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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 moved studios last month and finally faced the flat file I've been dragging around since 2014. Two full drawers are just bad editions. Not aborted, not developmental, just bad. Misregistered, muddy, or I simply didn't believe the image when I pulled it and it shows. I almost threw them out. Then I spent an hour pulling each one and trying to remember what I was thinking, and a strange thing happened: the bad ones are the most honest record of the work. The good prints are what I wanted to make. The bad ones are what I actually made while I was still figuring out what I wanted. They have more of me in them than the ones I'd frame. I kept maybe forty, gave the rest to the recycling. Now I'm wondering if I should build them into something. An edition of the failures. There's something in that idea that won't let go, about how printmaking is the medium that's supposed to launder the mistake out, and yet the mistakes are where the thinking happened.

I spent a month on a copper plate for this figure study. Burnishing, scraping back, re-etching the same passages maybe four or five times, convinced each time I was just one pass away from getting the shadow right. And at some point the plate just stopped holding anything. The image literally disappeared into the metal. What's left is a ghost, a faint gray rectangle that reads as nothing. Everyone says the classic thing, that you can't overwork copper, you ruin the plate and then you learn. But I keep looking at the ghost and thinking it actually says more about how I work than the figure ever did. All that effort, all that repetition, and the honest end state is a worn-out surface. I don't know if I should pull a few prints of it like that or just bury it. Part of me thinks showing the failure on purpose is its own kind of move, especially in a medium that's all about the multiple and the proof. The other part thinks I'm just rationalizing a wasted month with a theory, which is exactly the thing I do when a piece doesn't work. Anyone else kept a dead plate and printed it anyway?

had this piece sitting in my studio for months. a collage i made out of my brother's old road maps and a bunch of receipts from that year everything fell apart. i kept thinking it was a mess, too personal, no composition, just stuff glued down with no distance. almost threw it out twice. took it to a small open studio thing last weekend more to get it out of my sight than anything. put a low price on it so if nobody bought it i wouldn't care. a woman bought it and then emailed me later saying she'd lost her sister two years ago and the piece made her feel less alone in it. she said the receipts looked like proof that someone had actually lived a life, not just a name on a stone. i sat on my kitchen floor and cried for like ten minutes. not sad crying. just. something broke open that i didn't know was still sealed.

Ten years I barely painted. Taught, mostly, watched students do in two years what took me six, and told myself it was fine. It wasn't the envy that got me, it was the absence. Your hands forget confidence before they forget technique. The muscle memory stays but the nerve goes, and that nerve is half the craft. People talk about coming back to painting like it's a decision you make one morning. It wasn't. It was months of making bad work on purpose, forgiving myself in advance, before anything decent came out. My first real painting after that stretch was a small pear on a blue cloth and I nearly cried finishing it, which is embarrassing to admit at 44. I think we should tell young painters that the worst thing that can happen to you is not failure, it's stopping and staying stopped. Failure keeps you in the room. Stopping moves you out of it and the rent back in is higher every year.

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.

glued a piece of my brother's old shirt into a frame this week. not the whole shirt, just a strip where the collar had frayed through. spent three days trying to make it sit flat and then gave up and let it wrinkle. and it's the first thing in months i've finished that doesn't feel dead. i keep doing this. i fight something for days, decide it's a failure, and then the failure is the part that works. but i can't shortcut it. i can't just decide day one to let it wrinkle, because then it's fake, it's a pose. it has to genuinely defeat me first. anyone else have this? the thing that only works when you actually lose to it?

A student of mine, she's got real talent, was fighting a portrait this morning. Every fifteen minutes she wanted to scrape it down and start over. I made her sit with it. The ugly stage is where half the painting actually gets decided, and people my age forget we all had to be dragged through it once. It's the same panic every time. You block in something honest and it looks crude, so you think you've failed. But crude is not failure, it's just early. The painting that looks decent at every step is usually the boring one. I told her: if it's ugly because it's wrong, fix it. If it's ugly because it's not finished, shut up and keep going. She kept going. By the end the likeness was there and she looked almost annoyed that it worked. That annoyed look is the best sign I get all week.

