Search

Beautiful morning for it, so I carried my coated papers down to the rocks before the sun got bold. Wind gusting, spray landing on the corners of three sheets. I left them anyway. The salt marks are part of the print now, little white freckles where the water sat on the emulsion before it dried. I didn't plan that. The sea did. I keep fighting this instinct to control everything. Sun time, water temperature, how long I leave the paper under. Then a day like today reminds me the whole point is I'm not in charge. I just hold the paper down. Developed them in seawater like always, and one came out lighter than I intended, almost faint, like a memory of a tide. I think it's my favourite. I'll sell the "correct" ones and keep that one. Almost forgot to eat lunch again. The winter swims keep me honest about that, at least.🙂

I've been making a series on the beach at Aguda since February. Same stretch, same black rocks, same two hours before the tide turns. What changed is that I started developing the sheets in seawater I carry up from there in a plastic can instead of the tap water in my studio. The prints come out softer, less certain of their own edges. I've been calling that a flaw in my head for four months. A woman bought one on Saturday. The one where the net drags across the top corner, the one I nearly threw away twice because the exposure went too long and the blue got so deep the weed reads almost black. She said it looked like something recovered from water rather than made. I stood there and took her money and said thank you and felt weirdly close to tears. I think the win is not the sale. It's that I stopped treating the sea as contamination in my own process. For years I've been correcting it out. Anyone else here sell the piece that embarrassed them a little? I don't mean the commissioned one. The one you almost didn't put in the folder.

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 made a careful little video last week. Me explaining the cyanotype process, coating the paper, the chemistry, why seawater instead of plain water. Good lighting. I even wrote a script. It got maybe 90 views. The day before, I'd thrown a phone clip up without thinking. Just me wading into the surf holding a wet print, letting the wave take it for half a second before I pulled it back. No talking. Grainy. My partner's shadow in the corner. That one has four thousand views and people are asking where to buy the paper. I keep being surprised by this and I should stop being surprised by it. The thing people want from the work is not the knowing, it's the feeling of almost-losing it. I don't know what to do with that except maybe stop making the careful videos.

I've got this big lino on the bench, maybe two foot across, a heron standing in water that's meant to be the inlet at Barna at dusk. And I carved the sky in these long horizontal strokes, close together, the way you do for a dark evening. Only problem is, the girl who helps me at the market on a Saturday looked at the proof and said "oh that's lovely, is it a wave?" And now I can't unsee it. The sky reads as water. The water reads as water. So it's just water on water, and the poor heron standing in the middle of it all like a fella who's lost his bearings. The grain on the lino was doing what it does and I leaned into it, but I think I've over-carved the sky trying to make it interesting when a plain flat sky would've done the job. Half of me wants to cut a fresh block and start the sky again, the other half keeps looking at it thinking well sure, a heron in the middle of the Atlantic would be a grand picture too. It's the second time this month I've let texture run away with me and turned a thing into a different thing entirely. Anyone else had a piece that kept telling you it was something else, and did you fight it or just let it be what it wanted?

For years I've rinsed my prints in the sea. Not always, but when the light is right I carry the paper down to the water and let the tide do the washing for me, the way I've always done it. This year the tide tables shifted somehow, or I did. I kept arriving at the water when it was already on its way out, so the prints came up half-bleached in spots where the foam worked them too long. There's something humbling about being told your timing is off by the ocean itself. No negotiating with that. I found myself missing the prints that failed the worst. One of them has this big pale scar across the middle where the water stayed too long, and it might be the truest thing I've made in months. I keep it pinned where I can see it. Wondering if I should start trusting the mistakes more than the plan. The sea seems to think so.

Left four cyanotypes face-up on the boardwalk by Matosinhos to dry in the sun, went off for a coffee and got talking, came back and the tide had already taken two of them. Not ruined, just gone, carried out somewhere into the Atlantic. The other two were soaked through with saltwater which honestly might have done them good. Everybody says oh no, your work. But I sat there a minute and thought, that's the process. I spend all year trying to get seawater onto paper and the sea just decides when it's ready. My grandmother used to say the sea takes what it wants, and she never meant it as a complaint. The ironic thing is the two it took were the best of the batch. Of course they were.

every winter I tell myself I'll keep swimming through it and every winter I don't. the cold gets into my bones in a way I can't shake, and the beach is empty and grey and the sea feels like it's holding its breath, and I just... stop. I stay inside and work indoors and forget what it feels like to be fully in the water. today was the first day I went back in. the Atlantic was still cold, it's always cold here, but it was the kind of cold that welcomes you instead of punishes you. I stayed in long enough that my hands forgot they were hands. came out and dried off on the rocks and felt like myself for the first time in months. I think sometimes the hardest thing is just getting back to the thing that makes you you. whether that's the sea or the work or whatever it is. today I did it. it's not a big win to anyone else but it's everything to me.

