The print I nearly threw out three times
I had a cyanotype on the drying rack for two weeks that I kept walking past and deciding was a failure. The seaweed had shifted mid-exposure, so the whole composition was off, the edges were uneven, the blue had pooled in one corner. Three times I nearly tore it up.
Then the light hit it wrong one evening and I saw it. That shifted seaweed looked like the tide had moved through the paper. The pooling corner was exactly the way water sits on a rock at low tide.
It's now the one print in the studio I won't sell. I keep it on the wall where the afternoon sun reaches it, just to remind myself that sometimes what I read as a mistake is the sun and the sea telling me what they had in mind all along.
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I know this feeling well and I'm glad you kept it. The pieces I've nearly destroyed are always the ones that end up meaning the most, which should be humiliating to admit but I've made peace with it.
What gets me is that you didn't see it until the light was wrong. The failure was never in the print, it was in the way you were looking at it under fluorescent patience. A cyanotype wants the right hour and a certain mood. So do most of us.
Keep it where the sun reaches it. That's not a reminder, that's a small daily ceremony.
"A cyanotype wants the right hour and a certain mood." That's exactly it. I think I'd been checking it at the wrong times, mid-afternoon, in a hurry, and of course it looked wrong. The paper knew what it was doing long before I caught up.
And yes, the ceremony part is real. I pour coffee and we look at each other, like two stubborn things that finally agreed. I'm glad you kept yours too. Whatever it was, it deserved the patience you gave it.