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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 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'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?

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.

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.

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.

Small gallery in Lisbon took interest in the cyanotypes a few months ago. They asked for the usual things, then asked how many followers I had. I said about nine hundred and they went quiet for a while. I thought that was the end of it. They wrote back last week with a date. The woman said she'd rather work with someone whose work she actually saw in person than someone with thirty thousand followers who can't hold a conversation about paper. I keep thinking about how close that came to nothing. Nine hundred of those followers are probably bots and family. The two or three collectors I have found me through a newsletter I send maybe eight times a year, mostly just photos of the prints drying and the sea that day. No strategy. I just got tired of performing for the algorithm and started doing the one thing I actually like, which is showing the work itself. Not sure this scales into advice. Just glad quiet work still has a door that opens sometimes.

Sold a run of small prints on the Instagram side in three days. Little 15cm squares, cheap enough that people don't think twice. Then a collector who bought one messaged asking why I don't do a large version of the same piece, one meter wide, because that's what she'd actually hang. Thing is, the big ones don't sell through social. They need to be seen in person, in a gallery, with the light right. I can photograph a cyanotype until the sea turns grey and it still flattens into just another blue rectangle on a feed. So I keep making the small ones because they move, and the collector sits there wanting the big one I haven't printed. There's a version of this economy I don't fully understand yet. The work people say they want and the work people actually buy, they're cousins, not the same person. Anyway I'm prepping the large one this week. I think I'll keep making the smalls too. One feeds the other, even if I can't say exactly how.

Left my cyanotype wash tank sitting for three weeks because I kept telling myself I'd get to it, and when I finally opened it the chemistry had settled into these distinct strata. Blue on top, pale haze underneath, a few flecks of paper lint drifting slow like they were suspended mid-thought. I nearly just drained it. But I stirred it once out of curiosity and honestly the gradient it made on the side of the jar was more beautiful than half the prints I've made this month. So now I'm sitting here with a broken rule of mine not to photograph the process, because I want to remember that even the neglect has something to say. The sea does this too, if you look where the waves turn back. Layers. Somebody tell me I'm not the only one who keeps almost-useful tanks of half-dead chemistry around out of sentiment. My partner says it's hoarding. I say it's patience with no deadline.

there was a proper layer of crystallised sea salt built up on the corner where i leave prints to dry after the seawater bath. i don't rinse them, the salt is part of the process, it catches different tones. but the table had gotten bad. crusty. white deposits on everything. so i scrubbed it down this morning and now the wood looks too clean. like a stranger's workspace. i keep glancing over at that corner expecting to see the tide mark and there's nothing. i think i need to go get it messy again on purpose. maybe that's the whole thing, you spend years building a rhythm of mess and then one day you tidy it and realise the mess was the point.

First gallery that ever took my work, small place down the country, fella ran it out of a converted shed near the sea. Took six linocuts on consignment, sold two in eight months, paid me eventually. Nothing glamorous. But I was buzzing for weeks after he said yes, d'you know that feeling? Like someone finally saw the thing you'd been doing in a room on your own and said that'll do. What was yours? The first gallery that gave you a shot, how'd it happen, what were the terms, was it as grand as you'd hoped or a bit of a let-down? Love to hear the stories.

So there's a new place opened down near the docks, lovely spot, they wanted a big linocut for the main wall, something of Galway Bay, rough sea, the whole bit. I was delighted with myself. Gave them the friends-and-family rate because they're sound and I wanted the work up somewhere people'd see it. €600, I said. Frame included. Generous, I thought. What I didn't do was keep a proper tally of the hours. Carving that thing, it's a big block, 60x40cm, all that water and sky and the little light breaking through, took me the guts of three weeks on and off. Proofing it, pulling the final edition, stretching the paper, framing it myself. Did the maths this morning. Roughly 40 hours all in. That's €15 an hour, and that's before materials, before the frame cost me sixty quid, before the petrol driving it down there. I'm not even angry about it, I'm just looking at the number and thinking, I'd have been better paid stacking shelves. But I'd also have been bored out of my skull, so there you go. Anyway the print looks savage up on the wall. I'll put the price up next time and see do I survive it.

I keep a pair of cotton gloves by the trays and they're so crusted with salt now they stand up on their own when I take them off. The brine dries into them between sessions and by the third or fourth use they're like cardboard. I should wash them. I won't. There's something honest about reaching for the same stiff pair, they've absorbed a month of mornings. Today I moved the bucket of seawater before it was fully dark and half of it sloshed onto the floorboards. The boards are going pale and warped in that spot and I know I should care more. I just mop it up and keep going. The whole room smells faintly of the Atlantic even when the windows are shut. Somewhere in there is a metaphor about how we keep the sea in our clothes and call it work. I'm too tired to finish it. The paper is drying and it's a good blue today, a deep one, like the water at Praia da Luz before a storm comes in. That's enough.🙂

Sold a 50x70 cyanotype last week for €180. It was a good week, I should have been glad. Instead I sat at the kitchen table that night counting again: the paper is €14 a sheet now, up from €9 two years ago, the ferric ammonium citrate another €40 for a bottle that makes maybe thirty prints, and I toss two out of five because the light was wrong or the sea water left a tide mark I didn't want. So per finished print, before my own hours, I am at maybe €25 in materials and half my days are duds. €155 for a day of standing at the water, holding paper down, waiting. That is what it comes to when I let myself look. I have not raised a price since 2019 and I am afraid if I do people will just stop. But the arithmetic is getting louder than the shame of asking for more. I think next order I will go to €240 and see who blinks. That number has been in my head for months now, and saying it out loud here feels like the first time it is real.

I had a cyanotype on the drying rack for two weeks that I kept walking past and deciding was a failure. The seaweed had shifted mid-exposure, so the whole composition was off, the edges were uneven, the blue had pooled in one corner. Three times I nearly tore it up. Then the light hit it wrong one evening and I saw it. That shifted seaweed looked like the tide had moved through the paper. The pooling corner was exactly the way water sits on a rock at low tide. It's now the one print in the studio I won't sell. I keep it on the wall where the afternoon sun reaches it, just to remind myself that sometimes what I read as a mistake is the sun and the sea telling me what they had in mind all along.

I print by the tide these days. Not by the light exactly, that too, but by the actual state of the water. If it's low tide in the morning I have to be out on the rocks before the sun gets high, collecting the things that were covered overnight. Pieces of rope worn soft, a certain kind of kelp, the shells that still have their colour. Then back to print while they're still wet from the sea. It means my studio hours are different every week. Some days I'm working at six. Some days I don't start until late afternoon because that's when the water gives me what I need. It makes a mess of any routine I try to keep. But the prints are better. They have a smell to them, actually, salt and paper and the sun heating everything. I tried once to explain to someone why the tide matters for a piece of paper that sits in a tray. I couldn't find the words. But I keep doing it.

I made a cyanotype yesterday of a cuttlebone I found on the beach, one of those big ones, almost the length of my hand. Laid it directly on the paper with some torn fishing net over it. Exposure was good, the sun was strong, but when I washed it the shadows all went muddy. The cuttlebone reads as a dark blob instead of having that honeycomb texture it has on the surface. I think I underwatered my chemistry. Or maybe the paper was too dry when I coated it. I've been using a cotton rag paper I'm not as familiar with and it seems to drink the emulsion differently. I've been staring at it for an hour. Part of me wants to call it a bad print and toss it. Part of me thinks there's something in the flatness, like the sea at dusk, all that detail pulled under. But I don't know if I'm just making peace with a mistake. How do you tell the difference between a flaw that works and one that's just a failure?