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The edition of riso prints I made almost as a joke, sitting at the print table during a residency, outsells everything I've put actual weeks into. Etchings that took me months to pull. Nobody buys them. The 60 cent machine-made copies sell out in two days. I keep telling myself it's because they're cheap, people can afford them, they don't need a frame and a wall. But the real reason is probably that they photograph flat and fast and that's what the feed wants. The etching doesn't read on a phone. The riso does. So the market rewards the thing that reproduces well, and I'm a printmaker, I should find that funny. It is funny. It's also a little humiliating that I'm fifty euros away from just making risos full time and telling myself it's a conceptual choice. I'm not complaining about the money. I'm complaining that I can't tell anymore if I'm following the work or the algorithm disguised as the work.

I'm still thinking about this guy, must be sixty-five, works in oil paint only, big gestural abstracts. He watched me pulling proofs for a day and then at dinner he said it with this real pity in his voice: "It's a shame, because you clearly have the eye, but you're limiting yourself to crafts." I said printmaking has been central to contemporary art since, I don't know, Dürer? And he said Dürer was a painter who also did prints. Like printmaking is just a side thing painters do when they're between ideas. The thing that gets me is the hierarchy. Oil painting = serious. Etching, screenprint, anything that involves a process and a press = decorative. It's so nineteenth century. And I didn't fight him properly because I was tired and my hands hurt from scraping, but I've been composing the argument in my head for three days now. You know when the perfect retort arrives too late?

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 etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

A gallery in Berlin that I won't name wants three of my etchings for a small group show in spring, and asked for the price list. I sent it. Three plates, aquatint, edition of 18, 780 euros unframed. The reply came back the same afternoon. Could I do 390, because "prints are multiples, so the price should reflect that." I have been chewing on this for two days and not because I'm insulted. Because the logic is wrong in a way that's interesting. The multiple is exactly the reason the price is what it is. Eighteen people can own this thing, which means each one of them is not paying for the whole of the work. The plate, the proofing, the four days of biting and scraping and failing, the two states I threw away, the paper I ruined on the third run: all of that is divided across eighteen. If I'd made a single unique drawing on that same paper I would be asking four times more and nobody at that gallery would blink. So the argument isn't that the multiple makes it cheap. It's that the multiple makes it copyable, and somewhere in the gallery's head a copy is worth less than an original. Which is the oldest idea in the medium and also the one I've built my whole practice against. Walter Benjamin would have a field day. Actually he'd probably be very polite about it and then say something devastating. What I want to know is whether I'm being naive. I could say no to 390 and lose the show, or say yes and quietly agree that eighteen is a discount rather than a structure. I said I'd think about it. I don't want to think about it, I want to know what the rest of you do when the person across the table is using the medium against you. Meanwhile I've got a stack of proofs on the drying rack that I can't look at without doing sums in my head.

First gallery that showed any interest in my work, early in my MFA. I was making these very labour-intensive etchings, lots of aquatint, layered. The gallerist looked at my portfolio and said, I'm not making this up, "this is beautiful but etching doesn't sell. Do you work in oil?" I didn't. I'd never painted. I said no and we never spoke again. Now I think: she was wrong about etching, but also she was telling me what she was, a decor dealer, not someone interested in what the work was about. Took me a while to learn the difference. What's your gallery red flag story? The thing that told you immediately this wasn't your person.

I finally did the real math on my last edition and it's worse than I thought. Thirty prints, edition of 30, sold at €220 each. Sounds fine until you count what's actually in it. The plate took me six weeks of drawing and biting. That time doesn't multiply across the edition, it just sits there as a lump. Then each sheet: paper, ink, the hours in the studio, the failed proofs that go in the bin before a single good one exists. Two plates cracked before I got one to bite right. So €6,600 gross on the edition. Take out paper and ink and studio rent and the proofs that failed and the plate time at anything near minimum wage and I'm looking at maybe €9 an hour if I'm being generous with myself. And that's the number I'm supposed to feel lucky about because editioned work is "approachable" for collectors. What I can't figure out is where the line is. Raise the price and a print is no longer the entry point, it's a real purchase, and people hesitate. Keep it where it is and I'm basically paying to have my work out in the world. I know plenty of printmakers who've just stopped doing editions altogether because the answer never made sense. I'm not there yet but I'm watching the math get worse every time I add up a new one.

So my first real gallery yes came from a space that, I'm fairly sure, had never shown a print in its life. There was a plate mark on one of my pieces and the director asked, genuinely curious, why I'd "damaged the paper there." I explained intaglio for maybe ten minutes. He nodded a lot. I still said yes. The show was fine, the work was fine, but what I remember is that the person selling my multiples could not explain how a multiple works to a buyer. Which for my work specifically is a bit of a problem, since the whole point is the reproduction. So I want to know: how much did the first gallery that took you on actually understand your medium? Did they get it, did you have to teach them, or did you decide it didn't matter as long as they had wall space and a mailing list? I still go back and forth about which of those is the honest answer.

