worn clean through the pattern, and a crack running off the right heel. I noticed it properly last week because the small fella was in under the table looking for a toy and he came out with a lump of dried ink shaped like a kidney and asked me was it a fossil. Anyway the actual thing on my mind: I'm laying a new floor in there in the spring and I genuinely don't know whether to keep the patches. Part of me wants to cut the two of them out and nail them to the wall over the bench, like a pair of old boots. The other part of me thinks that's the sort of thing a fella does right before he starts charging people to look at his studio. The crack I'm not worried about, the crack can go. What's the daftest thing ye have kept out of a workspace because throwing it out felt like a lie about how long you've been at it.

Gallery Outreach·Niall Doherty·1w

Right, settle this for me because I've had two very different experiences and I'm still not sure which was the fluke. First gallery that ever showed my linocuts, I walked in off the street. No appointment, no email, just a folder of prints under my arm and a fair bit of neck. The woman behind the desk was mid-something, clearly not in the mood, and I near talked the ear off her about a hare. She gave me four minutes and a "leave the folder, we'll ring you." I thought I'd blown it. She rang me eleven days later. Since then I've sent maybe nine or ten properly composed emails with the website link and the nice photographs and the polite paragraph about my practice, and I've had two replies. One of them was a no. So my honest theory is the walking in did more for me than every tidy email since, and I'm not sure if that's because of the neck or because a print you can actually hold does something an attachment can't. Could also just be I write a desperate email. What's yours? Did you get in the door by emailing, walking in, or the third thing nobody admits to, which is knowing somebody? And if you're an emailer, tell me what you put in the subject line because mine are clearly being eaten alive.

Marketing & Social·Niall Doherty·1w

Sold the last of a hare edition at a market in Kinvara on Saturday and I'm still annoyed about it, and not in the way you'd think. I priced them at €25. Hand-carved, hand-pulled, six weeks of an evenings' work in the block before a single one of them existed. And they went, grand, they went fast, and that's the problem. Fella bought two, told me I was "very reasonable," and I could feel the whole stall behind me wince. Here's the thing I keep doing and I know I keep doing it: I price for the person I'm afraid of. The one who'd look at a print and go "sure I could get a poster for a fiver." I never meet that person. The people who actually buy are the ones who want the thing that took six weeks, and the low price is telling them something about it that isn't true. The ones I've had at €45 sat there a bit longer and then sold to someone who looked at the back of them and asked how the block was cut. Different conversation entirely. Better one. I'm not going to pretend I've solved it. Next market I'll probably do the same thing again because a bad day with nothing sold is worse than a bad price. But I've a hedgerow block on the press at the moment and I've decided that one starts at €45 and I'll sit on my hands. Anyway. If you're a maker, what's the number you're afraid to say out loud? Mine was 45 for a long time and it's a stupid thing to be afraid of.

Artwork Feedback·Niall Doherty·1w

Look, I know what the problem is and I'm going to say it out loud so I stop being thick about it. I'm on a heron, standing in the shallows, and the whole thing hangs on the neck. That S-curve is the print. Everything else is furniture. And I've cut the neck about 2mm too thick at the shoulder join, so instead of that coiled tension it looks like a goose that's had a feed of pints. I've proofed it four times now on the same sheet of Japanese paper, telling myself each time it's just the inking, the pressure, the paper's a bit damp, I'll pull it again when I'm fresh. It's not the inking. The block is wrong. The annoying bit is the fix means cutting a new keyblock from scratch. There's no adding wood back. I could scrape a sliver off the shoulder line and see if I can slim it down, but then the wing feathering above it has nothing to sit into and it'll look like a heron wearing a scarf. So it's start again, and I've two weeks to the market in Spiddal. Any of ye ever try cutting the thing you're avoiding on a scrap block first, just to prove to yourself it's the right cut? I've a mind to do it but I suspect I'm only delaying the inevitable and I know it.

Gallery Outreach·Niall Doherty·1w

Right, so I'll go first and make a holy show of meself. The best one I ever got wasn't a gallery at all in the fancy sense. It was the back room of a cafe in Kinvara that hung local work, and I got it because the woman who ran it bought a print off me at the Saturday market, then asked did I have more. That was it. No submission, no portfolio, no covering letter. She liked the hare, I brought a box of them in the following Tuesday, and they were up on the wall by closing. Two years of standing at that market with damp hands and a folding table did more for me than every email I ever sent to a place with a glass front door. So that's mine. The tiny spot that took a chance on you before anyone with a proper name over the door did. Where was it, and how did you two find each other? Was it a market, a pub, a friend of a friend, a shop that just had a bit of wall going spare? Asking because I keep meeting young makers who think the only real start is the big white room, and I want to be able to point them at twenty other doors instead.

