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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?

i have a folder. it's a physical folder, brown and worn, and it has every single rejection letter i've gotten since 2013. gallery shows, grants, residencies, that one time a zine said no to my sticker page. i don't open it. i don't throw it away. it just sits on my shelf like a tiny museum of my own mediocrity. my therapist would have a field day if i had one lol. but also there's something weirdly useful about it? like proof i actually tried. nobody writes back when you don't apply. the folder only exists because i kept sending shit out. the other day i found the letter from that residency in upstate new york that said "your work shows promise but lacks maturity" and i laughed out loud because i was 24 and of course it lacked maturity, i was painting owls wearing hats. anyway. keeping the folder. it's my version of a photo album i guess

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.

applied to a small residency back in february, the kind with a studio in an old school building and a bunch of other people around. found out at 7 this morning i didn't get it. form email, one line of actual comment, and the comment was "we'd like to see more risk." the funny part is i've been sitting on a bigger piece for six weeks because it scared me. it's got a burnt section in the middle that i've been covering back up every time it gets too honest. so yeah. fair. i'm not going to pretend i took it well at first. i ate toast standing up and stared at the wall for a while. but i'm clearing the table for it tonight, the one under the window, and the burnt bit is staying exposed this time. if anyone's got a rejection email that stung but also landed, i want to hear it. misery loves specifics.

Ten years ago a small gallery in the 6th offered me a show and I said no. The owner wanted me to paint "more like the ones that sell" and I could feel the whole thing turning into a decor contract. My then-girlfriend, now wife, said I was insane. I still think I was right, but I've wondered about it plenty since. So, what's the best offer you've actually turned down? A gallery, a commission, a residency, a nice chunk of money. Tell me I was wrong if you like, I can take it.

The edition of riso prints I made almost as a joke, sitting at the print table during a residency, outsells everything I've put actual weeks into. Etchings that took me months to pull. Nobody buys them. The 60 cent machine-made copies sell out in two days. I keep telling myself it's because they're cheap, people can afford them, they don't need a frame and a wall. But the real reason is probably that they photograph flat and fast and that's what the feed wants. The etching doesn't read on a phone. The riso does. So the market rewards the thing that reproduces well, and I'm a printmaker, I should find that funny. It is funny. It's also a little humiliating that I'm fifty euros away from just making risos full time and telling myself it's a conceptual choice. I'm not complaining about the money. I'm complaining that I can't tell anymore if I'm following the work or the algorithm disguised as the work.

Got my first real show at 34, after ten years of fabrication work and nobody knowing my name. Walked in with photographs of a commission I'd done for a church, stone and steel, and the owner just looked at them and said bring it in. No resume, no slides, no nonsense. That was the old way. But I've watched enough younger artists since to know that's not how it goes for most people now. Connections, a residency, a curator who happened to be in the room. Which was it for you, the work or the contact? And be honest, because I've got a theory that everyone thinks they got in on merit and most of them didn't.

I got my start the long way. Knew a fabricator who knew a framer who knew a gallery owner who needed someone to fix a broken piece of sculpture on a Saturday. Did the job, didn't charge, came back Monday with a portfolio of my own work. They hung three pieces. Took two years to sell one. No residency, no MFA, no cold call. Just asked a guy who owed me a favor for an introduction. How did you get your first gallery? Cold email, walked in, referral, someone saw your work somewhere? Curious if anyone actually landed one through the front door, because I never did.

Landed my first gallery by walking in off the street with three paintings under my arm. The owner barely looked at me, took the work, said "come back in a month." I thought I'd been dismissed. Turns out she framed one and sold it before I even returned. I got lucky, but I've also got friends who did the polite route, the residency route, the friend-of-a-friend route, and it worked just as well. I don't think there's one way. But I know plenty of painters who've been waiting years for the "right moment" to approach a gallery, and I think that moment never comes. Did you knock on the door yourself, or did yours find you?

I've only ever shown through applications, open calls, residencies that led somewhere. The walk-in, the cold email to a gallerist I've never met, I've never done it. Not once. There's something about it that feels like showing up to someone's house unannounced and I can't get past it. But I wonder if that's a mistake. Everyone I know who's further along got their first show through a person, not a form. Someone knew someone. Did any of you actually get in somewhere by just walking in with a portfolio, or emailing out of nowhere? Did it work? Or is the personal connection the only door that ever opens? I'm starting to think I've been hiding behind application deadlines so I don't have to do the awkward part.

I'm printing a four-plate etching this week, hard ground line over aquatint, Charbonnel black, on this Somerset that's been in the drawer since a residency in 2021 and has gone slightly cockled at the edges. I pulled twelve proofs Sunday. On the first nine the ink flaked off the shoulder of the plate where the ground got scratched too thin, a little starburst of grey dust sitting on top of the image like ash. By proof ten the plate had worn in and it stopped. Clean. So I have nine with the flake and three without, and I've spent two days now trying to decide which one the edition is. The obvious answer is the clean one, that's what the plate does when it's properly bitten and properly inked. But the flake is the only mark in the whole thing that isn't mine. It's the part that happened. There's a thing I keep coming back to, that a print is supposed to be the same every time, that's the promise. And here is a small accident that makes nine of them not the same, and my first instinct was to call the nine the real ones and the three the mistakes, which is backwards and also feels true. I know somebody is going to tell me to just re-bite the plate and print it properly. I probably will. But I wanted to say it out loud first, because the moment I fix it, the version I care about stops existing, and I'm not sure I've decided that's fine. Anyway. If anyone has a rule for this, like a cutoff for how much unplanned mark you're willing to certify as the print, I want to hear it. Mine keeps moving.

I have about forty etching plates stacked in a corner of my Berlin studio and I know exactly which ones are on top, the ones I used last, the ones I still believe in. The ones at the bottom are the ones I don't want to look at. Some of them are good plates, technically. But they're associated with a show that went nowhere, or a residency where I was lonely, or an idea I didn't push far enough. So they sit there. I could file them properly, label them, give them a chance to be reused or at least recycled. Instead they're a kind of archaeological record of my disappointments. I'm not sure what to do with that. I think I'm supposed to say I'll clean the studio this weekend but we all know that's a lie.