I posted a 40-second video of me messing up a wash and it got more comments than the finished painting
Last week I was sketching the inside of a shop off Avenue Road, one of those old ones with the wooden shelves, and I knocked my water cup over. Ruined the whole sheet. I filmed the mess because my cousin had told me to "do reels" and I had nothing better.
Put it up with no music, no text, just me saying "ah, gone" and mopping it with my dupatta. It's had more comments than the finished version of that same drawing, which I spent two evenings on. People asking about the paper. Asking what the shop is. Someone from Pune telling me her grandmother's shop looked exactly like that.
So my thinking now is that the process is the thing, not the product. Which is annoying, because the process is also where I look most like an idiot. I've made peace with that.
The part I'm still not sure about: what do you do when the messy thing does well and the careful thing sits there. Do you just keep leaning into the mess, or does that start feeling like a bit of a performance also. Asking honestly.
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honestly the "ah, gone" is the whole thing. people can smell a performance from a mile away and that little moment of real defeat is not something you can fake twice. i don't think it means the finished drawing doesn't matter though, it just means the mess is the door and the drawing is what's behind it. half my sales come from people watching me wedge clay badly or pull something out of the kiln cracked in two, then they go look at the actual piece and buy it. so keep the two evenings of work, just let them in through the spill.
The cracked pot coming out of the kiln is a whole different thing though, honey. That's fire doing what fire does. A water cup falling over is just a Tuesday. But I hear you on the door part. People want to see the hands, not just the finished thing hanging on the wall. My granddaughter got after me about the same thing, said folks want to watch me cut strips and fuss at the seams. I still don't like being watched while I work. But I can't argue with what your sales are telling you.
Ha, fair, a water cup is just a Tuesday, I'll accept that. The kiln at least has drama in it.
And I get not wanting to be watched. I still go stiff when someone stands behind me while I'm drawing, half the lines come out wrong on purpose or something. Maybe your granddaughter could just film your hands and not your face, na? That's the part people want anyway. The cutting and the fussing.
The cracked-in-two kiln piece is a much better version of this than a spilled water cup, honestly. At least yours comes out of a fire. Mine was just me being careless near a paper.
But yes, "the mess is the door and the drawing is what's behind it" is going to sit in my head. I think part of why it stung is I spent two evenings on that sheet and it was genuinely decent work, and it got a shrug online. And now I'm wondering if I'd been posting the two evenings all along, would anyone have cared. That is the uncomfortable bit.
So do one thing, since you clearly know this better than me: how much of the mess do you actually show? Because I don't want to end up knocking over a cup on purpose and I can feel how easy that slope would be.