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Took me three weeks to get back into the studio proper after Christmas. You know the way, kids back to school, chest infection going round, the whole place damp and cold and the ink was like treacle. Kept finding reasons to just tidy the bench instead of cutting. Anyway last night I finally pulled a proof of a block I started in November. Big heron, neck curved down, standing in that shallow water you get on the Corrib at low tide. First proof was rank, cut too deep in the wing feathers, lost the line. Had the whole thing sitting there mocking me. Pulled a second proof at half eleven last night with a different black and a lighter touch on the roller. And the missus came down to see what I was at, coffee in hand, looked at it drying on the rack, and said "that's grand now, that's a nice one." For her that's the highest praise you'll get. No fuss. Took herself back up to bed. Sometimes you just need to get through the bad version to find the good one. And a "that's grand" off someone who's seen every failed print you've ever made. That'll do.

Spent the morning editioning a screenprint, edition of 40, and I kept a tally of every proof I pulled before settling on the good ones. Fourteen proofs. Fourteen almost-finished prints sitting in a drawer that no one will ever see, and I caught myself thinking about how thrilled I'd be to find a stack of rejected proofs by someone I admire. But mine are just... failures. I signed the edition, and then I couldn't stop running the numbers on how many hours of my life are in those discarded sheets. There's something odd about a medium where the whole point is the multiple, and then we turn around and create this hierarchy of the sacred copy. The artist's proof, the edition, the sketch, the one that got away. I've been reading about how Duchamp and all of them were obsessed with the readymade and reproduction, but the print world still behaves like a monastery deciding which relics are authentic. I don't know. Maybe I should have titled the drawer. Maybe the rejected proofs are the more honest work and I'm just not brave enough to show them. Does anyone else keep their near-misses, or do you destroy them?

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.

Three weeks without the press. Sent the bearings off to a fella in Clare who said he'd have them done in a week, took three, sure what's the rush in Clare. I was half-convinced I'd get it back and something else would be wrong with it, or I'd forgotten how to print altogether. Stripped it down, cleaned everything I could reach while I was waiting, found a biscuit wrapper the youngest had posted through the roller gap back in February. Reassembled it this afternoon with a spanner I'd left out in the rain and had to dry off on the Aga. Pulled the first proof an hour ago. An old block, a hare I've carved so many times I could do it in my sleep. And it just... worked. Clean. Even pressure. The ink laid down like it was glad to be there. I stood there staring at it for longer than I'd admit. The missus came in and said "is that it" and I said yeah that's it and she said "grand" and went back to putting the kids to bed. Which is exactly the right amount of fuss. If you've got a tool or a machine or a process that's been sitting broken and you're dreading getting back to it, just get the first one done. The second one's easy after that.

Pulled a proof last night at about eleven because the kids were finally down and the house was quiet for the first time in, I swear, three days. Carved the block back in March, one of those hares I keep doing and telling myself I'll stop doing, and I've been avoiding it since because the design was off and I knew it. So I sat there with the light on over the sink, rolled the ink, and pulled it. And you know what, it was grand. Not perfect. The ear's still bothering me. But there's a moment when the paper lifts off the block and the image comes through that makes me forget every hour I've spent staring at it from the wrong angle. I left it drying on the kitchen table and my wife found it this morning and said "oh that's a nice one" and I nearly told her it was old news, but I didn't. I just said thanks and made the tea. Still think the ear is wrong though. Is there a single piece any of us has ever finished where there isn't one bit, one corner, one line that you'd carve out and start again if you had the patience? I'm starting to think chasing the perfect ear is the whole point and I'd have nothing to do if I ever caught it.

I pulled twelve proofs of the same plate today. Same plate, same ink, same paper, same rag on the press. You'd think after ten years I'd stop flinching when the paper lifts. I don't. There's always one corner that didn't bite, or the ink decided to sit heavier on the left, and suddenly it's not the plate anymore, it's that exact moment of pressure and humidity and my own tiredness. Every single copy slightly off from the one before. That's the thing nobody tells you about printmaking when you come in thinking it's about multiples, about the copy. It's the opposite. The edition is a lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep. What actually happens is you make thirty versions of the same drawing and each one teaches you what you meant, a little later each time. I have one from this batch where the registration slipped maybe a millimetre on the yellow pass. It's wrong. I keep looking at it. It might be the best one of the day.

Was clearing out the press room today, the shelf behind the inks that I never look at, and there's a proof of a heron print I'd have bet my good arm I never carved. But there it is. Same heron I do now, only rougher, less sure of itself, and the date on it says 2014. I don't remember making it at all. Not a bit. It's a strange thing, coming across your own work like it's somebody else's. I studied it the way you'd look at a stranger's print in a gallery. And I was a bit jealous of the fella who made it, do you know? He didn't know what he was doing and it shows, but he was having a gas doing it. No worrying about editions going wrong or whether the market's dead this quarter. Just carving. Anyway I have it pinned up over the bench now. Might keep it as a kick up the arse. Ten years from now maybe I'll find this week's work and think the same thing about me today, and that's a sobering thought and a comforting one all at once. There's worse ways to spend a life than leaving a trail of prints you don't remember making.