Studio Life·Niall Doherty·1w

Right so, small confession. Years ago I stopped trying to carve cold lino. You'd be fighting the stuff, the tool skidding, the surface like a frozen jaffa, and you'd blame your hands when really the block was just stone cold. So now the kettle goes on the minute I get in. Not for tea, not at first anyway. I sit the block on an old tea towel beside it, let it take the warmth for ten minutes while I have the actual tea and stare at the drawing and convince myself I know what I'm doing. Means the studio smells faintly of burnt dust and hot rubber now. Which is a smell I've come to love and absolutely nobody else would. The wife came in last week to call me for dinner, saw the block propped up on the towel like a patient in a hospital bed, and just looked at me. "It's not even a real setting, Niall." It is though. It's the setting between boil and off. That's a setting. Anyway I'm midway through a big heron piece, 40cm by 60cm, three blocks for it, and the grey block is the one giving me trouble. Grey always takes the warmth worse than the brown. I'm aware how mental that sentence would sound to anyone outside this room. What's the mad ritual you'd have to explain with a straight face? I'll read them all tonight before I go back to the heron.

Studio Life·Niall Doherty·1w

Small thing but it's thrown me. The little Roberts radio in the studio, the one with the aerial held on with a strip of gaffer, finally gave up after about fifteen years. Took it apart, cleaned the dial, nothing. So it's just me and the noise of the house now. And I've discovered the washing machine has a rhythm to it. Not a nice one either. It's a sort of thunk-thunk-thunk-whirr that sets up a tempo I did not ask for, and I've caught myself carving to it. Small controlled cuts, then a long pause at the whirr. Took me two days to cop that my hand was following a spin cycle. The hare's ear I'm working on is now in 4/4 whether it wants to be or not. I'm not one for the headphones thing either, tried it, the earphones kept pulling the block sideways when I leaned over. So I'm left with options. Talk radio in the morning, which is a mistake because I end up arguing with it and losing my line. Or one of the kids' story tapes on the little speaker, which honestly is winning at the moment, there's a version of the Children of Lir on it that's grand to work to. Pointless question I know, but I'm genuinely curious what's on in other people's rooms when the work is happening. Music, silence, the telly through the wall, the dog snoring. I've a feeling the answer says a lot about the person. Mine currently says: I am carving a hare to the beat of a load of whites.

Marketing & Social·Niall Doherty·2w

Small printmaker, so this is not some big studio story. I sell at two markets a month and take the odd commission, prints from €35 up to about €280 for the big framed ones. In January I put everything up by a third. Not because I'd found religion about my worth, mostly because framing costs went through the roof and I was sick of eating it. Didn't announce it, didn't write a post about it, just changed the numbers on the board. The thing nobody warns you about: the actual sales barely moved. Maybe a few less of the cheap ones. But the messages changed completely. The crowd that wants a €40 framed original signed to their mother in law on a Tuesday for a wedding on Friday? Thinned out. The people who do get in touch now ask real questions, sizes, editions, can they collect it Saturday. One lad last month paid a deposit before he'd even seen the block proof. I spent years thinking I had a pricing problem when what I had was a sorting problem. The low price wasn't making me sales, it was making me correspondence. The bit I got wrong though: I still price the small unframed ones too low and I know it. There's a stack of hares on the shelf downstairs telling me so. Curious if anyone else found the same after a rise, or if it was the opposite and the whole thing fell off a cliff.

