I deleted my Instagram in January. My waiting list is longer than it was in October.
Not a manifesto, just a thing that happened. I closed the account in the first week of January, mostly out of fatigue. Photographing a canvas under three lamps, adjusting the white balance, cropping so the edges don't show, then watching forty people like it and nobody write. Ten years of that and I was tired in a way sleep doesn't fix.
Three commissions have come in since, all through the same channel: someone saw a painting on a wall at a friend's apartment in Lyon and asked who did it. One of them is a large interior, a woman at a window, and she has already sent me the light measurements from her apartment and asked me to visit at 4pm to see the room. That is worth more than any algorithm has ever handed me.
I'm not saying everyone should quit. I still have a website with prices on it because I'm not a monk about this. But it's been two months and I have not missed it once. What I do miss is the excuse to see other painters' work, so I've been going to the Musée des Beaux-Arts on Thursdays instead, when it's empty, and looking at the Fantin-Latour for an hour. That has done more for my work than a year of posting ever did.
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the light measurements detail is what got me. someone standing in their own room with a tape measure because they already know where it goes, that's a completely different thing from forty likes.
i deleted mine for a year and a half and the honest result was... nothing happened. no waiting list, no commissions. so i don't think the leaving is what did it for you, i think it's that you already had work on other people's walls doing the talking. the account was just the middleman taking a cut in attention.
still, i'd rather not go back to photographing under three lamps either. that part i believe completely.
the part about nothing happening when you left, that's the honest version most people don't post. i think you're right that the walls did the work, not the leaving.
but i'd add one thing. the work has to be somewhere a person can stand in front of it. i have maybe four pastels up in other people's homes, and every single one of those came from somebody seeing the actual piece, not a photo of it. phone photos of pastel are hopeless anyway, the light kills it. so maybe it's less "the account was a middleman" and more that you and i both only have a few doors open, and none of them are the screen.
still not going back to the three lamps though. that i believe.
The pastel thing, yes. I paint oil mostly but I have done enough dry media to know a phone photo of it is a small crime. The tooth, the dust sitting on the surface, none of that survives a screen. So when you say your four pastels came from someone standing in front of them, that isn't a coincidence, that's the whole mechanism.
And I'll take the correction. "The account was a middleman" was lazy of me. It wasn't a middleman, it was a bad substitute for the only thing that ever worked, which is a person in a room with the actual object. What I really lost when I closed it was the illusion that I was doing something.
Four pastels in other people's homes is not a small number, by the way. That's four rooms where someone chose to live with the thing. I'd take that over a thousand of the forty-likes days.
You're right, and I'd rather agree than flatter myself. The account was not the thing that built the work. Ten years of paintings ending up on other people's walls did that. If nothing had been hanging anywhere, deleting the app would have just made me quiet.
But I'll push back a little on "nothing happened." Nothing happened on the surface. You didn't lose anything either, did you? No commissions, no waiting list, and also no more evenings spent cropping edges for people who were never going to write. For a year and a half you had your attention back. I don't think that counts as nothing, even if it never shows up in a number.
The measurements, though. A woman standing in her own room with a tape measure is not at an exhibition, she is not scrolling. She is planning where the light will fall. That is the only part of this I would call luck.