Had this block sitting in the drawer since February. A grey heron I started last winter and just couldn't get right, the line of the neck was off, the wing shape was doing my head in, and I'd carved half of it badly and walked away. Swore at it plenty. Pulled it out this morning because I was between things and the kids were at school and the house was quiet for once. Thought I'd just have a look at it fresh, maybe salvage something. Ended up carving the whole bottom half off and re-cutting it. Re-inked it twice. Third proof came off the press and I just sat there looking at it. It's not perfect, the registration is a bit squint and there's a cut I shouldn't have made, but it's alive in a way it wasn't before. The dog came over and sniffed the ink and sneezed all over the print and honestly that felt right too. Sometimes you just need to walk away and come back when you're not trying so hard.

I pulled the blanket off the press this morning and noticed the maker's plate on the side. Glaser, West Berlin, 1962. My father died when I was twenty, so he was alive when this press was bolted together in a city that no longer exists. And now it sits in my studio in Berlin, which is basically the same street, a few kilometers from where it was built. My father was not a printmaker. He was a surgeon. I don't know why I keep doing this arithmetic with the dates. But I've been pulling proofs all week and I keep stopping to touch that plate like it's a relic. There is something about objects that outlive the people who made them. That's probably the whole reason I fell into this medium in the first place. The plate, the proof, the edition. You make a thing and it just keeps going, indifferent to whether you're still around to say anything about it. Anyway. I pulled a good proof of the new aquatint today. The first one that actually feels like something. So the press and I are on good terms right now.

Been pulling proofs of this heron print all week and it hit me somewhere around the third bad one. I've been fussing over the legs and the beak for years, thinking that's where the bird lives. And then I looked at one of my early versions next to a recent one and the legs barely changed at all. What changed was the neck. That little kink where it doubles back on itself before it strikes. That's the whole bird. Get that wrong and you've got a stork with notions. Get it right and you can botch the feet entirely and nobody cares. I've got a stack of proofs out the back where the neck is a hot mess and I'd convinced myself it was a depth problem or an ink problem or a bad lino batch. It was none of the above. I was just over here polishing the wrong corner of the thing. Anyway I've recarved the neck for the fifth time this week and the current proof is the first one that actually breathes. Just wondering if anyone else has had the thing where you spend a decade staring at a piece and then suddenly the actual subject of it shows up. Makes you feel like a right eejit but also a bit glad, sure the work is better for it.

Carved a heron block back in March, pulled a proof, and the head on it was grand but the legs were all wrong. Stiff, y'know, like the poor creature was standing on broom handles. So I cut the whole lower half out and re-carved it. Just spent today proofing that version and sure the legs are lovely now but I've gone and ballsed up the wing that was perfectly grand the first time. There's no version of this where you don't find out. You're always a day and a half of carving away from knowing you shouldn't have touched it, and a day and a half past that from being glad you did. The lino doesn't forgive and it doesn't remember, it just sits there with whatever you last did to it. I've three hares in the pile like this, each one the second or third attempt at the same fecking bird or beast. One of these days I'll frame all the discarded proofs together and call it a series. Call it "Learning to Leave It Alone" or perhaps more honestly "Learning to Not." Anyway. The wing. I'll either live with it or I won't. The lino's not going anywhere.

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?

Every time I give in and post the thing I almost didn't, the rough etching proof with the wiped plate mark still on it, the screenprint that misregistered and made this weird ghost double, that's the one that travels. The pieces I actually spend weeks on, the editions I pull clean and sign, they sit there with forty views. I know intellectually the rough stuff reads as "process" and process is what the feed wants. We're all supposed to be celebrating the handmade and the imperfect now. But there's part of me that resists being rewarded for the thing I'd normally throw in the bin. It feels like the medium itself is being flattened into aesthetic, the mess as decoration, and the actual conceptual work I'm doing gets no airtime because it doesn't photograph well. Also I'm aware that saying "my spontaneous casual posts do better" is itself a strategy now, and posting about posting is the most hollow loop there is. I tried leaning into it. Posted a genuinely failed proof, ink disaster on the plate, told the truth about what went wrong. It did numbers. And I felt weirdly used, like I'd sold the accident instead of the labour. Still don't know if the answer is to gamify it deliberately or to refuse and accept the smaller reach. Anyone else caught in that particular trap?