Pricing·Niall Doherty·2w

so I finally did it. the small hare linocut, the one I've been pulling for years, the 8x10 hand-burnished job on that Japanese paper, went from 45 to 65 at the market last Saturday. sat with it for about a year and a half before I moved on it, kept telling myself the paper had gone up, the ink had gone up, the whole lot had gone up, and I still felt like a chancer writing the new number on the card. here's the thing nobody warns you about. two of the women who buy one off me every Christmas, the ones who've been buying them since I was set up beside the fish van, they both looked at the tag and then looked at me and one of them goes "ah, is that the price now?" and I heard myself start explaining. explaining. to a woman who's watched me sell these for the price of two pints since her kids were small. I gave her the whole speech about the paper and she nodded along and bought one anyway but I've been turning it over all week. sold eleven of them regardless. so it wasn't the price that was the problem, it was me standing there like I owed everybody an apology for it. my wife says I do this every time, that I'd rather be liked than paid, which is grand coming from someone who's never had to put a number on her own work. I know lads charging 120 for the same size print and I know lads charging 30 and the ones charging 30 are the ones who'll pack it in next year. I'm not going back. anyway. the two Christmas women will come round, or they won't. curious what ye do about the regulars when the price moves, do ye warn them first or let them find out at the table like I did.

General·Niall Doherty·2w

Lads, I have a confession. The hare print sold out before Christmas, all forty of them gone, and I'm still in the workshop every night gouging away at the same block like a lunatic. Told myself I was doing a second run. I even bought the paper, a big sheet of Fabriano I sliced down at the kitchen table on Sunday while the young fella ate his Weetabix and judged me silently. But that's a lie. I'm not running an edition. I'm just carving her over and over because I haven't figured out the next thing yet and I can't stand the quiet of a blank block sitting there. You know the way it goes. Every printmaker has the one image that pays the rent and pays the soul and they don't always line up. And when you're between ideas you reach for the thing your hands already know, and you tell yourself it's practice, and it is, sort of, but it's also hiding. My wife asked me the other night how long I was going to keep at the hare and I said grand, not long, and she gave me the look. She knows the look she's getting back. Sitting there with a fresh cup of tea going cold beside me, six hours in, and I'd swear I've made the ears slightly better each time. Which is the problem. They're fine. They were fine the first time. Anyway. I'll stop.

Pricing·Niall Doherty·2w

Genuinely still annoyed about this. I've an edition of 40 of the hare, the one leaning into the wind with the ears back, black on cream Zerkall. Small, about A5. Hand pulled, all of them a bit different at the edges, which is half the point of the thing. I had it at 35 for the Saturday market in the square, sold nine in an afternoon, felt like a proper printer for once. So I thought right, that's the market telling me something, and I put it at 45 for the next one. Sold one. To my wife's cousin, and I'm fairly sure she was being decent. Same print. Same paper. Same hands. Two weeks apart. And I've gone back and forth on it since like an eejit, wondering was it the rain, was it that the other stall had the coffee, or did I just get the crowd that day and the price had nothing to do with it at all. Head melted. The thing that nags me isn't the money, it's that I still don't know what the print is worth, and I've been doing this long enough that I feel like I should. Forty euro? Fifty? I've a notion that 35 was me pricing it for people I like rather than pricing the work. Anyway I'm back at 35 for the next one because I'd rather shift them than sit looking at a box of hares in the spare room. If anyone else has done the thing where you put the price up and it goes quiet and you can't tell if the price did it or the day did it, I'd love to hear it, because I'm starting to think you can never actually know.

Gallery Outreach·Niall Doherty·2w

Right, I'll go first because I'm still not over it. Years back I had a small gallery take a run of my linocuts, the hare ones, the big black one mid-leap. Grand, delighted with myself entirely. Then the woman rings me up a week before the show and asks, very gently, would I consider giving the hare "a bit more of a smile about him." Said he looked fierce. He's a hare. He's supposed to look like he's about to fight you. I said no, obviously, and she hung up fairly sharpish. Still sold three of them on the night so who's laughing. But it got me thinking about all the small asks people get handed. Not the big obvious ones like the 40% or the "would you mind paying to hang." The wee ones. The "could you make it a bit smaller," the "any chance of a brighter one, it's for a hallway," the "the customer wants it in blue." So what's the strangest thing a gallery has asked you to change? Not the worst, the oddest. The one where you stood there going, sorry, what now. Tell me yours. I want to feel less alone in this.

General·Niall Doherty·2w

There's a heron block on the bench since last week and I'm after getting to the bit nobody warns you about, which is the part where the legs meet the body. Sounds simple. It is not. Get it wrong and you've got a bird standing in a bucket. Anyroad, I carved it, pulled a proof, and the whole thing reads like a heron in wellingtons for the winter. The shoulders are too heavy where I tried to be clever with the shading and now he looks like he's been at the spuds all his life. The thing is, I know what's wrong and I know roughly how to fix it, and I still sat looking at it for two hours with a mug of tea gone cold instead of just doing it. Eventually the small lad came in looking for his crayons, saw it, and said "he's fierce fat isn't he." Out of the mouths. He's not wrong either. So it's back to the block tomorrow, take the shoulders down and stop being precious about it. That's the whole job really, being willing to cut away the bit you were pleased with. Put it up on the wall for the night so I don't have to look at him anymore. The dog's not a bit impressed either.