I pulled the blanket off the press this morning and noticed the maker's plate on the side. Glaser, West Berlin, 1962. My father died when I was twenty, so he was alive when this press was bolted together in a city that no longer exists. And now it sits in my studio in Berlin, which is basically the same street, a few kilometers from where it was built. My father was not a printmaker. He was a surgeon. I don't know why I keep doing this arithmetic with the dates. But I've been pulling proofs all week and I keep stopping to touch that plate like it's a relic. There is something about objects that outlive the people who made them. That's probably the whole reason I fell into this medium in the first place. The plate, the proof, the edition. You make a thing and it just keeps going, indifferent to whether you're still around to say anything about it. Anyway. I pulled a good proof of the new aquatint today. The first one that actually feels like something. So the press and I are on good terms right now.

I've been wrestling with this particular copper plate for weeks, trying to get a specific layered aquatint. Every proof was muddy or flat. I was close to just shelving it entirely. Then this morning, after a very careful sugar lift and a bit more nitric acid, it just... worked. The subtle tonal shifts are there. Feels like a small victory against the material itself. Now to pull the edition.

I did the math on my last edition of 12. Each print took about six hours of actual work, plus plate prep, plus the failed states I pulled before I got the one I kept. I used to price per piece based on time and materials alone, which meant each print was maybe €180 and I was basically paying myself to make work for people to frame and never think about again. Then I flipped it. I priced the edition as a whole, sold the run of 12 at €380 each, and the margin came out to more than my screenprinting gigs pay per week. Same hours, same copper, same ink. The only difference is I stopped pretending the value lives in the labour and started charging for the fact that there are only twelve of something in the world. Feels almost dishonest. Scarcity doing work that my hands should be doing, or that my hands ARE doing and I just refused to name it. Still not sure where the honest line is between "this took me time" and "only a few of these exist and you can't have one unless you pay." But I'm not going back to per-hour pricing either.

The price of a 5-colour screenprint of mine sat at 120 euro for over three years. Not because I did the maths and it came out at 120. Because 120 was the first number I said out loud to someone at a group show in Kreuzberg and after that it felt like a fact about the work. Meanwhile each impression takes me about forty minutes of actual printing, plus the screens, plus the paper which is Fabriano and not cheap, plus the ones I ruin. If I count properly it was maybe 110 euro of my time per print before anything goes wrong. So I was charging people roughly the cost of the paper and a coffee. In January I changed it to 190. I wrote the new price in the spreadsheet, told the two galleries, and waited for the small humiliating email. Nothing happened. One person bought two instead of one. That is the part that disturbs me more than the money. I think what was actually keeping the price down was not the market. It was me deciding in advance that the work was worth less than what I was asking, and then politely making sure everyone else agreed. Which is its own kind of conceptual problem, and not the interesting one I wanted to be working on. Still haven't raised the etchings. Those are at 260 and I know they should be 340 and I have the email drafted. It's been in the drafts since February.

I realised something yesterday while I was pulling proofs that I already knew but hadn't admitted: the part I love most is the preparation. The drawing on the plate, the aquatint, the biting, the masking. The thinking part. Then I get to the printing and something in me checks out. I rush it. I'm already onto the next idea. I used to think this meant I was lazy or not a "real" printmaker but maybe it's just that my brain likes potential more than completion. The proof is where everything is still possible. Once it's an edition it's just... fixed. Decided. I have about 40 copper plates sitting in a drawer that are etched and ready and I haven't printed. Some from two years ago. I tell myself I'm saving them for the right paper or the right mood but honestly I think I just don't want them to be finished. Anyone else work this way or am I just avoiding the hard part?

Every time I give in and post the thing I almost didn't, the rough etching proof with the wiped plate mark still on it, the screenprint that misregistered and made this weird ghost double, that's the one that travels. The pieces I actually spend weeks on, the editions I pull clean and sign, they sit there with forty views. I know intellectually the rough stuff reads as "process" and process is what the feed wants. We're all supposed to be celebrating the handmade and the imperfect now. But there's part of me that resists being rewarded for the thing I'd normally throw in the bin. It feels like the medium itself is being flattened into aesthetic, the mess as decoration, and the actual conceptual work I'm doing gets no airtime because it doesn't photograph well. Also I'm aware that saying "my spontaneous casual posts do better" is itself a strategy now, and posting about posting is the most hollow loop there is. I tried leaning into it. Posted a genuinely failed proof, ink disaster on the plate, told the truth about what went wrong. It did numbers. And I felt weirdly used, like I'd sold the accident instead of the labour. Still don't know if the answer is to gamify it deliberately or to refuse and accept the smaller reach. Anyone else caught in that particular trap?

Small thing but it took me three weeks to get here. I etched a plate of a single line repeated forty times, same line, same pressure, and the whole idea falls apart if the plate doesn't hold the finest one at the edge. First three attempts I overbit it in the ferric and lost the delicate marks, just grey mush, and I sat in the studio in Kreuzberg at 11pm deciding whether the concept was even worth the chemistry. Today I inked it, ran it through the press, lifted the paper, and forty lines came off the plate where I wanted them. Forty, not thirty-eight, not smeared at the corner. I don't know why this one hit harder than a sale would. Maybe because nobody asked me to make it. Anyway I'm keeping proof number one on the wall above the sink even though it's technically imperfect, there's a smudge from my thumb near the bottom margin and I've decided the smudge stays.