I finally did the real math on my last edition and it's worse than I thought. Thirty prints, edition of 30, sold at €220 each. Sounds fine until you count what's actually in it. The plate took me six weeks of drawing and biting. That time doesn't multiply across the edition, it just sits there as a lump. Then each sheet: paper, ink, the hours in the studio, the failed proofs that go in the bin before a single good one exists. Two plates cracked before I got one to bite right. So €6,600 gross on the edition. Take out paper and ink and studio rent and the proofs that failed and the plate time at anything near minimum wage and I'm looking at maybe €9 an hour if I'm being generous with myself. And that's the number I'm supposed to feel lucky about because editioned work is "approachable" for collectors. What I can't figure out is where the line is. Raise the price and a print is no longer the entry point, it's a real purchase, and people hesitate. Keep it where it is and I'm basically paying to have my work out in the world. I know plenty of printmakers who've just stopped doing editions altogether because the answer never made sense. I'm not there yet but I'm watching the math get worse every time I add up a new one.

The Vandercook in the corner of the studio makes this heavy click-clack rhythm when I run a proof, and I've stopped noticing it until someone visits and says, what is that noise. And then I notice it and I realize I like it. Like a metronome that doesn't care about tempo. There's something about a machine that just does its one thing, over and over, that calms me down more than any playlist. Repetition is literally my medium and I still get surprised that I find it soothing instead of boring. Today I pulled thirty-one proofs of a copper plate I've been fighting for two weeks. The inking is finally even. The plate is ruined in the sense that I will probably never edition it because I changed the composition three times, so it's just a unique state nobody will ever see. There's a word for that in Italian, stato unico, and I like that a language has a term for the thing that's only ever happened once and will never happen again. Printmaking is supposed to be about multiples. Sometimes the one-off is the honest version. Anyway. The click sound is still going. I think I'd actually miss it on the days I don't print.

I have this habit where every new piece I want to talk myself out of the idea first. I pick it apart, find where it's weak, and if it survives me it's worth pulling a proof. It keeps me honest but it also means I spend half the working day arguing with my own thought. Today I did the opposite. I woke up, had an image in my head before coffee, and I just scratched it into a plate. No framework. No question behind it. It was almost embarrassing, like showing up somewhere underdressed. And you know what the proof looks like? Dead. It looks exactly like something I didn't think about. Which is its own kind of lesson, I suppose, but not the one I wanted to learn. I'm trying to figure out if there's a middle ground between overthinking every mark and just making it badly. Because right now the two speeds are: seminar, or garbage. There's a space in between where you trust the hand but the head is still in the room. I don't know how to get there. Maybe it's just volume. Maybe I have to make fifty bad ones. Anyway, the plate is still on the table. I haven't decided if I'm going to print it or scrub it. Part of me wants to keep it exactly as it is, as evidence.

There's this big wave breaking over rocks that I've been at, on and off, for the best part of ten years. Not the same block, obviously, I'm not that married to a piece of lino. But the same idea, the same swell, the same way the spray comes up off the black stone. I must have carved it twenty different ways and every single one of them ended up in the drawer with the dogs and the false starts. Then last week I was proofing something else entirely, a hare for a wedding commission, and I'd a bit of lino left over, the good green stuff, too big to throw away and too small for the hare again. So I just started in on it. No drawing, no planning, just the one wave and the rocks and the same old ledge I've been trying to get right for a decade. And it just... came. The pull of it, the weight of the water, all in. Proofed it this morning, black ink, and I put it up on the wall and I just stood there looking at it. Not crying or anything dramatic, but close enough. Ten years of trying the same thing and it walked out of me in an afternoon when I stopped forcing it. The best bit is it's on a scrap bit of lino the size of a tea plate and I'll likely frame it and keep it for myself, which is the first time I've ever wanted to. Anyway. Off to the post office with the hare. Sure look, that's the way of it.

I've been carving the same basic composition of a sitting hare for about two years now, on and off. Same pose, same rough size, and every time I think I've got it licked I pull a proof and the head's wrong or the ear's too stiff or the whole thing just sits there on the paper like a stuffed toy. Dead. Anyway I cut a new block last week out of sheer stubbornness, Japanese vinyl this time instead of the battleship grey I usually use, because why not change everything, and I pulled a proof this morning and I swear to God it's the first one that actually breathes. There's a life in the eye that wasn't there before. The line down the flank has the right weight to it. I don't know what I did different, or maybe I know exactly but can't put words on it. Just years of getting it wrong till one day you don't. Anyone else have that one subject or composition you keep coming back at because it won't let you go? The one you're not done with yet.

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?

Tried plein air for the first time last Sunday. Picked a little spot by the creek, got all set up, and the wind just wrecked me. My easel tipped over twice, a leaf landed wet side down right in the middle of my sky, and I packed it up after about forty minutes with maybe ten minutes of actual painting done. But here's the thing. I got more done in those ten minutes than I do in a whole afternoon of painting from photos. The light on the water was doing something I've never been able to fake in the studio. I've been chasing that same look for weeks from reference photos and it's always flat. Now I'm looking at those little wind-proof clamps for the canvas and a heavier easel, and I keep checking the forecast for a calm day. I think this is my new thing. Just wish I'd tried it before I turned forty.