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Studio floor is currently a museum of other people's junk. Sorting for the autumn show, three years of hoarding, and there is one piece I keep walking around: a cast-iron stove door, rusted shut, from a flat on Vinohradská that got gutted last year. It's the best object in the room and I won't put it in. Reason is stupid. It's too good on its own. You set it down anywhere and it does the whole job by itself, and then the room around it just becomes a plinth for a nice rusty thing. Which is fine, that's a career, plenty of people do it, but it's not what I've spent thirty years learning to do. So it sits in the corner and I build everything else and every morning I look at it like a dog at a table. I know the honest answer is probably "use it and stop being precious," and I also know that answer is a trap. Sometimes the object that carries the piece is the one that kills it. Mostly writing this down so I stop pretending it isn't the actual problem.

Second colour on the riso edition today, 40 sheets of a warm grey over the black. The drum pulls slightly to the left no matter what I do to the paper guides, so the second layer sits about half a millimetre off. It's visible if you look for it. You can see the ghost of the black under the grey along one edge, like a shadow that shouldn't be there. First pull I was furious. By sheet twelve I had decided it was fine. By sheet thirty I had genuinely started to like it, which is the part that bothers me. I know the argument. Riso misregistration is a signature, people build whole practices on it, the wobble is the point. But I've spent years arguing that the multiple is not a lesser object, that the print is not a copy of a drawing but a thing in its own right, and a big part of that argument rests on the fact that I control the matrix. The plate is deliberate. The registration is deliberate. If I let the machine decide, then what am I defending exactly? Something has shifted from "I chose this" to "this happened and I made peace with it," and those are not the same object, even if they look identical on the wall. The other possibility, which I don't like more: maybe I'm just tired and forty sheets is a lot and the difference between a considered decision and an accommodation is only ever visible from the outside. So I'm leaving them to sit until Monday before I decide anything. Curious whether other people here have a firm line between the accident you keep and the accident you've stopped fighting.

Testing a 12-plate edition this week and I've noticed something that bothers me. Pulls 4 and 5 come out of the press effectively identical. Same ink, same pressure, same sheet from the same batch of Somerset. And still, laying them side by side on the drying rack, I choose the 4th every time. I can't articulate why and I resent that a bit, because the whole point of my work is that the multiple is supposed to be a critique of the unique object. I've been telling this to students for years. So now I have a stack of number 4s that are the "good" ones, which is exactly the hierarchy I claim not to believe in. Either the difference is real and my press does something on the fifth pull I haven't identified, or it's pure aesthetic superstition and I've been making fetish objects without noticing. What I actually suspect: it's not the print at all, it's the sequence. The 4th is the one where my hands have stopped thinking and the edition hasn't started to bore me yet. Which would mean the "authentic" impression is just a record of my own attention span, and I should probably stop numbering them. But I won't. Has anyone else caught themselves doing this with an edition? Choosing a favorite pull and then having to build a whole theory around the accident of it.

My old drill died last week. Twenty years of screwing together salvaged frames, brackets, whatever held a room up. I bought the same model, same brand, but it has a different sound. Higher pitch. The old one grumbled, this one whines. And I realized the sound was in my head too. Every time I drilled that old one I knew exactly where the resistance was, when to ease off, how it felt before wood split. The new one tells me nothing. I'm working blind on something I've done a thousand times. It's not about the drill. It's that the small tools become part of you and you don't notice until one dies. The same thing happens with materials. A room of found objects I've built five times, then suddenly the objects are different, the grammar is gone, and I'm a beginner again. Middle age is just losing your tools one at a time and pretending it doesn't matter. Anyway. The hinge post in here reminded me. We blame the hinge, but it was never the hinge.

Found a box in the back of the closet today. Ex's stuff, the stuff I couldn't give to Goodwill after we split. Not sentimental stuff either, a cracked lamp he fixed twice, a stack of his old field guides, some cassette tapes. Four years and I still can't bring myself to open it, let alone get rid of it. Weird part is I don't miss him. The marriage was done long before the divorce was. But that box is the one thing I won't touch. I make work about objects carrying weight and here I am with a literal box of dead weight I'm too chicken to deal with. Maybe it becomes a piece someday. Maybe that's the only way I let myself look at it.

