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Had a meeting a few years ago with a space in Berlin that said they loved my work but wanted to "see more range" before they'd commit to a show. Which translated to: could I make something less repetitive, less conceptual, more decorative. Basically could I be someone else. I said no and we both wasted six months anyway. I still wonder if I should have been more flexible. But also, the whole reason I work in print is repetition. The multiple IS the point. So "show range" felt like showing I didn't believe in my own ideas. What's the worst thing a gallery has asked you to change about your work? And did you do it?

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.

okay so there's this window in my apartment that gets this specific soft afternoon light around 3pm and I've been trying to catch it for like... months now. This month alone I've done 14 studies of it. 14. Same window, same view of the neighbor's slightly sad little balcony, different light every time. My partner thinks I've lost it. Maybe I have. But here's the thing – every single time I think I've figured out how to paint that quality of light, the next day it's different and I realize I was wrong. The color temperature shifts, or there's a haze, or the whole thing goes golden for like twenty minutes before it's gone. Watercolor is SO unforgiving about this because you can't just paint over it, you have to get it right while it's wet or you lose it forever. And I keep losing it. My mom called yesterday and asked if I'd sold any of them yet and I was like Mom I can't sell them they're all failures. She didn't get it. But I think there's something in the repetition, you know? Like each one teaches me something the last one couldn't. I'm not chasing a perfect painting, I'm chasing understanding how light actually works. Anyway I laid them all out on the floor last night to compare and honestly it's kind of beautiful seeing them together even if none of them are The One. Might keep going until I run out of paper or winter comes and the light changes completely. Then I guess I'll start over.

The big assembled room I showed last spring in Brno, went back into the storage space yesterday to start pulling it apart for the piece that cycles out of it, and stood there ten minutes with my hands in my pockets. The far wall, the one I was proudest of when we hung it, is dead. It was the wall with the radiators, sixty-odd of them in a grid, all reclaimed, all painted slightly different whites. I thought the repetition did the work. It does nothing. It's a wallpaper. There's no friction in it. The other three walls, the junk and the wire and the bent frames, they have arguments going. The radiator wall just sits there agreeing with itself. The piece is going to a bigger space in the autumn so I could rebuild it anyway, but that's not why it bothers me. It bothers me that I couldn't see it a year ago. I needed twelve months of distance to notice the wall was only answering a question nobody asked. Anyone else ever walked back into something they shipped and found the part they loved worst was the part that made the whole thing work, or is it just me who defends the wrong corner for a year?

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?