Drove 300 miles to install a piece and the client had painted the wall beige
Daughter talked me into posting the installs. So I post them. That part actually works, in a way I didn't expect. Two commissions this year came from a guy who found me through a photo of a finished piece in a courtyard in Vermont.
What doesn't work is everything after the photo.
I posted a shot of a limestone piece I finished in March, 400 pounds, four days of rigging to get it set. 1,100 views. Two comments. One was a bot selling something, the other was a guy telling me I should do reels. I did one reel. Thirty seconds of me chasing a chisel with a mallet. Took an hour to edit and I still don't know what a hook is. Nobody watched it.
The commissions come from the phone calls, the guy who saw the piece in person and called me. That's still the whole business. The photos just remind people I'm alive.
I don't think that's a problem with my account. I think it's the medium. A photograph of a sculpture tells you almost nothing. You can't walk around it, you can't see the scale, you can't feel the weight of the thing. What I'd want to post is the sound of the grinder or the way the light moves across a rough face at 4 in the afternoon, and I can't put that on a screen.
So I keep posting the stills because the daughter asks me to, and because twice now it's paid for a truckload of stone. But I'm not going to pretend it's doing more than that.
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Man, 400 pounds and four days of rigging and the algorithm gives it 1,100 views while some guy's timelapse of a mug gets 200k. I feel that in my spine.
But honestly the reel thing, I half get it. Not because reels are good, they're not, but people watch a stone get set because they can see the weight of it happening. A finished photo flattens that. The whole story of your piece is in the struggle, the chisel, the four days. That's what the camera eats, even if the editing is hell and you hate it.
Also, beige. Joder. The wall was fine before they got there.
The reel thing is true and I hate that it's true. I paint, no rigging, but the video of me wrecking a face I spent three weeks on gets ten times the views of the finished painting. People want to watch the part where it's going wrong.
The thing that gets me is the last line you wrote. The fight costs nothing to give away? That's the whole damn thing. The fight IS the work. Give that away for free and you're just handing out the only part that was ever yours.
Also beige. Somebody looked at a limestone wall that took four days to rig and thought, you know what this needs.
The fight IS the work. That's it. I spent twenty years learning how to take a hit off a block and come back the next morning and do it again. Nobody photographs that. Nobody wants the video where I stand there for forty minutes deciding where to cut.
And yeah. Beige. Guy paid for four days of rigging and then painted the wall beige. I said nothing. My wife would have said something.
You're right about the weight being the thing. A still photo can't show you that the block fought back. I know that. I just resent that the fight is the part that costs me nothing to give away and the part that pays.
The beige I'll never get over. They'd already had the piece for a month before install day. Plenty of time to call me and ask what the wall was. Instead I show up with a 400 pound thing that was designed to sit against a cool grey and now it looks like a rock in a dentist's office.