I was at a salvage yard outside Kladno yesterday, digging through a pile of window frames from a school they tore down in the eighties. The wood still smelled of chalk dust and coal. You can't fake that. You can't buy it. And the whole time I was thinking, this is what I miss when I walk into a brand-new residency studio with white walls and a concrete floor that's never held anything heavier than a thought. There's a kind of life that comes into the work when the materials have already lived. I'm not romanticising poverty. I'm saying the objects carry something. You handle them and your hands know what to do before your head does.

I spent two days this week trying to keep an edition consistent and I hate every single print. The registration is perfect, the ink density is the same, the paper behaved. And they're dead. Completely dead on the page. I think I've been doing this long enough that I should know better. But there's something about the discipline of the edition, the obsessive checking, that kills the life out of the work. The prints that always end up in the shows are the ones I pull a little too fast, when the squeegee angle drifts, when I stop thinking and just move. I lined the dead ones up on the floor this morning. Thirty-two perfect, identical, worthless little objects. It should be the opposite. The multiple is supposed to be about the copy being alive in its own way, not a Xerox of itself. I keep telling people that. Maybe I should start believing it and pull the screens a little sloppier again.

Finished and installed a 60 by 80 cm panel last month, a small olive tree, smalti and salvaged marble. I quoted 2,400 euros for it. That is materials, six weeks of setting, and the cement board, and I did the install myself with a hired van. The client paid without a word. Then, at the end, standing in the doorway with her coat on, she asked if she could have the leftover smalti. The offcuts. The bag of bits. I said yes because it is a bag of bits to anyone who does not cut stone. But those bits are 90 euros of material I already bought, and some of them are colours I will use again in March. I stood there holding a plastic bag of my own stock and feeling stupid about it. I have been thinking since about what I actually sold her. She thinks she bought the object. I think I sold six weeks and a bag of material and the bag got left on my floor. Nobody is wrong here, that is the annoying part. I am not going to start invoicing for offcuts. But I am going to start keeping them in a closed box before the client arrives, because apparently I need to organise my own generosity.

Spent three weeks pulling a six-colour screenprint edition of 40. Zinc white over a warm grey, the registration had to be perfect or the whole thing read as mud. Got them all numbered, signed, wrapped in glassine. Then the gallery calls, cheerful voice, to tell me they've sliced the margins down to fit their standard 50x70 frames. Every sheet. My margins. Gone. So now the image sits flush to the edge like a cheap poster, and I have to write to 40 people and explain that the edition they bought is technically a different object than the one I made. Half of them won't notice. The half who notice are the ones who'll never buy from me again. The thing that's actually eating me is that I can't decide if I'm furious about the work or about the fact that I said thank you when they told me. I heard myself do it. Thank you, of course, no problem at all. Printmaking is supposed to be the medium where I control the exact specifications. The whole point. Same plate, same paper, same pressure, repeatable, documented, honest. And it still only takes one person with a paper trimmer and a tidy idea of what a frame looks like.

I'm going to say something that will get me in trouble with half the printmakers I know. Last month I finished a mezzotint. Rocked the whole plate by hand, which honestly took longer than I want to admit, probably 40 hours across three weeks. Edition of 25. It is the best thing I have made in two years and I would defend that claim in front of anyone. I posted it once. And then I posted a photo of the copper plate itself, still inked, sitting on the scuffed bit of the worktable with my thumbprint in the margin. No caption, no price, nothing. The plate photo got about six times the reach. Someone messaged asking if the plate was for sale. Nobody asked about the print. I've been sitting with this for a week and I don't have a clean point about it. My instinct is to say the algorithm rewards process over product, we all know this, be more human, show the mess. Fine. But I think that's too easy. What that photo showed was the object after labour, the residue, the evidence. What the mezzotint showed was a finished thing that looks like it came from nowhere. And people cannot desire what has no visible cost. That's not an algorithm problem, that is just how wanting works. Maybe I should have been showing the cost all along and I was too proud about the mystique. The uncomfortable part: the prints are not selling. Three gone, and one was to my mother. So now I have 22 of them in a drawer and a decision about whether I keep making plates that take 40 hours, or whether the thing I actually like doing is the part nobody wants to buy. I don't think I'm going to stop. But I'd like to hear from anyone who found a way to make the slow version legible without turning it into content.

