I stopped posting finished pieces. People started replying to the failures.
For years I posted only the prints that came out clean. The ones where the fern held its shape, where the wash went even, where the paper didn't buckle at the edge. Nice squares, no mess.
Then in February I ruined a whole batch. Too much sun, I left them out maybe twenty minutes too long and the whole thing went flat, no depth left in the blue at all. I photographed the worst one anyway and put it up. Just the ruin. No caption saying look at my process, nothing like that.
More people wrote to me about that one print than about a year of the good ones. One woman in Galway asked if she could buy it. A man asked what tide I'd pulled the net from, which felt like the right question to be asked.
I think people are tired of being shown the result. They want to see the hand that is not sure. I don't want to turn that into a formula either, because then it becomes another performance. But it changed how I think about what is worth putting into the world.
I have three ruined sheets on the studio wall now. I like them more than the ones that worked. Not sure yet if that is a good sign or just me getting older.
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Ah this is the right way round entirely. I'm a printmaker in Galway meself, lino mostly, and I've a drawer of what I call the honest ones, the prints where the gouge slipped or the registration went sideways or I inked it up like a man in a hurry. Held onto them for years thinking they were proof I'd a bad day. Then a lad at a market asked to buy one of the misfires off the pile and I near choked. He said the good ones were lovely but this one had a bit of a story in it.
That's the whole thing, I think. A clean print tells you the person can print. A ruined one tells you they kept going. People aren't buying the fern, they're buying the twenty minutes you forgot it in the sun. And the woman in Galway asking for it, sure that's the print doing its job, it's got a hook in it now.
Only thing I'd say, and I'm guilty of the opposite so it's not a lecture, don't get clever about it either. The minute you write a caption explaining the ruin it turns into a lesson and the spell's broke. Just put the mess up and say nothing, the way you did. That's the hard part, mind, saying nothing.
Fair play to you. Now I'll have to go dig out the drawer and see what's in it 🙂
I want to push back a little on the clean one / ruined one split, even though I mostly agree with you. A clean print doesn't only tell you the person can print. Often it tells you the person printed it twelve times and showed you the twelfth. Which is its own kind of lie, or its own kind of editing, depending on how generous you feel.
What I like in your Galway story is smaller than that: the lad wanted the one that had a story. He wasn't buying the accident, he was buying the trace of a decision. There is a difference and I think it's the whole thing. A slip that happened to you is one print. A slip you looked at and chose to keep is a different one.
I keep mine in a flat file and call them the maybe pile, which is less romantic than honest ones, so fair play to you there.
You are right, and the distinction you draw is the part I was missing. The clean print can be a true thing or a rehearsed thing and from the outside they look identical. That is what makes it a kind of editing, maybe even a kind of hiding.
The trace of a decision. Yes. The slip that happens to you is weather. The slip you keep is a choice, and you can feel that on the paper. I have a few where I decided to stop fussing with it and let the mark stand, and those are the ones I would not part with.
So maybe it was never clean against ruined. It is decided against undecided. Thank you for that, I will be carrying it into the next batch.
"A clean print tells you the person can print. A ruined one tells you they kept going." I will be thinking about that for a while, honestly.
The drawer of honest ones is a good name for it. Mine are in a box under the bench, and for years I could not look at them without a small shame. Now I think they are the most honest record I have of the work, more than any finished piece. The clean ones could almost be anyone's. The ruined ones are only mine.
And the lad at the market was right. It is the story that keeps people. I still have that bad blue from February on the wall, flat and dead as anything, and I like it more than prints that took me a week. Funny how that goes.