Deleted Instagram off my phone for six weeks. First post back: 11 likes, and honestly I'm fine with it.

Six weeks ago I deleted the app off my phone. Not the account, just the app, because I kept opening it while standing at the sink and I couldn't tell you one thing I'd seen.

Came back last week, posted a detail shot of the piece I've been chewing on since March. Somewhere around the fourth layer of acrylic the paper starts lifting and you get these little blisters that look like the surface is breathing. That's what I photographed. 11 likes. Two comments, one of them from a guy who wants me to check out his print-on-demand service.

Here's the part that surprised me: it didn't sting. Usually I'd post, then check my phone forty times over two days, then feel like a vending machine that nobody was putting coins in. This time I posted it, closed the app, went back to the studio and tore a page out of a 1970s phone book for the next layer.

I did lose something though. A woman who'd bought a small piece in 2022 messaged asking where I'd gone. I hadn't seen it for three weeks. That one actually bothered me.

So now I'm trying to figure out if the account is worth keeping at all, or if I should just have an email list of eleven people and a note on the wall. Anyone else cut back and find the math worked out better than they expected?

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6 comments

Ananya Iyer·1d

The sink thing got me, because that's exactly where I used to scroll too, and like you I couldn't have told you a single thing I'd seen. Six weeks is a proper stretch.

Also, the detail you chose to photograph says a lot. The blisters where the paper lifts around the fourth layer, that's the part most people would crop out or repaint over. I work in watercolour and ink so I know the terror of paper doing its own thing, but acrylic lifting is a different beast altogether. That's the real work, the bit with no audience. Eleven likes on it feels about right for something that honest, honestly.

The POD guy in your comments is just the tax you pay for posting anything these days.

Camille Laurent·1d

The blisters are the part I'd keep too, but I'd argue with "no audience." A lifting edge is where the light actually catches, that little lip of shadow under it. Most people crop it out because it reads as damage. It reads as damage because they don't know how to look at a surface. Acrylic on paper is a hard thing to accept, it does not forgive.

Six weeks off the app and you came back to photograph the accident. That's the right instinct.

Mira VeyOP·1d

"it reads as damage because they don't know how to look at a surface" is going straight into my head, thanks for that.

and yeah, acrylic on paper does not forgive. i've got a stack of pieces that prove it. i keep them anyway, the failures are more honest than the ones that behaved.

the accident is the only part worth photographing. i stopped trying to make the work look like i meant all of it.

Mira VeyOP·1d

the sink scroll is a real thing, it's like a little trap you walk into every morning. and yeah, the blisters. i've stopped fighting them. the last one i tried to press flat and it just tore and honestly the tear was better than the blister would've been, which tells me something about my instincts.

eleven likes on the honest one. you get it.

Niall Doherty·1d

the bit about the paper breathing is the whole thing there. fourth layer and the blisters starting up is the exact moment a piece stops being yours and starts doing its own thing, and that's a bastard to photograph, so fair play for catching it.

but here's what I'll say about the 11 likes. I did the same thing last spring, pulled the app off the phone for a month, and the first thing back got a grand total of nine and one of them was my sister. and I felt the same, grand about it. then three weeks later a fella I'd never met messaged me looking for a print of a hare I'd posted two years previous, the one I'd near binned. so the numbers aren't the thing, the thing is that a stranger who actually knows what a lifted blister looks like will find it eventually.

the print-on-demand lad though. they're a fierce determined breed 🙂

Mira VeyOP·1d

ha, the sister like is the real detail here. mine would've done the same and then told me she'd done it.

and yeah, that's the bit I keep circling. it's not that the likes don't matter, it's that they arrive on a totally different schedule than the work does. two years later, from a stranger, for a hare. that's not a metric, that's just timing you can't game.

the blister thing though. I've shot it maybe forty times and the good frame is always the one where I didn't move the light. it's a nightmare to catch and then it looks effortless in the photo, which feels like a lie every time.