I had a gallery once, early on, who said my work was too blue. Could I try warmer tones? Maybe some ochre, some green. They wanted the sea but without the sea, I think. I said no, which felt enormous at the time and now just feels obvious. But it stayed with me, that moment of almost bending. What's the weirdest thing a gallery has asked you to change about your work? The thing that made you think, do they even see what I'm doing?

Three buckets carried up from the beach this morning, still cold, a little grit in the bottom. People ask why I don't just mix salt into tap water and I never have a good answer, but it isn't the same. The sea at low tide has a particular smell, that iodine and green thing, and it carries whatever was floating out there that night. My prints pick up traces of it. Maybe not visible, but I know. My partner thinks I'm ridiculous, hauling seawater up the hill in a bucket at seven in the morning. He's not wrong. But there's something about developing a print in water that touched the same rocks my father's boat used to scrape past. It matters to me even if nobody else can see it. Today's batch turned out too dark. The sun came through the clouds wrong and I overexposed. I'll pour the water back into the sea when I'm done. It feels like returning the favor.

People always ask how my knees survive and the honest answer is they don't, I just work low because that's how the job goes. You can't set smalti on a table and see it true. So I'm down on the floor eight hours and the cats treat me like furniture. Melina slept on the unfinished corner of the piece yesterday and I let her. She was warm and the image is of water anyway, a cat shaped dent in the sea is fine. Started the morning cutting last year's leftover white tile because I refuse to buy new until it's gone. Found a piece with 1970s cement still crusted on it and it cut like butter anyway. Old stuff is better. New smalti has no patience in it. My actual studio right now is a floor covered in glass dust, three cups of cold tea I keep refilling with hot, and a mosaic of a harbor that's been looking at me for two weeks waiting for me to commit to the sky. I keep putting the blue down and taking it up. Somewhere in me I know the answer is fewer colors, not more. I'll get there by Thursday or I'll throw the whole thing in the sea where it belongs.

Set up thirty sheets on the rocks this morning, weighted with stones, the good glass held down with fishing net. Sun was perfect, low and honest. Then the sea did what the sea does and came in sooner than I planned. Watched the Prussian blue wash away, sheet by sheet, like the paper had never held anything at all. Some of them I'd coaxed for days. The seaweed pressed just so, the exposure timed to the morning light. I keep telling myself the ocean is the collaborator. Today it felt more like the editor. Cut everything I was too attached to, left me with the blank ones and the ones that turned a strange pale grey I don't recognise yet. I'll go back tomorrow. The tide won't ask my permission either way, and that's maybe the whole point.

I collected a few litres of seawater two weeks ago during the storm, when the sea was throwing everything at the rocks. I strain it before developing prints in it because there is always sand, sometimes a bit of weed, once a small crab leg. Kept it in glass jars on the bench. Today I used the last of it and I already miss that particular batch. Each one is different. The temperature, the salt, whatever the sea was carrying that day. It changes the blue, barely, but it changes. Now I need to wait for the next storm to get more, and I resent that the water in the tap won't do. It is a strange way to work. I know that. But the paper remembers where the water came from even if my eye can barely tell.

Every cyanotype I make gets developed in sun and seawater, and that is usually beautiful. This week I did a set in the dark, under my own hands, timing the exposure second by second instead of letting the sky decide. I had been avoiding it because I thought losing the sun would flatten everything. It did the opposite. Four prints of a scallop net, all of them finally the blue I keep seeing in my head and never quite got on paper, that deep cold blue the sea goes in January when nobody is in it. I have been printing for years and I still cannot explain why the same formula, the same paper, gives me a different blue depending on the day. But now I know I can hold the door shut myself when I need to. The sun is back tomorrow. I will go back to the beach with the paper and let it do what it wants. It just feels good to know I am not only waiting for weather anymore.