I pulled thirty trial proofs of a two-plate etching this week, over three days, same plate, same pressure, and the first twenty-nine went straight in the bin. Not bad prints. Just all slightly off in a way I couldn't name until I had the thirtieth in my hand and could see the difference. The thirtieth has a slip. The paper moved about a millimetre while it went through and one line from the second plate sits just outside where it should, so the whole image reads like something remembered slightly wrong. That's the one I want. I've been standing in front of it for two days trying to work out whether that's a real judgment or just fatigue deciding for me. The thing I keep circling: in an edition, the slip is the error. You pull it, you look, you discard, you keep going until the whole run is identical. The whole form is built on the idea that the good version is the repeatable one. But the actual object I care about here is the one that can't happen twice. Maybe that's not news to anyone. But it's been sitting on me all week, this feeling that I've spent years making multiples and secretly I've been hunting for the single. And I chose a medium that refuses to give it to me.

Pulling a test sheet off the press yesterday, the third one in a row that came out slightly off, and I had the thought I always have now: I don't want to fix this one. For those who don't print: registration is the alignment of the layers. You build a sheet in passes, and every pass has to land exactly where the last one did. There is a whole apparatus of crosses, pins, mylar, tape. It exists so the reproduction is faithful to the matrix. So the copy disappears into the original. I have a registration sheet from a two-colour etching I made in 2015, and the second plate drifted maybe a millimetre and a half on every one of the forty prints. A hairline of the first colour, all around the edge of the shape, where it should not be. I kept the sheet. Not as a memento, more as an argument I was having with myself. Because a perfect multiple has no author. It has a maker, a press, a process, but the sheet itself is just the matrix arriving. The misalignment is the one thing the plate cannot reproduce. It is where the hand is still visible, in a medium whose entire premise is that the hand gets edited out. There is a whole conversation about the aura and the copy that starts in the 1930s and never quite ends, and I keep finding that the interesting part is not the copy. It is the error. The copy is the system working. The error is the system admitting someone was standing there. I am in the middle of a series now where I am deliberately letting the second colour shift by a fixed offset on every print, the same amount, no variation. Which is its own trap, I know. I have turned the accident into a rule. A rule is reproducible. So I am back to no hand, just a more interesting system. I don't have a neat place to land this. It is just that the sheet on my wall is eleven years old and I am still not sure if I kept it as evidence or as an excuse.

My Bologna neighbor, who I've said good morning to for four years, watches me haul a stack of zinc and copper plates up three flights every few weeks. Today he finally asked, with genuine concern in his voice, if I was "doing some kind of scrap metal art marathon" and whether I needed a hand because the plates looked "heavy for my frame." I thanked him and said no, it's printmaking, it's etching. He nodded slowly and said, "Ah, like the recycling." Not the worst interpretation. Honestly some days that's exactly what it is. I keep the bad plates, you know, the ones that printed wrong or the ground failed, and I have a whole graveyard of them under the studio table because I can't throw metal away. It's a hoarding problem disguised as ecological conscience. So maybe he's not wrong. The marathon part I can't defend. I did not tell him that the plates are copper because copper holds a line better than zinc and that I think about this more than I think about most people in my life. Some conversations stay at the door.

There was a print fair in Leipzig two weekends ago, small, mostly German editions dealers and a few of us artists. I brought thirty etchings, three editions, and I had this spreadsheet before I went, mentally, about which ones to push because they did well on Instagram. The "engagement" ones, the moody close-ups people save. You know what sold? Not those. It was the piece I almost didn't pack, a silly little riso of a basil plant, because someone's grandmother in Bologna might have grown basil and it made them laugh. Three people stopped just to tell me it reminded them of a kitchen. One bought it. I keep thinking about that gap. The internet told me people wanted the dark architectural work. The room told me they wanted a basil plant and five minutes of talking about their nonna. I've been optimizing for the wrong audience because the online one is the only one that gives me numbers. The fair gave me 600 visitors on a Sunday and I learned more than a year of analytics. Not sure I have a tidy solution. Just noticing that the algorithm has quietly become my gallerist and I'm not sure I hired it.

I spent yesterday going through the last month's failed prints instead of making new ones. Lined them all up on the long table in the studio, maybe thirty of them. Registration off, ink too thin, paper cockled, one where I pulled the screen too early and smeared the whole ghost across the face. The strange thing is, lined up like that, they look like a series. Coherent, almost intentional. There was a moment where I thought I should just sign them and call it something about process. I didn't. But it made me wonder how much of what we call intention in printmaking is just the archive deciding for us. We don't choose our oeuvre, we curate our failures and the rest is what happens to survive. The one that bothers me most is a small etching where the plate was under-bitten, so everything came out faint, like the image is apologising. I keep coming back to it. Probably because it's the only one where the failure feels like a mood rather than a mistake. Anyway. The table is clean again. I'll make new mistakes tomorrow.