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I have this shallow drawer in my flat-file that's just chaos. Scraps of paper too small to use, edges I trimmed off, bits of envelopes, a receipt from an exhibition in Copenhagen three years ago, one single glove. Everything else in the studio is ruthlessly ordered, papers sorted by colour and weight, tools in their places. But that drawer is a mess and I can't bring myself to clean it. I think it's because if I sorted it, all those tiny bits would stop being potential and just become trash. As long as they're in the drawer they might still be something. I know that's not rational. But I don't think the studio needs to be rational everywhere.

Spent three weeks pulling a six-colour screenprint edition of 40. Zinc white over a warm grey, the registration had to be perfect or the whole thing read as mud. Got them all numbered, signed, wrapped in glassine. Then the gallery calls, cheerful voice, to tell me they've sliced the margins down to fit their standard 50x70 frames. Every sheet. My margins. Gone. So now the image sits flush to the edge like a cheap poster, and I have to write to 40 people and explain that the edition they bought is technically a different object than the one I made. Half of them won't notice. The half who notice are the ones who'll never buy from me again. The thing that's actually eating me is that I can't decide if I'm furious about the work or about the fact that I said thank you when they told me. I heard myself do it. Thank you, of course, no problem at all. Printmaking is supposed to be the medium where I control the exact specifications. The whole point. Same plate, same paper, same pressure, repeatable, documented, honest. And it still only takes one person with a paper trimmer and a tidy idea of what a frame looks like.

I got my first real representation sideways. A group show in a converted factory space in Plagwitz, maybe 2003, and the gallerist spent the whole evening in the corner eating the cheap sausages and barely looked at the walls. I assumed nothing. Three weeks later she called and asked if I had more work in that direction. I had four canvases and a lot of nerve, so I said yes. That was it. No portfolio, no polite emails, no follow up. I have never once got a gallery by sending an application cold, and I have sent many. So I am curious how it went for others: what was the actual door that opened the first time? A friend who knew someone, a studio visit, a juried show, a bartender, your mother's neighbour? And was it luck or did you do something deliberate that worked? Tell me the real version, not the tidy one you put in the bio.

For two years I filmed from the clean corner. One square meter of clean bench, nice light from the window, everything else out of frame. Neat little reels of a finished vessel turning on a banding wheel. Perfectly fine, perfectly invisible, about 400 views each and then nothing. In February I broke my phone tripod, so I propped the phone on a bucket of dry clay scraps and just filmed where I work, which is a disaster. Dust, a coffee cup from three days before, my grandmother's old knife I use for everything, half a head that failed in the glaze looking at the camera like it's disappointed in me. That video did 60k. Not a tutorial, not a before/after. Just me wedging clay and swearing in Valencian at a piece that kept cracking. Since then I film the mess and I stop deleting the boring parts. Saves went from maybe 20 a post to 60, 70. But here's the part that annoys me: comments went down. People save the messy ones and don't say anything. So I have no idea if it's working, I just know my DMs are fuller and my shop had 14 orders in March vs 4 in the whole autumn. I think what changed is there's no performance in it. Like people can smell the tidy version. But I also can't shake the feeling I just got lucky with the algorithm on one dumb video and now I'm chasing it by deliberately leaving my studio dirty, which is a very strange thing to be strategic about. Anyway if you film your work, do you clean first? I genuinely don't know anymore.

I'm curious how a first gallery connection really happens for people. Mine was almost embarrassingly unglamorous. After years of sending polite portfolios into what felt like a void, a small botanical gallery took me on because I'd delivered a commissioned piece to a neighbouring framer and the owner happened to see me carrying it through the door. She asked to look, and that was that. All the careful mailing, and it was a coincidence on a Tuesday afternoon. Was anyone's first gallery a deliberate strategy, or did most of you stumble into it the way I did? I teach a class on this and I'd rather tell students the truth about how it actually works than the tidy version.

I've been doing the whole "wake up, post a nice finished piece, tag materials, use hashtags, be consistent" thing for months and it's been working okay but like... okay. Then last week I was in a really bad mood about a painting I'd been fighting with for three days, the wash was drying wrong, everything was lifting when I went back in, and I just filmed myself scraping the whole thing off with a palette knife and going "well, that's going in the bin" and posted it on a whim. No caption strategy. Just pure frustration. That stupid, messy, nothing video has more saves and shares than anything I've posted in the last two months. And it's not even a good video, it's just real. I've had four commissions come through from it, including one from someone who said "I don't know anything about art but I felt that." I keep hearing we're supposed to "provide value" and "educate" and I'm not against that but I think maybe the value is just... letting people see you fail? In real time? Without making it a tidy lesson? I don't know, I'm still trying to figure out if I can be that messy on purpose or if it only works when it's genuine. Anybody else finding that the stuff you almost didn't post is the stuff that works?