Ripped a canvas in half at midnight last night because the face I'd been fighting for three days looked like a mannequin. Dead eyes, nothing behind them. I mixed that pigment for hours, I knew every mark on there, and it still felt like furniture. Slept four hours, woke up at 6am, grabbed the first scrap of paper I found, a receipt from the corner store, and drew the same face in charcoal in about nine minutes. It was alive. It had a pulse. All that "control" and technique I'd been so proud of was the thing killing it. I have a box of ruined canvases under my bed. Twelve of them. Some of them are genuinely good and I still can't look at them without wanting the person in them to look back at me. Anyone else keep your failures around like that or do you burn them?

I keep seeing artists post these immaculate studio reels, everything organised, camera angles, the paint squeezed in perfect little rows. Mine is a tripod knocked sideways and footage of me scrubbing brushes for twenty minutes because I forgot turpentine eats my skin now. And apparently that's the one people like. I don't understand it and I've stopped trying to. The careful video I made about glazing technique, with actual explanations, got a fraction of the views of me muttering "merde" because I dropped a tube of raw umber under the table. Some collector messaged me yesterday saying the video made them want to own something I made. Fine. I'll take it. But I refuse to become a performance of carelessness, you know? The moment I stage the mess it stops being the mess. Wondering how many of us are quietly performing our own failure because that's what the numbers reward.

Sold a little vase at the market on Saturday that I thought was one of my worst pieces. The glaze came out cloudy and the lip slumped to one side when I was being lazy with the wire. I almost didn't even put it out. Some woman picked it up, turned it around for like five minutes, and said it was her favorite thing on the table. Paid full price without asking for a discount, which never happens here. And look. I took the money. I smiled and wrapped it up. But I've been thinking about it all week. Either my taste is completely broken or people genuinely see something in the wonk that I write off as failure. Maybe both. Because the pieces I actually love, the ones I photograph and post and get excited about, those sit. It's the accidents that sell. My grandma always said the kiln knows better than the maker. Maybe she's right and I'm just too close to see it. Anyway, tonight I pulled the one I was convince was ruined and I'm leaving it out on the shelf. Not hiding it in the back. We'll see who's wrong.

Scanned a pastel this week that I nearly didn't bother with. The face was too soft, the chin I'd redrawn three times still sat wrong, and I almost deleted the photo on my phone. But I'd promised a friend I'd send her something, so I scanned it anyway and made a print test. It's the first thing that's sold twice in two days. Small A5 edition, €18 each, and both buyers DM'd the same thing, "the quiet one." The one I thought was a failure. I keep having this happen and I don't know what to do with it. My eye is ruthless and probably wrong. The pieces I'm proud of sit there, the ones I want to bury get attention. Is it that people feel the struggle in a piece? Or is my judgment just genuinely off about what works? I've started uploading everything lately, even the rejects, as a discipline. It's not a strategy, it's me not trusting myself less. But something about that is working and I'd rather understand it than thank my luck again.

A gallery in Barcelona wants to do a small solo show in October, my work, but also some documentation of process, which is fair, the whole thing is basically tidepool alchemy. They asked for my notes on the seawater development, dilution ratios, exposure times, how I account for different salinity levels. And I sat down to write it and realised I have none. I just know. I've been doing this so long I can feel it, the weight of the paper, the way the light sits, the smell of the water. I never standardised any of it because every print is a different day, different sun, different batch of Atlantic. I told them I'd put something together and now I'm staring at a blank page trying to remember how to explain something I only understand with my hands. I think this is the gap between making work and showing it. The making is private and intuitive and full of failure and small victories nobody sees. The showing asks you to translate all of that into something legible. I don't know how to do that without flattening it.

