I hired a kid to film my studio for three days and now my phone won't stop buzzing

My gallery suggested it as a favour, half-joking, because I keep sending them photos of paintings that look flat and dead in a jpeg. So I found a student from the academy, a video person, and let her follow me around for three days. Scraping back a layer, mixing cold wax, the stupid thing where I stand and stare at the wall for twenty minutes. I figured it would be nothing.

She cut it into forty seconds and posted it herself. I did not look at the comments for two days because I was sure it would be embarrassing, the way I always look slightly annoyed working, and then the gallery called me and said my inbox was full.

I don't know what to do with this. I spent twenty years building a reputation the slow way and a clip of me scraping paint off a canvas has done more for attention than any exhibition opening I've had since 2019. It is not the work. It is me looking like I am concentrating, which I am, but so is everyone.

I am not going to pretend the attention is bad. But I am old enough to know that this is a different kind of currency and I do not yet know what it buys, or what it costs me to keep minting it. The kid wants to come back and film the next piece start to finish. I said yes. I have no idea if that was wise.

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Mateo Serrano·1h

this is the thing nobody tells you about working in a visual medium, that the actual process is almost always more interesting than the finished piece. i had someone film me throwing for a day once and i couldn't watch it, too much of me looking confused and poking at a pot. but other people saw something in it. there's a vulnerability in the work that people connect to and we're too close to see it.

also the standing and staring at the wall thing? that IS the work. that's where half the decisions happen. i'm glad the kid had the sense to leave it in.

did it actually move the needle for the gallery or is it just nice having proof you exist outside your own studio?

Lukas BrandtOP·54m

The pot-throwing thing, I know exactly what you mean. Watching yourself work is like hearing your own voice on a recording, some uncanny version of yourself that everyone else seems to recognise and you don't. Probably that's exactly the point, though. We're inside the decisions, they only see the labour.

And the staring at the wall, yes. I don't even think of it as thinking. It's more like the painting is doing the thinking and I'm just in the way until it's done. But nobody films that with any patience, so I was surprised the kid kept it in. She understood more in three days than some collectors understand in a decade.

As for the needle, I don't know yet. The gallery called me, which is not nothing. But I've been doing this long enough to know the buzz is a weather system, not a climate. Ask me in six months.

Gloria Mae Jackson·1h

Now that's something, honey. Folks love the finished thing but they don't understand the living in it. I've been sewing since I was a girl and people used to just want to see the quilt laid out on the bed, all done and neat. But it's the choosing of the scraps, the way you hold a piece up and turn it this way and that, the sitting quiet while the Lord tells you where it goes, that's where the real story is. That child saw it, and she gave it back to you in forty seconds.

I'm glad the phone won't stop buzzing. Let it buzz. You earned it. 🙂

Lukas BrandtOP·1h

The quilting comparison, that sits right. It's the same thing, the holding and turning and waiting for the piece to tell you something. People want the object, not the labour, and I never minded that until I saw how much of the story gets lost when you skip the labour.

And you're right about the child. She had the instinct to point the camera at the waiting, not just the hands. Twenty minutes staring at a wall and she understood that was part of it.

Let it buzz. I'll try. The gallery has been nicer to me this week than my own wife has.