They asked for 150 words. I've written maybe eleven versions and deleted all of them. It's the jacket. My brother's. It's been hanging in the corner of the studio for six years because I couldn't put it in a closet and I couldn't throw it out, and the piece is what happens when you stop pretending it's going to move somewhere else. I know that's not what they want. They want the version with "explores themes of" in it. And I get it, the text matters, people read it before they look. But every time I write it down the object gets smaller. Like I'm explaining a joke. So now I'm sitting here at 11pm trying to find a way to say the true thing without handing over the whole thing. Not sure that's possible. Maybe the statement is just supposed to be a little bit of a lie so the work stays intact. Anyone else write theirs months after the piece is done, or is that just me being stubborn about it.

I'll start. Years ago a space in Germany agreed to take a room-sized piece, then asked if I could make it "less heavy." Not lighter. Less heavy. They meant the feeling of it. I took out about a third of the objects, and it was a worse piece, and I still did it. What is the most absurd thing you were ever asked to change before a show? Not pricing, not framing. The one that made you stand in the loading bay and laugh.

How did you land your first gallery? Mine was pure dumb persistence. I was fabricating for a sculptor who had a show in a decent space, and I kept coming back to install and fix things. One day the owner asked who did the welding. I said me. She came to my studio a week later and took three pieces. No slideshow, no artist statement, no portfolio. Just the work in front of her. That was thirty years ago. I still think most of it is timing and someone seeing the actual object instead of the paperwork. What about you? Email with a portfolio, a walk-in, someone who knew someone? Or did it never happen the way you planned?

Been posting the installations for two years now with the location, the materials, the whole little essay in the caption. Museum tags, artist tags, the works. Everything by the book. Last month I put up a photo of one room with nothing but the date. No title, no name, no hashtags except the gallery's because they insisted. I forgot to finish the caption, honestly, phone rang. That single photo brought more DMs than the last ten proper posts combined. People asking where it was, what it was made of, if they could come see it. Questions I would have answered in the caption nobody read. Not a lesson. Probably just the algorithm being tired of my voice too. But I'm half tempted to post the next one as just a wall and let people invent the meaning. That's what I do with found objects anyway. Let them find it.

weird thing I've never told anyone in studio circles. the thing I reach for most to cut paper and carve into board is a bread knife my ex left behind when he moved out. he didn't want it, it was in the drawer of stuff neither of us claimed. serrated edge is perfect for tearing through wet paper without crushing it. been using it four years now. sometimes I think about how the best tool in my practice is a piece of a marriage I didn't even want to keep. I don't know what that says about me or the work but it's true. anyone else working with objects that have a weird history attached? not sentimental pieces, I mean the ones you use daily without thinking until suddenly you do.

I just finished an edition of 25 screenprints that took me four months from the first drawing to the last pull. Copper plates, inks, paper, the studio time, the proofs I rejected along the way. Sold the whole edition to a gallery for €900, which sounds fine until you do the real math and realize the materials alone were close to half that, and the gallery takes 50% on top. So I made 25 objects by hand and I think I netted something like €6 an hour. The gallery is happy. The collector is happy. I'm the only one who knows the number. The part I keep turning over is that I priced it like a print. Like the edition makes it cheap, because it's a multiple, because the original is the plate and the prints are just copies of it. But each one of those copies took my hands on it. That logic is from an old world where printmaking was a reproduction tool, not a primary medium. I keep selling work on a pricing model that was built for something printmaking no longer is, and I don't know if I'm too scared to break it or just can't figure out what the new number should be. I raised the price on the next edition by €300 and I'm already scared nobody takes it.

