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A museum shop in Vienna picked up a small edition of my screenprints for their retail. I was thrilled, museum shop, right, that feels like validation. They paid €150 per print, wholesale. I sold them 20. I did the math yesterday because I was avoiding something else. Each print takes me about four hours from exposure to final trim, not counting the drawing time before that, not counting the screens I burned and then rejected, not counting the test proofs. So €150 for roughly six hours of work per print if I'm being generous about what counts as labour. That's €25 an hour if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. I'm not saying the museum shop ripped me off. That's just the going rate, they were fine to deal with. But I sat there thinking: I have an MFA, I've been doing this fifteen years, and I'm making €25 an hour selling to an institution that will mark it up to €400 and call it affordable art. And I said yes because I was flattered they asked. I don't know what the right number is. I just know that the gap between what feels good for the ego and what's actually sustainable keeps getting wider and I keep choosing the ego.

My partner's dog, this old lab who never runs anymore, ran after something in the shallows this morning, some gull or driftwood, I don't know, and came back wet and sandy and very proud of himself. walked straight through the studio door and across a print I'd just taken out of the sun. a perfect paw print in cyanotype blue, right across the middle where the paper was still washing. I was so angry for about ten seconds. then I looked at it and thought, that's actually the best thing that's happened in this room all week. the print was fine, just a nice photogram of seaweed. now it has a ghost dog in it. I'm framing it.

Ach, I'm still buzzing off this. A small gallery up in Sligo got in touch out of nowhere back in February, found me through Instagram, if you can believe it, said they'd been following the work for a while. I thought sure it was one of those scams at first, the ones where they want you to pay to be "featured," but no, genuine people running a proper little space. Sent them a dozen prints this morning, all matted and packed proper. The big heron I've been messing with for months made the cut, and a new hare that finally came together after I ruined about four blocks getting there. Felt strange sealing the box, like sending a bit of yourself off in the post. But good strange. Never had a gallery come to me before. Always been me knocking on doors, standing at markets, sending emails into the void. Nice to be on the other end of it for once. Now I just have to hope they sell and I don't have to pay return postage on twelve unsold prints 😅

I've been doing this thing the last year or so where instead of trying to flog prints to strangers who've never heard of me, I just trade with other artists and makers. Potter gets a hare linocut, I get a mug. Woodworker gets a heron, I get a stool. That sort of carry-on. And what I didn't expect, half the commissions I've had this year came because that potter showed the print to someone who walked into her studio, or that woodworker hung it in his workshop and a customer asked where it came from. It's the slowest funnel in the world but it keeps working. I'm not even trying to sell at that point, I'm just swapping because I want the thing they make. The other thing is it got me out of my own head about pricing for a bit. Nothing resets your sense of value like holding something someone else spent ten hours making and thinking Jesus that's worth more than twenty quid. Makes you price your own work better too. Anyone else doing this or am I just building a very eclectic house one swap at a time?

There's a Saturday market in Galway I've been doing on and off for maybe twelve years. Rain, hail, the odd glorious day where everyone's in great form. And I used to think the point of it was to shift prints, which it is, but the real thing it taught me is how to talk to people about what you make without sounding like you're selling. You get all sorts at a stall. The tourist who wants something that says Ireland without being a leprechaun on a toilet. The local who stops because they recognise the pier or the mountain. The person who clearly loves the work but hasn't got thirty quid and stands there turning a card over in their hands. And you learn, quick, that the ones who buy aren't the ones you try to convince. They're the ones you just talk to, normally, about the carving or the ink or the hare that lives in the field behind your house and won't let you get near it. The thing that stuck with me is this: I've never sold a print by telling someone how good it is. I've sold plenty by telling them the story of the night I carved it and nearly took the tip of my finger off, or how the block got dropped in a puddle and the crack became part of the print. People want the thing behind the thing. They don't want a pitch. Anyway. The market's grand for that. But online, I still catch myself trying to sound like a proper business instead of just a fella in a jumper with ink under his nails. And the minute I do that, engagement drops off a cliff. The posts that work are always the ones where I forget I'm supposed to be marketing and just talk about what happened today. Sure I don't know where I'm going with this except that the best marketing advice I ever got was from a woman buying a print of a heron who said "just tell me why you made it" and walked away with two.

