Deleted my artist account with 11k followers and the people who actually buy found me anyway

so i killed my instagram in february. 11k followers, three years of posting almost daily. the reach had gone to shit anyway, i was getting maybe 200 views on a reel that took me an afternoon, and i kept catching myself making work that would photograph well instead of work i wanted to make. that's the part that got me. i made a piece in january specifically because i knew the process video would do numbers. it did. i hated the piece.

anyway i deleted it. no announcement, nothing, just gone.

what i did instead: went back to emailing. actual emails to about 40 people, buyers from the last two years plus a few gallerists and one curator who'd been nice to me once. no newsletter platform, no funnel, just me at the kitchen table with the names in a spreadsheet. one email every four or five weeks with a photo of whatever's on the wall and one line about what i'm doing.

sold four pieces since february. which is more than i sold in the previous eight months of posting. i don't fully understand it. maybe it's that email feels like a person and the feed feels like a shop. maybe i just got better at asking. either way i'm not going back and i feel slightly stupid for the three years i spent chasing views that never turned into anything.

the thing i can't decide is whether this only works because i already had the followers to begin with. like if i were starting from zero tomorrow would i have to do the whole dance again. i think probably yes and i don't like that answer

6comments

Add your reply to this discussion…

6 comments

Kasia Nowak·1h

The part about making a piece because the process video would do numbers and then hating it, that's the bit that would have gotten me too. I paint with pastel and there is nothing to film anyway, but I have caught myself choosing a subject because I thought someone would like it, and then the whole time I am drawing I am not really in it. The work comes out flat and I cannot say why until later.

11k gone and 40 emails is a much smaller number but at least you know who is on the other end of it. That part sounds a little scary honestly, sending real emails to real people with your name on them. Do you find it harder to write those, or easier than posting was?

Margaret Hsu·1h

The flatness is the tell, isn't it. I have had that exact experience: a specimen that looks perfectly competent on the paper and has nothing in it, and it takes me a fortnight to admit the reason is that I chose it for someone else's eye rather than my own. Pastel is honest about it too. You cannot fake the pressure of a stick the way you can fake a wash.

Sending the emails is the part I would find hardest as well, and I say that as someone who spent years writing grant applications. It is a different nerve entirely when your own name is at the top and there is no institution between you and the answer. Though I suspect the forty are worth more than the eleven thousand ever were.

Mira VeyOP·28m

the pastel thing stuck with me. you can't fake a stick, right, the whole surface is the record of how hard you pressed and in what mood. a wash will lie to you all day.

and yeah, no institution between you and the person reading. that's the whole problem with the emails. a grant application you're performing competence for a panel, they don't know you and won't. an email to someone who bought a piece off you two years ago, you have to just say the true thing. i wrote and deleted the first one nine times. the ninth one was worse than the first, i sent it anyway.

which is what, the specimen question. what do you do with the flat one. i've got a drawer of them. can't throw them out, can't show them, can't look at them.

Mira VeyOP·30m

the flatness thing, yeah. you can hide it from everyone but yourself for about two weeks and then it's just sitting there staring at you.

pastel's a rough one for the algorithm, nothing to film, nothing to speed up. but also kind of a gift now that i think about it. you can't perform a drawing that doesn't want an audience.

and yeah the emails were terrifying. first one i sat on for three days. then the second one i sent and the person wrote back in like an hour asking about a different piece entirely. that was the whole lesson honestly

Ananya Iyer·1h

The part about making a piece because you knew the process video would do numbers, and then hating it, that's the bit that would have got me too. I've caught myself framing a sketch so the light hits it nicely for a photo instead of just drawing the corner I actually wanted to draw. Small thing, but you notice it after a while.

Forty emails sounds like so much work compared to one post though. Was it the writing that was hard, or just sitting with the silence after sending? Genuinely curious, because I keep thinking about doing something similar and then I look at my grid and do nothing.

Mira VeyOP·1h

the frame-the-sketch thing. yeah. it's never one big sellout moment, it's forty tiny ones and then you look at a year of work and none of it has a corner you actually wanted to draw.

to answer you: the writing wasn't the hard part, i'd rather write a real email than film a process video any day. the hard part was the silence. you send 40 and 31 don't reply and that's normal and it still sits in your chest. then one person writes back "i still have the small one, it's in my hallway" and you forget the other 31 for a week.

the silence is just the rejection you were already getting on the grid, except now it's addressed to you personally instead of shouted into a void. somehow that's easier to survive.

and honestly the email list didn't cost me the grid. i kept the grid. i just stopped letting it tell me what to make.