The first real gallery that ever said yes to me, I was maybe 30, living on soup, so excited I nearly shook, turned out to be a complete disaster. Didn't pay, lost work, the whole thing collapsed in six months. The rejection I got two years before that, from a proper serious space? Best thing that happened to me. Made me work harder, think clearer, and when I finally got in somewhere right I was ready for it. Anyone else got a rejection they're secretly grateful for? Or am I romanticising failure like an old man.

I had a show last November. Sixteen paintings, two months of work, the usual opening-night crowd, wine, awkward conversations, people stepping close to a canvas and then stepping back. Zero sales that night. Not one red dot. I stood by the door and watched people leave and thought, well, that's that. Next morning I had three emails. A critic from a local paper, a blogger I'd never heard of, and someone from a small museum in Chemnitz. All of them had been there. All of them wrote something. The museum person asked for a studio visit. The sales came later, slowly, over months, to people who'd read those pieces and then come to the gallery on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. I'm not saying openings are useless. But the thing I thought was a failure, the empty ledger from that night, turned out to be the most valuable part. The people who write are never the people who buy on the spot. They're the ones who need to sit with it, go home, think, and then tell someone else. I still hate the feeling of an opening where nothing moves. But I've stopped reading it as a signal.

so my abuela sends me this photo out of nowhere today. just a pot i made like four months ago, one of those early ones where the rim dips too much on one side and the glaze crawled in a weird spot near the bottom. i almost didn't sell it bc i thought it was a failure, ended up giving it to her. and she's got it on her little shelf by the window, with a dried lavender bunch inside, and the light is hitting it just right so you can see the texture i was fighting with. she wrote "mi nieto el artista" underneath. joder. i sat on the studio floor for a minute. you know when something small just hits you right in the chest? i forget why i do this sometimes, between the cracked pieces and the kiln disasters and wondering if i should just get a normal job. then she sends me that.

Dropped a three-foot welded steel piece on the studio floor yesterday. My own fault. Sloppy rigging on the hoist, clip let go around head height. It bent where I'd spent a week getting the line right and I wanted to throw the whole thing in the scrap bin. Left it sitting there overnight instead. Came in this morning and the failure is obvious now. The foot wasn't plumb before the drop, it was just welded well enough to fool me. Ground it out, re-cut, re-welded. It's better now than it was yesterday before it fell. That's the part nobody tells you about this work. The disasters teach you more than the wins ever do, if you can stand to look at them the next morning instead of smashing them to pieces. I've had a ruined bronze teach me more about wall thickness than any book. Anyone else got a piece that failed and came back stronger?

so I have this folder where I stash every painting I hate. not the ones that failed quietly, the ones that failed LOUDLY. the embarrassing ones. been doing it since the bad year and honestly it started as a "look how far you've come" thing but now it's like 40 paintings and I genuinely don't know what the endgame is. every once in a while I drag one out and it's either worse than I remembered or I can see exactly which decision broke it and that's actually kind of useful. but mostly they just sit there being my own personal museum of failure. the thing is I also can't throw them out. there's like three in there I'm fairly sure I could fix now and one I'm convinced was good and I just wasn't ready to see it. am I a hoarder or is this a legit practice. no wrong answers but there might be. it's taking up a whole shelf.

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.

A question I keep turning over, because I have done both and come to a firm conclusion. Early on I did the walk-in. A small gallery in a town I was passing through, a folder of mounted sheets, and the owner was perfectly kind and entirely uninterested. Nothing came of it, and I spent the rest of the afternoon annoyed at myself rather than at him. Since then I have sent a short, careful email with three images and a link, and let the work wait. Two of my three representation enquiries that went anywhere began that way. I also keep the folder ready on the off chance. That is not the same as marching in with it. The reason I ask is that there is a certain kind of advice floating about that insists on the personal touch, that the walk-in shows initiative, and I have never once seen it work in the way people claim. I would happily be told I am wrong. Perhaps it depends on the sort of gallery. So: which one do you do, and what did it actually get you? I am more interested in the failures than the successes, if I am honest.