Every gallery in Lyon that takes me seriously found me through an email, not a grid. Every commission this year came from someone who walked into the studio or stood in front of a painting at a group show and stood there too long.

Meanwhile the thing I kept hearing, from people whose advice I paid attention to, was that if I stopped posting the algorithm would forget me. It did not forget me. There was nothing to forget. I had four thousand followers and about nine of them ever wrote to me, and two of those nine are my cousins.

So I stopped for a year and put the two hours a day back into the work. That is the whole story. I am not going to tell you it doubled my sales, it did not. It just gave me back an afternoon and a morning every week, and I made a lot of paintings in that time, and some of them are good.

What I notice now, going back into it lightly, is how much of the language around marketing is borrowed from physical trades. Building an audience. Growing a platform. Nurturing a funnel. It all sounds like hard, visible labor. But I have never once seen it behave like labor. You cannot put in the hours and be sure of the output. That was the thing I could not get used to, after years of learning to paint from life where effort and result are at least in the same room together.

Je ne sais pas. Maybe it works for the people who enjoy it. I never did.