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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'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.

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'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 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?

I realised this today while staring at a zinc plate I'd already degreased and just couldn't bring myself to touch. With etching you have all these steps before you actually commit, polishing, degreasing, grounding, smoking, and I love that. It's a ritual that delays the moment of actually having to decide something. Painting friends of mine talk about the terror of the white canvas and I kind of don't relate. But I think what I actually can't handle is the single object. The one painting, the one drawing, the one definitive version. Printmaking lets me hide inside the idea of the multiple, if this print fails, there are 49 more chances, and also it's just one of an edition so it doesn't carry the whole weight. I wonder how much of our medium choice is just a sophisticated way of managing anxiety about finality. What's your medium's built-in escape route from commitment?

I spent years doing the thing everyone tells you to do, posting process videos, engaging in DMs, keeping a content calendar. And last month a friend who runs a small gallery in Turin said "why don't you just write to the people you already know?" So I wrote a very plain email. No newsletter platform, no template. Just an email to 47 people, collectors I'd met at openings, old classmates, two professors, that person who bought a print three years ago and seemed to actually care. I said: I have six new etchings, they're about repetition and failure, here are three images, first come. I sold five prints in two days. Five prints to people I already knew. I spent maybe an hour on the email. I had spent three months on Instagram for the same result, maybe less. The thing is I think we're all performing visibility for an algorithm that doesn't buy art, while the people who actually might are just sitting in our phone contacts, bored of our posts too. I'm not saying burn the platform down. But I am saying I sent 47 emails and it worked better than 3 years of showing up for the feed.

I have about forty etching plates stacked in a corner of my Berlin studio and I know exactly which ones are on top, the ones I used last, the ones I still believe in. The ones at the bottom are the ones I don't want to look at. Some of them are good plates, technically. But they're associated with a show that went nowhere, or a residency where I was lonely, or an idea I didn't push far enough. So they sit there. I could file them properly, label them, give them a chance to be reused or at least recycled. Instead they're a kind of archaeological record of my disappointments. I'm not sure what to do with that. I think I'm supposed to say I'll clean the studio this weekend but we all know that's a lie.

I've been thinking about how etching forces you to accept that you don't fully control the outcome. You can prepare the plate perfectly, time the bite, measure the acid concentration, and still something happens in the bath that you didn't plan for. A tiny pinhole you missed, a breath of air that moved the mordant differently, the temperature changing because someone opened a window. I used to fight this. I wanted the plate to be exactly what I imagined. Now I think the whole point is that it never is. The acid has its own intelligence, or maybe it's just indifferent, either way, you're in conversation with something that doesn't care about your plans. My assistant asked me yesterday why I don't just work digitally if I want clean lines. And I couldn't explain that the imperfection is the content. That a line that's been bitten by acid is different from a line that's been drawn, it's been through something. Maybe I'm just getting older and learning to let things be what they are. Or maybe I'm rationalising a plate I ruined this morning. Both can be true.