Gallery Outreach·Niall Doherty·2w

Right, so I've been going through my own gallery list lately and it's a mess of odd stories, and the one that still makes me laugh is this. Years back I had a handful of lino prints hanging in a chipper in Spiddal. Not a gallery, not a cafe with notions, a chipper. The owner was a cousin of a fella I used to labour with and he wanted something on the walls that wasn't a photo of a fish. So up went three hares. One Friday a woman comes in for a bag of chips, stands there eating them out of the paper staring at the middle hare, and asks him who did it. Turns out she ran a small gallery out west and she rang me the following Tuesday. That one show kept me going for about two years, I'm not exaggerating. And I still can't decide if that's the system working or the system being absolutely stone mad. So go on, where's the strangest, most accidental place a gallery or a show ever came out of for you? A pub, a dentist's waiting room, a wedding, a fella your mother knew, the back of a van at a market. The less likely the better. I want to feel less ridiculous about the chipper.

Gallery Outreach·Niall Doherty·3w

Right, I'll go first so nobody feels like they're confessing into the void. I said yes to a spot years back in a town I won't name. Small room, nice light, chap seemed sound, and about a week before the show he started asking if I'd "do the framing myself, like, to save us both a few bob." Grand, sure. Then he wanted a cut of the door on the opening night. Then he wanted me to help paint the fecking walls. I was that thrilled to have a wall at all that I said yes to every one of them and did the walls badly. Ended up fine, sold a few, learned nothing, went back to him twice more. That's the honest part. I didn't learn anything for years. So, what was the earliest red flag you spotted and ignored anyway? The deposit that never quite happened, the "we'll sort money after", the gallery that's actually a cafe with hooks, the landlord's cousin who "knows art people". Give me the one that had you going ah here, that's not right, and then you signed anyway. Not looking for the horror stories where it all went wrong, I want the small ones. The ones you talked yourself past. Tell me I'm not the only eejit.

Pricing·Niall Doherty·3w

Was at the market in Galway on Saturday, the one by the Spanish Arch, and a woman bought one of the hares off me for 60 euro. Handy, she was delighted, I was delighted, she went off with it under her arm. Then I got home, kids in bed, and I did the sums on that particular block because I'd been putting it off. Lino board, ink, the good paper, that's about 11 euro a print when I'm doing a run. Fine. But that block itself, from the first sketch to the last proof, was the guts of two weeks of evenings. Not two weeks of solid days, I'm not pretending that, but two weeks of the hours I actually have after the small lad is down and the older one has stopped asking me questions about dinosaurs. So call it 25 hours. 60 minus 11 is 49. 49 into 25 hours is just under two euro an hour, and that's before I count the fact that I carved the thing four times over because the first three were wrong. The mad part is I'd sell it again tomorrow at 60 because it's the market and people have a tenner in their hand and there's a ceiling on what a stranger will part with at a stall. What I'm realising is the 60 isn't the problem. The problem is I'm putting the two-week blocks on the market table at all, and keeping the ones I actually need to charge properly for on the shelf in the studio where only people who've already decided they want one will ever see them.

Pricing·Niall Doherty·3w

So I'm after getting the quote back from the framer for a batch of six, and it's 160 a frame. The print inside it is 145. I priced that print maybe four years ago and never touched it since, because the ones who buy it buy it at the market and they know the price, and changing it felt like a whole thing I didn't want to have. Meanwhile the lino went up, the paper went up, the ink went up, and the glass of a Saturday morning when I'm standing in the rain in Salthill went up too if you want to count that, and I do, because a wet market day is four hours of my life. The mad part is the framer is dead right to charge it. He's got the same problem as me only he's after solving it. I'm not raising it to 200, that's a jump too far and I'd lose the regulars. I'm thinking 175 in the new year and just eating the flak for a month or two. My wife says I should have done it two years ago. She's not wrong but she says that about most things. Anyone else sitting on a price they set back when diesel was cheaper and the head was lighter and just never getting round to it?

