I deleted my Instagram last week and my commissions went up, which makes no sense
Okay so this is going to sound like I'm about to sell you a course and I promise I'm not.
I deleted the app off my phone nine days ago. Not the account, just the app, because I was opening it while the kettle boiled and then the kettle would boil for eleven minutes and I'd be watching some guy in a loft in Berlin explain underpainting to me. My actual painting time was like 40 minutes a day and my scrolling was two hours. Do the math, it was ugly.
Then three commissions came in. From the same two people who've bought before, plus a woman I met at a market in March who said "I'll think about it" and I fully wrote her off. And I keep trying to figure out if this is causation or if it's just that the work I made in those nine days was better because I wasn't painting with half my brain doing caption math the whole time. I think it's the second thing. The commissions might be coincidence. The work is definitely not.
The part that bugs me is that the "post every day" advice isn't wrong exactly, it just made me a person who was making content about painting instead of making paintings, and I didn't notice the swap happening. It was slow. Also honestly the account's fine, I'm not quitting, I just check it on my laptop now like a Victorian.
Anyway. Nine days, three commissions, one very smug partner who told me to do this in June. Has anyone else taken a step back from posting and had it go weirdly okay, or is this just a lucky streak I'm about to be humbled by
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ngl the "kettle boiling for eleven minutes" thing hit a little too close. i've had whole afternoons evaporate watching someone explain underpainting like i don't already know what underpainting is.
that said i half agree with the comment above that it's probably the nine days of actual painting doing the work, not the deleting. but i think that's kind of the point and it's the part people skip. the app wasn't stealing your commissions, it was stealing the hours that make commissions happen, and the replies just showed up on time for once. the causality is boring but the mechanism is real.
The video explaining underpainting is a strange thing, ji. In our Mithila work we do not do underpainting at all, the line goes down and that is that, and still I have lost many an evening to watching someone in a far country explain something I was taught at my mother's knee. So it is not only you.
And I agree with your half agreement. Nine days of painting will show in the hand. No buyer needs to be told why the lines are steadier this month, they can see it and their hand goes to the pocket. The app was only eating the hours. People want a dramatic reason, but the honest reason is boring and it is the true one.
the line goes down and that is that, oh I love that, and it's also terrifying?? no underpainting means no fixing it later, that's like the opposite of my whole personality haha. I had a professor who would have loved you, he thought glazing and layering was mostly a way of avoiding committing to a mark.
and you're right that it's the same trap. I don't think I've ever watched someone explain a thing I already knew and come away better at it. just comes away having lost the evening. the hand only learns from the hand.
also your last line is the whole post and I should've just written that. boring reason, real cause.
"the causality is boring but the mechanism is real" is going straight in my notes honestly, that's the whole thing in one line and I couldn't get there in a whole post. and yes to the underpainting videos, like sir I have a BFA, I know what it is, I'm just watching you do it in a nicer loft with better light. that's the actual crime.
the boring causality thing is what's messing with me though, because I keep wanting it to be a story about the app being bad and it's not, it's just that I had 40 minutes a day and now I have two and a half hours and stuff got finished. which is way less fun to post about.