For about a year I tried to do the Instagram thing properly. Reels, stories, a little carousel about my process. I was showing up, I was consistent. And it worked, in a way, more eyes, more likes, a few commissions. But I was spending the part of the day when the light is right sitting inside editing a video of the light. Last autumn I just stopped. Not deliberately, not as a strategy, I had a show to prepare for and the choice was between making the prints or making the content. So I made the prints. I'm not on TikTok. I don't have a newsletter. My website is a single page with an email address. And honestly? This year has been better than last. Not richer, but better, the people who find me find me through word of mouth, or because someone saw a print in a friend's house, or because they walked into the shop that carries my work. Every sale has a real thread attached to it. Nobody found me through an algorithm and asked for a discount. I don't think this is advice. It's not scalable and I'm not trying to make a living off prints alone, my partner works, I teach a workshop now and then. But the pressure to perform the making instead of just making is so constant that I wonder how many of us are burning our best hours on it. The sea doesn't care about your content calendar.

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.

I've been thinking about how my prints sell. It's not through aggressive social media campaigns or paid ads. It's mostly word-of-mouth, people seeing them in small galleries or cafes here in Porto, and then finding me online later. I sell maybe five pieces a month this way. The key is that the work itself has to resonate, to carry its own quiet story. I don't chase trends. I just make what feels true to the ocean, to the light. It’s a slow burn, not a sprint, and honestly, I’m fine with that. It feels more honest, somehow.

I've been developing cyanotypes in seawater for years now, bucket of it carried up from the beach, still cold, full of sand and whatever else. But today the tide was high and I thought, just try it. Hold the paper in the actual water, let the wave wash over it. Held it by one corner. Second wave ripped it right out of my hand. Watched it tumble in the foam for a few seconds before I went in after it, up to my thighs, January water, gasping. Got it back. Ragged at two edges, stained with something that isn't the iron solution, but fixed. It's drying now pinned to the studio wall with the tear showing. Might be the best print I've made this year. Not sure what that says about me or the work but I think I needed the reminder that I'm not really in control of any of it. The water decides.

He's a carpenter, didn't say that the first day, just picked up the heron and off he went. This morning the door opens and there he is with the thing in his hands, framed in ash with a little float mount, beautifully done. Not for sale, he said, just wanted to show me. Wanted me to see it done right. Stood there in the studio with my coffee going cold and him telling me about cutting the mitres and choosing the ash because the grain matched the bird's leg. I swear to god I nearly had to look out the window for a minute. You spend so much time alone with the carving, staring at the same line for two hours wondering if it's too deep or not deep enough, and then something like that happens and you remember the whole point is it leaves your hands and goes out into the world and becomes part of someone else's. He'd put as much care into the frame as I put into the print. That's a lovely thing. Anyway I told him next one's on me. Which it will be, but sure I'll probably end up trading him a set of blocks for a bookshelf or something, that's how these things go.

I made a cyanotype yesterday of a cuttlebone I found on the beach, one of those big ones, almost the length of my hand. Laid it directly on the paper with some torn fishing net over it. Exposure was good, the sun was strong, but when I washed it the shadows all went muddy. The cuttlebone reads as a dark blob instead of having that honeycomb texture it has on the surface. I think I underwatered my chemistry. Or maybe the paper was too dry when I coated it. I've been using a cotton rag paper I'm not as familiar with and it seems to drink the emulsion differently. I've been staring at it for an hour. Part of me wants to call it a bad print and toss it. Part of me thinks there's something in the flatness, like the sea at dusk, all that detail pulled under. But I don't know if I'm just making peace with a mistake. How do you tell the difference between a flaw that works and one that's just a failure?