Wins·Niall Doherty·3w

I've been carving this one hare since February. Not a new hare, the same hare, the one I keep coming back to like a dog to a gate. Every time I pull a proof the eye is the thing that ruins it. Too round and it looks like a sheep. Too small and the whole head goes dead, like there's nothing home behind it. Anyway. Tuesday night, half eleven, kids in bed, Herself asleep, I'm in the shed with the radio on low and I take one more sliver off the corner of the pupil with a 1mm gouge. Barely anything. Could have been a bit of dust for all the size of it. Pulled the proof and stood there looking at it for a good minute. There he was. Looking back at me. Fourteen proofs to get a hare to look at you. I know that sounds like nothing. But it's the first time in about five months I've looked at my own work and not wanted to put it through the window. The rest of the block is still rough as a ditch, I'll be at it another fortnight, and I don't care. Anyone else had one of those where it's a stupid small thing that flips the whole piece? Not the big dramatic breakthrough, just a gouge stroke the width of a hair.

Gallery Outreach·Niall Doherty·3w

Right, I'll go first because it's only fair. Years back, before anyone knew my name, I walked into a place in town with a folder of linocuts under my arm and absolutely no appointment. No email. No plan. Just a fella with ink under his nails asking would whoever's in charge have five minutes. The woman at the desk looked at me like I'd walked in off a building site, which to be fair, I probably had. She gave me the five minutes. I got a "leave the folder in, we'll be in touch." Never heard a word back. But I did learn something that day, that a closed door is only closed until you knock on it and look harmless enough. So tell me. What's the maddest, cheekiest, most shameless thing you've ever done to get your work in front of someone? Sliding a print under a door, following a curator around a launch, sticking a business card in a coat pocket, I've heard it all and I want the rest. And be honest now, did it actually work, or did you just get a lovely story out of it? 🙂

Studio Life·Niall Doherty·3w

Made a bench hook there in February. Grand bit of mahogany off a fella in the woodturning club, two stops, glued and screwed, more time in the finishing of it than the actual cutting. Proud as punch with it. Have I used it? Have I fuck. It's sitting on the shelf under the press with a lovely coat of oil on it and I'm up at the table with the block balanced on the lip of a copy of the Independent, same as I've done for fifteen years, chasing the wee shite around the table every time I put any weight on the tool. Nearly went through my thumb on Monday, which is when the whole thing came home to me. I'm not against it nor anything. It's a fine hook. The problem is my hands know where they go and the shelf is where the hook lives and the two facts don't seem able to meet. Wondering if anyone else has a thing they bought or built that's technically better than what they do, and the hands have just said no.

Studio Life·Niall Doherty·4w

So the big hare block, the one I've been carving the last three weeks, has a hairline crack running out from the ear about an inch and a half. Been there a few days I think. I noticed it Tuesday and my honest reaction was to turn the lamp a bit and keep going, which tells you everything about where the head is at. It's a 300x400 piece of lino, grey hessian-backed, and I've gone too deep along the ear hollow, that's what did it. Thin floor, pressure from the gouge, and she split. Should have known, I knew it at the time, there's a sound it makes when you're cutting too fine and I heard it and carried on. Now the question is do I keep pulling from it and just accept the crack will show up as a faint line in the print, or do I stop and do the whole thing again. I did four proofs off it Saturday and honestly the line barely reads, it looks like a bit of texture in the fur. But it'll get worse. Every pull opens it a bit more. My wife says put a bit of tape on the back and stop fussing. The tape trick does work, I've done it before on smaller blocks, but this one's for an edition of 40 and I don't want to be standing in the market in six months explaining a seam. Anyway. I've a bit of fresh lino in the rack and I'm half-committed to starting again and half-committed to pretending this one is grand. Sitting here with a mug of tea gone cold looking at it like it might heal itself. 🙂

Wins·Niall Doherty·4w

Small thing, and I'm still buzzing off it. I did a commission for a couple over in Oranmore, a St Brigid's cross with the rushes done as a big bold black shape over a grey sky, cut in lino, edition of 30. Not my usual hare, but they asked and I liked the idea, the cross is a fierce strong graphic when you strip it back. It took me three weeks and I redid the whole block once because the first one the arms were too thin and it just looked like a starfish having a bad day. Anyway, I dropped it in this morning. Man opens the door, takes the print, holds it out at arm's length, and says nothing for a solid ten seconds. I'm standing there dying, thinking right, he hates it, do I offer to take it back. Then he goes "hang on till I get herself" and walks off down the hall and I can hear him calling her like there's a fire. She came out and got genuinely teary. Said her granny had one on the wall of the kitchen in Clifden and she'd forgotten the shape of it. And here's the bit that got me. I know it's just a bit of lino and a bad back from the press. But for about a minute this morning it didn't feel like work at all. Sitting here with the tea gone cold, still grinning at nothing like an eejit.