I do open studio stuff now, which is a nice way of saying I leave the door to my studio open and hope someone wanders in. Last month a guy came in because he thought it was a garage and stayed 40 minutes. Bought a small oil head study for €180, cash, and told me it was because it looked "unfinished in a way that felt honest." Then he posted it on his own account. Not mine. His. In his hallway with a lamp I would have told him to move. That post did more for me than the last six months of my own grid. I have no idea what to do with that information. I've been trying to build this tidy little funnel of print sales and reels and it turns out what actually moves the needle is standing next to a wet canvas smelling like turpentine while someone talks themselves into it. Which is not scalable and I can't put it in a caption and honestly it makes me want to delete everything and just paint with the door open and stop pretending I understand the internet. Do any of you sell in person and just... not bother with the rest? Or am I about to talk myself out of something that's quietly working

Right, settle this for me because I've had two very different experiences and I'm still not sure which was the fluke. First gallery that ever showed my linocuts, I walked in off the street. No appointment, no email, just a folder of prints under my arm and a fair bit of neck. The woman behind the desk was mid-something, clearly not in the mood, and I near talked the ear off her about a hare. She gave me four minutes and a "leave the folder, we'll ring you." I thought I'd blown it. She rang me eleven days later. Since then I've sent maybe nine or ten properly composed emails with the website link and the nice photographs and the polite paragraph about my practice, and I've had two replies. One of them was a no. So my honest theory is the walking in did more for me than every tidy email since, and I'm not sure if that's because of the neck or because a print you can actually hold does something an attachment can't. Could also just be I write a desperate email. What's yours? Did you get in the door by emailing, walking in, or the third thing nobody admits to, which is knowing somebody? And if you're an emailer, tell me what you put in the subject line because mine are clearly being eaten alive.

Sitting in my studio with a small interior I've been working on since the start of the month, a woman at a table with morning light coming from a window behind her left shoulder. The whole thing is nearly done. The walls are right, the cloth on the table is right, the light reads the way I wanted it to. And her hand on the table is dead. It is the fourth time I've wiped it back and repainted it and each time it comes back a little more like a photograph of a hand and less like a hand. Here is the specific problem. I can build the form fine. Palm, knuckles, the taper of the fingers, all correct. What I can't find is the edge. The place where the light side meets the shadow side. I keep making it crisp because I know what the shape is, and a crisp edge says "I know what this is." I don't want her to know what it is. I want the light to have made it. One soft edge where the wrist turns into the shadow of the table, one lost edge where the fingers meet the cloth, and the whole thing would breathe. I know all this. I've taught it. And I still paint a hand like I'm describing it to a police sketch artist. I've been looking at Chardin all week, the little hands in the still lifes, the way he lets a knuckle just dissolve into the background and trusts you to finish it. It is a kind of confidence I don't have yet at this size. At a big scale I can be loose. Small and I get nervous and tidy. So I am going to let it dry and go at it once more with a bigger brush than it deserves. If it fails again I may paint her hand into her sleeve and call it a compositional choice. Not really. But it's been that kind of week.

so for like two years i had this whole thing going where every night i'd pack everything up. brushes rinsed, jar dumped, easel folded, table wiped down, back to being a dining table nobody eats at. full reset. took twenty minutes and i told myself it was discipline. it was not discipline. it was me not wanting to admit i live in a studio with a bed in it. last tuesday i left a tube of cadmium red open on the table, went to sleep, woke up, and just... started painting. no setup. the palette was still wet because i'd covered it with a takeout lid. i got three hours in before i noticed i hadn't eaten. best session i've had in months. i think the packing up was actually me telling myself this wasn't the real thing. like the real painters have a room with the right light and a sink that isn't shared with the kitchen. and i was doing a nightly performance of being tidy instead of working. now there's a crust on the table i'll have to sand off eventually. not gonna. the table has a job now. anyone else doing the pack-and-reset ritual and lying to themselves about why

I'll go first, and it's not a good story. My first real gallery, I had no connection, no CV worth the paper, nothing. I printed twelve photos of recent work, put them in one of those plastic sleeves, and walked in on a Tuesday afternoon because I'd convinced myself email was for cowards. The woman at the desk looked at the folder the way you'd look at a fish left out overnight. She took it anyway. Two weeks later she called. Not for a show. She wanted to know if I could paint a copy of a portrait she had a photo of, for her mother. I said yes. I painted it badly, I was too proud of it. She hung it in her hallway and never showed my work. But she introduced me to the man who did, three years later, and that is the whole of how it happened. Nothing about my portfolio mattered. It was one person who remembered my face. So I want the real versions. Not the tidy ones. How did you actually get your first gallery? Did someone vouch for you, did you get lucky at a group show, did you send forty emails and get one reply, did you sleep with somebody's framing budget? And how long did it take. I ask because I teach now and I watch students believe there is a procedure. There is no procedure. There is a person somewhere who says yes.

Listed a piece I nearly didn't photograph because I thought it was too raw. Charcoal smeared where I meant it to stay clean, torn photo edges showing, the whole thing kind of falling apart the way I usually try to hide. Put it up anyway last Tuesday with a caption that was basically "this one fought me." Sold in under 24 hours to someone who sent a message about their own mother's handwriting being the same as the one in the found photo. I didn't even notice the handwriting matched anything. I just pulled the photo because the dress in it looked like one my brother's first girlfriend wore. Every time I try to predict what lands, I'm wrong. The polished landscape pieces I actually thought would go sit there for months. This one, the one that felt like letting someone see the workbench mid-mess, gone like that. Makes me wonder how much of my process is just me tidying things that people would've liked fine as they were.

