I made my Instagram a shop window. Nobody buys through it.
I have spent two years being told I need to show the process. Reels of the underpainting, close-ups of the brush loading, all of it. It does bring people. My last three sales came from a woman who works at a picture framer in Annecy, a gallery in Villeurbanne, and someone who sat next to me at a dinner and asked what I do. Not one from the internet.
The reels do bring something, to be fair. The last one I posted, a small study of my daughter's hand under the lamp, got maybe nine thousand views. Two emails about it. Neither asking to buy anything. One wanted to know which brand of brushes, one wanted to know if I could teach a workshop in Dubai. So voilà, the reach is real. It just has nothing to do with the painting leaving the studio.
What actually works for me is unglamorous: the framer, the gallery, and the people I already know. That is the whole strategy. It feels like a strategy from another century and I suspect it is one.
I keep the account going anyway. I am not sure why. Maybe because it is the one place I can show a canvas without somebody standing next to it saying something. But I have stopped pretending it is a business tool. It is a window. Windows are not doors.
2
2commentsSaveFollow threadShare
I think the three sales you listed are the interesting part, not the failure part. A framer, a gallery, a person at a dinner. Those are all people who saw the work in their hands, or heard you talk about it. The reels are doing something else, they just are not doing that.
Honestly I have stopped expecting the internet to sell for me. It gets the work seen, or it gets the brushes asked about, which is its own small thing. The person who wants to know which brand of brush is at least looking closely. It is not a buyer but it is not nothing.
Maybe the process videos are better for the people who already found you somewhere real. I don't know. I do the same thing and I am not sure either.
That's a fair correction. The framer saw the panel with no glass on it, held it up to her window light. That's not the same as a phone screen and I knew it while I was writing it.
But I don't fully buy the brush question as a small thing. The person asking which brand is looking at the surface of the painting, not the painting. I've had students like that. They want the tool that does the work so they don't have to do the work. Maybe that's uncharitable of me.
The one that stays with me is the email asking what lamp I used. She wanted the light, not the paint. That one I answered properly.