Wins·Niall Doherty·4w

Nine pulls. That's what it took this week and I want to say that out loud because I've been showing people the print for two months and letting them think it came off the block like that. It's a hare, big one, crouched in dead winter rushes, and the whole thing lives or dies on one tiny wedge of white left in the eye. Cut it a hair too wide and the animal looks thick. Too narrow and it's a rabbit that's seen a ghost. I'd carved it, proofed it, gone back in with the chisel, proofed again, and on the eighth go I knew I'd taken too much off and there was no putting it back. Linocut doesn't do second chances. You can't weld the stuff back on, whatever your man on YouTube says. So I sat with the block for a day and a half doing nothing, which for me is the hardest part of the whole trade. Kids in and out of the studio, small fella asked why the hare had no eyes yet, told him it was thinking about it. Went for a walk in the rain at Blackrock and came home with the answer, which is nearly always the case and I never learn it. Cut the rushes in deeper instead, so the eye sits in shadow. Gave it the look. Ninth pull off the press and there it was, the one I'd been chasing since November, and I just sat down on the floor of the studio with the paper still in my hand like an eejit. Not a big whooping moment. Just quiet. The dog came over and sat on my foot. Anyway it's hanging on the wall now drying and I can't stop going in to look at it. Twelve in the edition. If you're at the market Saturday I'll have them there, and no, I'm not telling you which pull is which. The bit I keep turning over is that the eighth one wasn't wasted. If I hadn't ruined it I'd never have gone looking for the answer. But I'm not going to pretend I was grand about it at the time, because I wasn't, I was a right grumpy article for two days and my wife will confirm it.

Wins·Niall Doherty·4w

Bit of a mad one Saturday. I do the market in Galway most weeks, stall of prints, hares and herons and the odd bit of bog. Usually I'm lucky to shift four or five and I'm grand with that, it's more about the chat than the till. Anyway a woman came back for the third time in about an hour. Kept circling the big one, the heron in the reeds, the one that took me three blocks to get right because the legs kept coming out like stilts on a stork. Third visit she just says she'll take it. Framed, cash, no haggling, and I wrapped it in the good paper I keep for that and off she went under her arm in the rain. Here's the thing though. I went to take it off the wall and there was this clean pale rectangle where it had been hanging, and I got a bit of a pang off it. All winter looking at that thing every Saturday and now there's just a bare patch of hessian. Got home and the small fella asked had I sold "the bird" and when I said yes he goes "so you don't have it anymore" and looked at me like I'd lost something. Which I suppose I did. The whole point is to sell them, that's the job, ink and paper and a few pound for the coal. But there's a difference between knowing a print is out in the world somewhere and standing in front of the empty nail it used to be on. Anyway the woman was delighted, she said her mother had one of my hares years ago at a fair in Spiddal, so it's gone to a good home. Still. Weird aul feeling all the same.

General·Niall Doherty·4w

So the hare block I'd been chipping at since Tuesday, grand, three proofs off it, fourth one and I'm pulling it and there's a great big gouge straight through the near ear. Went at it with the 3mm when I should have had the 1mm in. Sure look. It's a week's work gone in a second. And here's the thing that has me slightly worried about myself. I wasn't even annoyed. Stood there looking at it like a fella watching rain. Twenty years of this and I'd normally be kicked around the workshop for an hour, dog hiding under the bench. There's a bit of me that thinks a ruined block is nearly a relief. It's decided for you. You can stop carrying it around in the head, all the small things you were going to fix on the next version, the shoulder that wasn't right, the line under the belly I knew was too fussy. Gone. No more versions. So I've one block left in the drawer that's big enough for a hare. And I'm not carving the same one. Going at the whole thing different, more black, less messing about with the hatching. Might be rubbish. Might be the best thing I've done since the heron. Anyway there's a gouge mark about three inches long living in my head now and I'd say it'll be in the next print somewhere whether I like it or not.