Yesterday a man watched me hang a cyanotype to dry at the market stall and asked if I'd considered laminating them "so they'd last longer." Laminating. The Prussian blue, the paper that's been soaked in the same Atlantic water my father worked in, and he wants me to run it through a plastic machine like a restaurant menu. I told him the blue fades a little over the years and that's the point. He looked at me like I'd said I pee on them for tone. Which, to be fair, is closer to what I do, since it's seawater and sun doing half the work. I've been thinking about permanence a lot lately. We fought the sea for so long to hold things still. Some of us held the camera. Some of us just let the light decide what stays and what goes. I know which one feels more honest to me now.

I'll go first, and it is not flattering. The only gallery that ever said yes to me, I got because I walked in during a quiet Tuesday afternoon with three cyanotypes in a folder, still smelling faintly of salt, and the woman at the desk happened to be the one who hung the shows. She looked at them for maybe forty seconds and asked where the sea was. That was it. Every careful email I ever sent, with the PDF and the artist statement and the polite paragraph about my practice, got a no or nothing at all. So I am genuinely unsure if I got lucky or if I have been doing the emails wrong for years. Which one actually works for you, the email or the walking in? And if it is the email, tell me what you put in it, because mine are clearly not landing.

Spent three weeks on a tall handbuilt vessel, the neck leaning like it's listening to something. Textured with a wooden rib until my arm ached. Glazed it in that pale green I mix myself, the one my abuela says looks like the sea at El Saler when it's grey out. She named the piece, actually. Called it "la que escucha." The one that listens. Went to open the kiln this morning, half nervous like always, and the whole thing had slumped. Not cracked, not exploded. Just folded over on itself like it got tired of standing. Now it's a green puddle glued to a shelf I'll be chipping at with a chisel for the rest of the afternoon. The worst part is I know what I did wrong. Packed it too low in the stack, fired a bit fast, didn't give it a slow enough ramp at the start. Rookie stuff. I've done this firing maybe forty times and I still rush it when I'm excited. Anyway the shelf is ruined, my hands smell like vinegar, and there's a lump of green glass on my bench I can't throw away yet. Going to go sit outside with a coffee and pretend I'm fine about it.

I taped off the horizon line on a 22x30 Arches sheet this morning and I'm now on my third strip of masking tape because the first two lifted wet paper and took a chunk of the sky with them, and the third one is somehow STILL not level. I've checked it against a ruler, held it up to the window, walked across the room and squinted, and it's leaning maybe a quarter inch to the right and I cannot unsee it. This is the whole painting. It's a beach thing, big wash, not complicated, and the one thing that has to be dead straight is the one thing I cannot get dead straight. My partner came in and said "looks straight to me" which is the single least helpful sentence in the English language, love you babe. Meanwhile the wash underneath is actually nice?? like the color is doing the thing I wanted, that soft grey-lavender where the sea meets the sky, and I'm going to ruin it with a tape line. I know I'm going to ruin it. I've already accepted it. I think part of me is stalling because once I peel that tape there's no undoing it, and I've got a little market table in three weeks and this was supposed to be one of the four pieces I'm bringing. Anyway if anyone has a trick for taping a straight edge on soaked paper that doesn't involve me buying a T-square I'm listening. Or I could just paint a boat over it, that's also an option I'm considering

I have done both and I still cannot decide which is worse. My first real show came from walking in. I had a folder of cyanotypes, salt still on some of them, and I stood in the doorway until the woman at the desk looked up. We talked for maybe ten minutes, mostly about the sea. She gave me a slot in a group show two months later. I am sure I was lucky. The emails, I have sent many. Most go nowhere, which is fine, but a few have turned into something. Harder to read a room that way. So which is it for you. Do you write first, or do you carry the work in and take your chances with whoever is at the desk? And has the one you chose ever actually worked.

A woman from a hotel group in Lisbon emailed last week about two of the blue prints. Not for a gallery wall. For a bathroom, one of those big ones with the freestanding tub and the single olive branch. The fee they offered: 180 euros for both, printed, for three years. I buy my paper from a small place in Barcelona. A single sheet of the heavy cotton is almost 9 euros now, and I ruin about one in four between coating and washing. That is before the sea, the hours, the fix. I said no, politely, and she wrote back that their budget was fixed and it was "a lovely exposure for the work." The exposure line. I keep thinking about how many people have said it to me and how little it has ever done. Once, years ago, I let a magazine use a print for free and I did get two sales from it, so I cannot say it never works. But 180 for two, printed, was not a negotiation, it was a rounding error for them. I am not asking how to price things. I know my number. I am just tired of the moment in the email where the other person decides my materials do not count.