There was a print fair in Leipzig two weekends ago, small, mostly German editions dealers and a few of us artists. I brought thirty etchings, three editions, and I had this spreadsheet before I went, mentally, about which ones to push because they did well on Instagram. The "engagement" ones, the moody close-ups people save. You know what sold? Not those. It was the piece I almost didn't pack, a silly little riso of a basil plant, because someone's grandmother in Bologna might have grown basil and it made them laugh. Three people stopped just to tell me it reminded them of a kitchen. One bought it. I keep thinking about that gap. The internet told me people wanted the dark architectural work. The room told me they wanted a basil plant and five minutes of talking about their nonna. I've been optimizing for the wrong audience because the online one is the only one that gives me numbers. The fair gave me 600 visitors on a Sunday and I learned more than a year of analytics. Not sure I have a tidy solution. Just noticing that the algorithm has quietly become my gallerist and I'm not sure I hired it.

I had a gallerist once tell me my etchings were "very nice, very craft", the way you'd praise a child for a tidy bedroom. Said it while looking at the most conceptual piece in the room. I still think about it. It taught me more about how they saw printmaking than anything they actually said. What's the most backhanded thing anyone in a gallery has said about your work? The one that made you smile and seethe at the same time.

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.

I used to write these careful captions about cyanotype chemistry, the UV exposure times, the pH of the seawater I develop in. Thought people needed to understand the craft to appreciate the print. Then I posted a photo of a print that went completely wrong, overexposed, paper curled, the blue almost black, the seaweed I'd placed shifting mid-exposure so the whole thing was a ghost. I wrote "The sun moved and so did I. This one belongs to the Atlantic now." It got more engagement than any of my tidy process posts. People commented about their own ruined things, the work they'd abandoned, the projects that fell apart. A gallery owner in Amsterdam messaged me asking if I had more "failures" available. I don't think people want to understand how it's made. I think they want to feel that they're allowed to make mistakes too. So now I show the ones that didn't work, alongside the ones that did. The studio floor after a bad week. The prints I fished out of the tide at the wrong moment. The work sells the same. But the conversations are different.

Took me three weeks to get back into the studio proper after Christmas. You know the way, kids back to school, chest infection going round, the whole place damp and cold and the ink was like treacle. Kept finding reasons to just tidy the bench instead of cutting. Anyway last night I finally pulled a proof of a block I started in November. Big heron, neck curved down, standing in that shallow water you get on the Corrib at low tide. First proof was rank, cut too deep in the wing feathers, lost the line. Had the whole thing sitting there mocking me. Pulled a second proof at half eleven last night with a different black and a lighter touch on the roller. And the missus came down to see what I was at, coffee in hand, looked at it drying on the rack, and said "that's grand now, that's a nice one." For her that's the highest praise you'll get. No fuss. Took herself back up to bed. Sometimes you just need to get through the bad version to find the good one. And a "that's grand" off someone who's seen every failed print you've ever made. That'll do.

I had a piece in a group show last spring. Small gallery, decent neighborhood foot traffic. They took 40% commission. That's fine, I know the deal, rent's real. But I also had to pay for my own framing. Print the postcards myself. Supply the wine for the opening. They asked if I could "activate my network" on social and tag them in stories every day leading up to it. So I'm paying to make the work, paying to present it, doing their marketing for them, and they take 40% of whatever sells. And I walked away thinking I was lucky to be there. I don't have a tidy conclusion. I'm still trying to figure out which part of this is normal and which part is getting played. Because I keep hearing about how the model is broken for artists but I don't see a lot of alternatives that aren't just "go viral on tiktok" which is its own kind of nonsense.

Young artist friend came by with a curator she's courting. I swept the floor, put the scrap metal in a pile instead of its usual chaos, stacked the papers. The visit went fine. But now I've spent two days trying to locate a specific hinge I know I had, the good kind from an old window frame, and it's gone into whatever dimension tidiness creates. The mess was load-bearing. It was my filing system. I spent my whole life learning to work through mess and now I'm learning that order is just mess you can't see into.

not a finished piece. not even lit properly. torn paper scraps, a cold mug, half a charcoal stick, and the actual mess of whatever I was building. I get it now and I hate it a little. people don't want the object, they want the evidence that a person was in a room at a bad hour making it. the finished thing looks effortless and effortless is boring. problem is I can't manufacture that. the second I set up a tripod for the "process shot" it dies. it reads as a product demo. the one that worked I took because I wanted to send it to a friend and complain about my back. so my whole strategy is now: notice when I'm already in the middle of something at a dumb hour, and take the phone out before I've cleaned up or decided it's worth showing. which is not a strategy. it's a habit of not tidying. my mother would be thrilled.