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 spent six hours yesterday printing the same screen 85 times and somewhere around batch four I started having full conversations with myself out loud. The kind where you catch yourself and think, who am I talking to. Everyone warns you about the technical disasters. Misregistration, bad pull, ink drying on the mesh. Nobody warns you that the real challenge is just staying in the room with yourself and the repetition. It's almost monastic. Or maybe just lonely. I keep a notebook now and just write down whatever stupid thought passes through, yesterday it was "what if I printed this on denim" and "I think I've had three different versions of this thought in three different cities." Anyway. 85 prints, one registration error. I'll take it. But my god the silence gets loud.

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.

There's this moment that happens around proof number twelve where your eye just stops being able to judge anything. You've been looking at the same image for hours, pulling it, adjusting the wiping, pulling it again, and suddenly you have no idea if it's good or bad or if you're getting closer or further away. The print just sits there being a print. I know this is normal. I know you have to walk away, come back tomorrow. But I also know that the best state I ever work in is the one where I've stopped caring what it looks like and I'm just doing the motion. Something else takes over. The small decisions get made without me. That's usually when the print gets interesting, when I'm too tired to be precious about it. I don't have a clean way to end this thought. I'm covered in ink and the proofs are clipped to the line and I'm not going to look at them again until tomorrow morning. That's the ritual, I suppose. Trusting that you'll see clearly in the light of day what you couldn't see at all at midnight.

I print by the tide these days. Not by the light exactly, that too, but by the actual state of the water. If it's low tide in the morning I have to be out on the rocks before the sun gets high, collecting the things that were covered overnight. Pieces of rope worn soft, a certain kind of kelp, the shells that still have their colour. Then back to print while they're still wet from the sea. It means my studio hours are different every week. Some days I'm working at six. Some days I don't start until late afternoon because that's when the water gives me what I need. It makes a mess of any routine I try to keep. But the prints are better. They have a smell to them, actually, salt and paper and the sun heating everything. I tried once to explain to someone why the tide matters for a piece of paper that sits in a tray. I couldn't find the words. But I keep doing it.

Working on a new screenprint series, and I keep getting stuck on the 'ghost' image. You know, the faint residue left on the screen after a print? It's not the 'real' image, but it has this strange, ephemeral quality. I find myself obsessing over it, wondering if it's more potent than the actual print. It feels like a memory of the image, or a potential for future images. Anyone else find themselves drawn to these accidental afterlives of a print?

I was clearing a drawer I've been avoiding and there it was, a spool of monofilament he must have tucked there years ago, the kind he used for the longlines. Faded, brittle, salt-stiff in places. I couldn't throw it out. So I laid a length across a freshly coated sheet of paper and let the sun do the rest. The line doesn't read solid like I expected. It leaves these thin, ghostly traces, almost like a thread of light that got caught. Faint interruptions where the sun wrapped around the curve of it. Where it kinked, the line lifted off the paper and the blue rushed in underneath. Those are my favourite parts. Little accidents he would have called coisa malfeita, badly made thing, but I think they're the most true. Anyway. He's been gone eight years and I still find him in the strangest places. Today he was in the sun, on paper, in that particular blue.

alright here's one that's been rattling round my head. I did a group show maybe three years back, decent gallery, nice space, did the whole song and dance. Sold three prints. Got my cut six months later after chasing it twice. Grand, that's the game, I know. but the same summer I did a one-night thing in a mate's pub in Salthill. Hung stuff on the wall with picture wire and blu-tack. Sold five prints off a stack on the bar and took cash in a jar. Made four times what the gallery paid me and had a feed of pints out of it. I'm not knocking galleries, I've had great ones. But I'm wondering, have ye ever done something scrappy and unpolished that outsold the proper exhibition? Like a studio open day, a market stall, a pop-up in someone's living room. What worked? What felt mad but actually paid?

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?