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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 had a gallery years back that wanted me to sign over rights to the work for the duration of the show. Not reproduction rights, the actual work. If it sold, fine, if it didn't, they kept it. I told them no and never went back. What's the one thing a gallery asked for that made you pack your stuff up?

Myself Ramesh. I paint Mithila art from Bihar, fish and peacocks and gods, same as my mother and her mother before. This is our tradition, many centuries old. Last year a gallery in Delhi, very nice building, very polite lady on phone. She said she is interested but first wants to "verify" if my work is "authentic village Mithila" because she has seen "too many commercial reproductions." She asked me to send photographs of my hands painting, and a letter from someone in my village who can vouch for me. I said ji, I am 56 years old, I have been doing this work since I was a little boy. My mother learned from her mother. You can see the natural pigment, the line work. But she insisted. So I sent. Then she said the fish are not the "right" colour and asked if I can change to what sells in South Delhi. I said no, this is Mithila fish, this is how we do. She stopped replying. Any of you had a gallery ask you to prove your own tradition? Or tell you your own art is not "authentic" enough? What do you even do with that.

I bought a decent printer last year thinking prints would be my side income. Got the good archival paper, color calibrated everything, spent way too many evenings fighting with it. Sold maybe six prints total, and two of those were to my mother in law. Meanwhile the original paintings sit in my booth at fairs and people keep asking about those instead. The overthinking it took me a full year to figure out: people buy the thing in front of them, they don't buy the reproduction of it. So I stopped pushing prints entirely and just started starting more originals at lower price points. Smaller 8x10s I can finish in two sittings now sell faster than anything I've ever made prints of. Sold nine of those in the last two months at the local craft market alone. Wish somebody had told me that a year and about 300 dollars in ink ago.

Early on, before I knew any better, I almost signed one where the gallery kept all reproduction rights to the work for twenty years. Twenty years. And the percentage was on the low end to begin with. My old mentor caught it and told me to walk, and I did. Lately I see more of the reverse, artists so scared of getting burned they won't sign anything, and they miss out on decent rooms. What's the worst thing you've seen in a contract, or the clause that made you turn around and leave? I want specifics, not "they wanted too much commission." What actually got slipped in?

Okay so I'm eight months into full-time art and I finally have enough data to be genuinely confused. My original watercolors sell consistently, like every time I post a finished piece it's gone within a day or two. But I got a professional scan done of one of my favorites, ordered a small run of prints to test the waters, and they've just been sitting there. Like barely any movement in three weeks. And I don't get it because everyone always asks "do you have prints?" when they see the originals. I made them available. Crickets. My partner says it's because people who buy watercolors want THE thing, the actual one with the paper texture and the wonky edge where my tape was, not a reproduction. And maybe that's true and I should just lean into originals only. But also maybe I priced them wrong or my thumbnails are bad or I'm just not promoting them right. Mostly I'm annoyed I spent real money on the scan and the test run haha. But it's also kind of nice to know the originals aren't a fluke. Any other artists out there where prints flop but originals move?? Or am I the weird one who should've known better.

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?

I've printed the same etching now about fourteen times. Same copper plate, same composition, tiny variations each pull. And I keep telling myself this is the last impression before I destroy the plate, and then I don't destroy it, and I pull another one. I thought it was about the image. It's a portrait of my grandmother's kitchen, which sounds sentimental and maybe it is. But the more I look at all fourteen side by side the less I see the kitchen and the more I see the plate wearing down, the lines getting shallower, the whole thing slightly softer, a little less certain. The image is the excuse. What I'm actually documenting is the plate dying. I don't know if that's a project or just an inability to let something go. I spent my whole MFA arguing that the multiple is the point, that reproduction is the content. And now I'm sitting here unable to let the thing have its last impression. There's a word for this and it's not conceptual rigor. Has anyone else kept a plate or a screen or a file alive way past when it should have been retired? I keep wondering if that's a practice or a pathology.