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Here is a real number: a plate I spent eleven days on in October, hard ground, aquatint, the whole slow liturgy, came out so badly bitten that the lines closed up. I posted it. 34 likes, two comments. A bad phone photo of the same plate sitting in the ferric bath, half submerged, nothing happening, no explanation, no caption worth reading: 1,900 views and eleven people asking what the liquid was. So the lesson is obvious and I hate it. It's not the failure they want, it's the process. The failure is only interesting if it's happening in front of them in real time. A finished bad print is just a sad object. A print in the acid bath is a suspense film, even if you already know how it ends. I've started filming the boring parts on purpose now, which feels like a small betrayal of everything I was taught about the mystery of the studio. My teachers would have found the idea of a tripod pointed at a tray of copper sulphate genuinely obscene. And I'm doing it anyway, because the alternative is making work nobody sees, and I'm not noble enough for that. The thing I can't decide: does the audience actually want to understand the process, or do they just want the sensation of something developing? I suspect the second, and I suspect I'd rather not know.

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?

For years I posted only the prints that came out clean. The ones where the fern held its shape, where the wash went even, where the paper didn't buckle at the edge. Nice squares, no mess. Then in February I ruined a whole batch. Too much sun, I left them out maybe twenty minutes too long and the whole thing went flat, no depth left in the blue at all. I photographed the worst one anyway and put it up. Just the ruin. No caption saying look at my process, nothing like that. More people wrote to me about that one print than about a year of the good ones. One woman in Galway asked if she could buy it. A man asked what tide I'd pulled the net from, which felt like the right question to be asked. I think people are tired of being shown the result. They want to see the hand that is not sure. I don't want to turn that into a formula either, because then it becomes another performance. But it changed how I think about what is worth putting into the world. I have three ruined sheets on the studio wall now. I like them more than the ones that worked. Not sure yet if that is a good sign or just me getting older.

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?

Six weeks ago I started posting the failures. Not the poetic ones, the actual duds: a smalti panel where I got the andamento wrong on a face and the nose reads like a shelf, a batch of tile I cut too thin that shattered the moment I pressed it in. Numbers, since this channel likes numbers. Reach went up maybe 40%. Comments dropped by half. And the DMs changed completely. Before, I got "how much for this" from people who never once converted. Now I get "I have my grandmother's broken marble table, could it become something" and three of those turned into paid commissions in six weeks. One from a woman in Kalamaria whose table is now a hallway panel and she cried when she picked it up. The "how much" crowd was never going to buy. They liked the finished photo, that is all. The people who write to you about the wreckage are the ones who understand you actually make the thing with your hands and want a piece of that. Also, small confession, I sleep better. Nobody claps for a shattered tile. Feels closer to the work.

There is a box on the shelf at the studio, and it is not a working box. Inside are maybe twenty sheets I have decided are too good for anything. A 1940s Swedish school atlas with the maps printed in three faded inks. A letter from 1911 with a handwriting I will never find again. Some marbled endpaper from a book I took apart at work and could not throw away. They have been in there four years. Every so often I take one out, hold it up, decide the piece I am working on is not worthy of it, and put it back. The piece stays unfinished, the paper stays in the box. I know exactly what this is. The moment I cut into the atlas it stops being the atlas and becomes material, and material is something you can ruin. But a box of uncut paper has no failure in it. Anyway. Today I cut a strip off the corner of one of the maps, the plain ocean blue part, and glued it down. It was fine. The strip looked good, actually. The rest of the sheet is still the atlas. I am telling myself this is a reasonable compromise, but I suspect it is just a slower version of the same hoarding. Curious how many people here have a shelf of the good stuff they never touch.

i did the thing where you make an edition because a friend said "prints are passive income." 40 giclee prints of a piece i actually like, cost me $180 plus shipping tubes, and i've sold three. two of those were to people i know. here's the part that bugs me. the original sold fast, $450, to a woman who wanted it for a hallway she's repainting. the print, same image, $45, sat. i think it's because a print is honest about being a copy and nobody wants to hang a copy of a painting, even a good one. or maybe my print is just bad, that's also possible. anyway there's a stack of 37 in my closet and one of them is under the lamp with the cracked base to stop it wobbling. i'm not mad about it exactly. it's more that i can't tell if i failed at marketing or failed at having the right product. those feel like different failures and i don't know which one i'm looking at. curious if anyone here has made an edition that actually moved, and what was different about it.

ok so against my better judgment I started filming the studio work. vertical, phone balanced on a bucket of grogged stoneware, the fancy one. seven videos in and here is what I actually learned. the timelapse of me building a vessel got 400 views. the one where I talk through what I'm doing, 90 views. the one where the piece collapsed at the end and I just said "vale, pues" and kept my hands in the clay, 6k. six thousand. on a collapse. so the thing everyone tells you, "teach, give value, be useful," is apparently worth 90 views. me failing quietly is worth 6k. I don't know what to do with this information. am I supposed to build failure into the schedule now? break things on camera for the algorithm? the part that actually bothers me is I film so much worse when I know the camera is there. my hands get self-conscious, I over-explain, I do the little laugh. and then I'm editing at 1am instead of, you know, making the thing that the account is supposed to be about. anyway I sold two pieces from the collapse video, so. maybe the answer is just keep failing where people can see it.

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.