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Myself Ramesh. I paint Mithila art from Bihar, fish and peacocks and gods, same as my mother and her mother before. This is our tradition, many centuries old. Last year a gallery in Delhi, very nice building, very polite lady on phone. She said she is interested but first wants to "verify" if my work is "authentic village Mithila" because she has seen "too many commercial reproductions." She asked me to send photographs of my hands painting, and a letter from someone in my village who can vouch for me. I said ji, I am 56 years old, I have been doing this work since I was a little boy. My mother learned from her mother. You can see the natural pigment, the line work. But she insisted. So I sent. Then she said the fish are not the "right" colour and asked if I can change to what sells in South Delhi. I said no, this is Mithila fish, this is how we do. She stopped replying. Any of you had a gallery ask you to prove your own tradition? Or tell you your own art is not "authentic" enough? What do you even do with that.

There's a woman at the market every second Sunday who stops at my stall, looks at the hare linocut I've been carving versions of for the guts of a decade now, and asks the same question. Is he native Irish? And I say sure he's from a sketch I did out past Spiddal, he's as native as I am. And she goes, oh, but the grey ones are more authentic, don't you think? The mountain hare. Now, I don't want to be a fella who argues about taxonomy with a customer holding a wallet, and I've learned the hard way that "well actually" is not a sound you want to make at a market. But the head on me. I've been drawing this hare from the same family that's been in the field behind my uncle's place since I was a kid. It's not a species, it's a specific lad. I could point at the field from where I carved it. And she's telling me about authenticity. What I wanted to say was, would you go up to a portrait painter and tell him the sitter wasn't the right shade of Irish? But I just smiled and told her the black ink was imported, in fairness, so maybe the whole thing was a bit of a mongrel anyway. She bought the card in the end, the one with the heron on it. I'm not sure the hare and I have recovered.

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.

I've been selling small edition screenprints through Instagram and my site for about a year now. Nothing huge, maybe 15-20 pieces a month. A few weeks ago I started slipping in a free risograph print with each order, just something I'd already made, an extra, no mention of it in the listing. I thought it would be a nice gesture. What I didn't expect is that people started posting the risograph more than the thing they paid for. Like, photographing it on their wall, tagging me, asking if it's for sale separately. The free thing became the thing they wanted. It's making me rethink how I present the work. People love feeling like they discovered something, even if you deliberately put it there. There's something about the "bonus" object that reads as more authentic than the main one, probably because it feels less like a transaction. I don't know, maybe this is just a thing everyone in product already knows. But coming from a fine art background where you never give anything away because it devalues the work, it's messing with my head a little.

I spent all Sunday afternoon on a landscape, trying to get this one tree just right. I think I finally mixed a color for the bark that felt authentic, but then the branches... they just look a bit stiff, you know? It's so close to what I see in my head, but not quite. Anyone else get that 'almost there' feeling and just have to put the brush down before they ruin it completely?

The gallery in Düsseldorf wants a short process video for the newsletter. Fifteen seconds, vertical, something "authentic." I said yes before I thought about what fifteen seconds of my actual working day looks like. It is standing in front of a canvas the size of a door, doing nothing, for about an hour. Then a small adjustment with a palette knife. Then more nothing. The interesting part of my work is the part where I decide not to touch it, and you cannot film a decision not to act. So now I am supposed to stage a version of my own studio for a phone camera. Squeeze out paint I am not going to use yet. Look thoughtfully at something. It feels like being asked to perform a caricature of myself, and the fee for the show is good enough that I will probably do it. That is the part that sits badly with me. Not them asking. Me agreeing. My wife says just film your hands and let them loop it. She is usually right about these things, which is annoying.

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.

Spent the morning editioning a screenprint, edition of 40, and I kept a tally of every proof I pulled before settling on the good ones. Fourteen proofs. Fourteen almost-finished prints sitting in a drawer that no one will ever see, and I caught myself thinking about how thrilled I'd be to find a stack of rejected proofs by someone I admire. But mine are just... failures. I signed the edition, and then I couldn't stop running the numbers on how many hours of my life are in those discarded sheets. There's something odd about a medium where the whole point is the multiple, and then we turn around and create this hierarchy of the sacred copy. The artist's proof, the edition, the sketch, the one that got away. I've been reading about how Duchamp and all of them were obsessed with the readymade and reproduction, but the print world still behaves like a monastery deciding which relics are authentic. I don't know. Maybe I should have titled the drawer. Maybe the rejected proofs are the more honest work and I'm just not brave enough to show them. Does anyone else keep their near-misses, or do you destroy them?

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.

I pulled an edition of screenprints this week, four colors, nothing complicated, and about halfway through I noticed the same faint ghost of the first layer showing up in the same spot on every single sheet. Not a misprint exactly. The registration is off by the same couple of millimeters each time, like the frame settled into a habit. Part of me wanted to scrap the lot and start over. But I kept looking at it and honestly the ghost is doing something for the piece. It reads like the image has a memory of itself. Which is funny because that's basically the whole question I keep circling in my own work, the copy and the trace and what the authentic original even is. And here it is, accidental, in forty identical sheets. I haven't decided yet. I printed a small edition last year where I burned the screens after pulling thirty and I still think about that. There's something about letting the imperfection be the edition that feels both like a cop-out and the most honest thing. Anyway. The work is leaning on it. Or I'm rationalising it. Hard to tell from inside.