Search

Left my cyanotype wash tank sitting for three weeks because I kept telling myself I'd get to it, and when I finally opened it the chemistry had settled into these distinct strata. Blue on top, pale haze underneath, a few flecks of paper lint drifting slow like they were suspended mid-thought. I nearly just drained it. But I stirred it once out of curiosity and honestly the gradient it made on the side of the jar was more beautiful than half the prints I've made this month. So now I'm sitting here with a broken rule of mine not to photograph the process, because I want to remember that even the neglect has something to say. The sea does this too, if you look where the waves turn back. Layers. Somebody tell me I'm not the only one who keeps almost-useful tanks of half-dead chemistry around out of sentiment. My partner says it's hoarding. I say it's patience with no deadline.

Sold two cyanotypes this month. Each one needed a full day of sun, and a day of sun in Porto in January is a small miracle. I waited eleven days between them just for the light to show up. Fourteen hours of actual exposure time across both, plus the coating, the washing in seawater, the drying, the flat files. €160 for the pair. I worked it out at the kitchen table and it came to about €11 an hour, and that's before the paper and the chemistry. The strange part is I'm not even angry. I set those prices. I've had the same number in my head for three years and not once questioned it. The print is a thing I love making more than anything, so I kept pricing it like a hobby that occasionally pays rent. I'm not raising it to €400 tomorrow. I think I'm going to test €85 per print and see who flinches. Even that feels like lying, which tells me exactly how far I am from a fair number.

I used to write these careful captions about cyanotype chemistry, the UV exposure times, the pH of the seawater I develop in. Thought people needed to understand the craft to appreciate the print. Then I posted a photo of a print that went completely wrong, overexposed, paper curled, the blue almost black, the seaweed I'd placed shifting mid-exposure so the whole thing was a ghost. I wrote "The sun moved and so did I. This one belongs to the Atlantic now." It got more engagement than any of my tidy process posts. People commented about their own ruined things, the work they'd abandoned, the projects that fell apart. A gallery owner in Amsterdam messaged me asking if I had more "failures" available. I don't think people want to understand how it's made. I think they want to feel that they're allowed to make mistakes too. So now I show the ones that didn't work, alongside the ones that did. The studio floor after a bad week. The prints I fished out of the tide at the wrong moment. The work sells the same. But the conversations are different.

I made a cyanotype yesterday of a cuttlebone I found on the beach, one of those big ones, almost the length of my hand. Laid it directly on the paper with some torn fishing net over it. Exposure was good, the sun was strong, but when I washed it the shadows all went muddy. The cuttlebone reads as a dark blob instead of having that honeycomb texture it has on the surface. I think I underwatered my chemistry. Or maybe the paper was too dry when I coated it. I've been using a cotton rag paper I'm not as familiar with and it seems to drink the emulsion differently. I've been staring at it for an hour. Part of me wants to call it a bad print and toss it. Part of me thinks there's something in the flatness, like the sea at dusk, all that detail pulled under. But I don't know if I'm just making peace with a mistake. How do you tell the difference between a flaw that works and one that's just a failure?

I mixed a big batch of cadmium red deep with a little burnt umber and a touch of cold wax medium last Tuesday. Laid it down in a broad band across the bottom third of a 180 x 140. Looked right. Earthy but alive. Yesterday I walked in and it had gone brown. Flat and dead. Not dried differently, the mixture itself seems to have settled or separated or just decided to be something else overnight. This happens to me more than I'd like and I still don't fully understand the chemistry. The pigment particles are heavy, I know that. Maybe the cold wax lets them migrate in ways I'm not accounting for. Or maybe I'm just not mixing thoroughly enough. But I stir it for a good five minutes, scrape and fold. I'm wondering if other people have a colour they love that reliably betrays them after a day. And if you've found a fix that isn't just mixing fresh every session because at this scale that gets expensive fast.