I did a screenprint edition last month, 50 copies, three colours, hand-pulled, on nice 300gsm. Cost me about €450 in materials plus probably 30 hours in the studio. Sold 7 so far at €40 each. That's €280. Even if I sell every last one I'm barely breaking even on materials, let alone labour. And I know the advice. Raise the price. Build a mailing list before you print. Test the market with a preorder. All sensible. But there's something about making the edition first, committing to it, that's the whole point for me. The risk is part of the form. If I only printed what I'd already sold, it'd feel like a different practice entirely. I'm not complaining exactly. More trying to figure out where the line is between doing something for the work's sake and just being bad at the business side. Because I think I'm genuinely bad at the business side. But I also think the people who are good at it sometimes make work that's too safe. Any other printmakers here just accepting they'll lose money on editions because the object matters more than the margin? Or am I deluding myself.

I've been selling small edition screenprints through Instagram and my site for about a year now. Nothing huge, maybe 15-20 pieces a month. A few weeks ago I started slipping in a free risograph print with each order, just something I'd already made, an extra, no mention of it in the listing. I thought it would be a nice gesture. What I didn't expect is that people started posting the risograph more than the thing they paid for. Like, photographing it on their wall, tagging me, asking if it's for sale separately. The free thing became the thing they wanted. It's making me rethink how I present the work. People love feeling like they discovered something, even if you deliberately put it there. There's something about the "bonus" object that reads as more authentic than the main one, probably because it feels less like a transaction. I don't know, maybe this is just a thing everyone in product already knows. But coming from a fine art background where you never give anything away because it devalues the work, it's messing with my head a little.

For two years I photographed every finished piece on the white wall with the good light and the grey card, because that is what you are told to do. Clean, neutral, correct. Then in October I was packing a piece for a group show in Malmö and took a quick phone photo of it lying on the table next to the scalpel and the glue pot and half a torn book page. Sent it to the gallery contact. She wrote back asking if she could use that one instead. Since then I have not shot on the wall once. Just the table, the window light from the left, whatever is genuinely lying around. Last month a small piece sold through Instagram in about four hours after a table photo. The wall version of the same piece had sat there for six weeks. I am not sure what the lesson is. Maybe that people are buying the studio, not the object. Maybe the wall photo looks like an advert and the table looks like a person. Or maybe it is just that the table one is slightly out of focus and something in that reads as true. I do not fully trust my own explanation. The annoying part is that it is less work. I used to spend an hour on the wall setup. Now it takes ninety seconds and does better.

This happened two weeks ago. A woman messaged me on WhatsApp, very polite, and she was interested in a Kohbar piece I had finished, the wedding painting with the sun and the moon and the lotus, all traditional. She asked the size, the price, all fine. Then she said, "Can you tell me what colours exactly are in it? I need to see if it will match my apartment's vibe." My son was standing there, I showed him the message. He laughed. I sat for a minute. This painting is about marriage, about fertility, about the gods witnessing a union. The colours are what they are, the red from the palash flower, the black from the soot, the yellow from the turmeric. They come from the earth, they are not chosen for a vibe. I told her, very respectfully, that the colours are natural red, yellow, black, some green from leaves. She said okay and asked if I could change the background to white and make the peacocks blue like "navy blue" instead. I said no, I cannot do like that, this is a traditional piece, the peacock has his proper colours in our work. She didn't buy it. Of course. I am still thinking about this. Not angrily. I understand she is from a different world. But I am realising that online, people are not looking for the thing itself. They are looking for something that fits into their already-made life. The painting is not an object with its own story, it is a decor item that must match the sofa. My question is not to complain. I just want to know, for those of you who make traditional or folk work, how do you handle this? When the buyer wants the art but does not want what the art actually is. Do you adjust and survive, or do you hold the line and lose the sale? I am torn.