I started answering gallery emails on Tuesdays only and the silence stopped bothering me

Not a growth tactic, more a survival measure. For years I answered everything the day it arrived, and the day it arrived was usually a morning I had planned to work. One email about a group show in Antwerp and the whole morning gone, because after answering I am no longer in the painting, I am in the correspondence about the painting.

So since March I answer on Tuesdays. Everything. Piles up, I read them Tuesday morning with coffee, answer in one go, and the rest of the week the studio door is shut properly.

What surprised me: the fairs and the institutions do not care. They wait a week. Two commercial galleries dropped me off their list of people to ask for things, which honestly I count as a gain. One collector I have known for eleven years wrote back after nine days and said it was a relief, he had assumed he was the only one drowning.

The thing it did not fix: the actual selling. Being unavailable makes you slightly more interesting to some people and simply absent to others, and the others are the ones with the money in the room. I have not solved that and I am not pretending the calendar solved it for me.

But I have had eight uninterrupted weeks in the studio since March, which is more than the whole of last year, and the work is better for it. That is the whole of my marketing strategy at the moment. A closed door on Wednesdays.

6comments

Add your reply to this discussion…

6 comments

Ananya Iyer·2d

This is the part nobody warns you about, that answering an email about the painting puts you in the painting's business and out of the painting itself. I used to keep my phone in the other room and still somehow end up sketching at eleven because I answered one thing at nine.

The Tuesday thing is tempting, but I'm a bit sceptical about the "institutions don't care" bit. In my experience the ones who don't care are the ones worth keeping, and the ones who want an answer in an hour are usually the ones who will also not pay on time. So you're basically filtering for the good ones by accident. Not a bad outcome for a survival measure.

Mira Vey·2d

The unpaid-on-time correlation is real and it's almost too reliable. The ones who need it in an hour are also the ones who "just need a few tiny tweaks" three weeks after you've delivered. Tuesday won't save you from those, it just delays finding out.

Lukas BrandtOP·2d

The "tiny tweaks" three weeks later, yes. What I have learned to say is that the painting left the studio in a state I signed off on, and anything after that is a new job with a new number. Some of them disappear at that point, which tells you what the tweaks were worth.

Tuesday does one useful thing for those people though. It puts a week between their urgency and my answer, and about half of them have solved it themselves by then.

Lukas BrandtOP·2d

The nine o'clock sketch at eleven, genau, that is the whole mechanism. You do not lose the morning, you lose the afternoon pretending you still have the morning.

And you are right about the filtering, though I would say I only half did it on purpose. What I noticed is that the ones who wait a week are also the ones who write back with an actual answer instead of a follow-up question. The urgent ones are urgent because they have not decided anything yet and want you to decide it for them. Then they pay late, because deciding is not their strong side.

So yes. Accidental filter. I will take it.

Tomáš Havel·2d

The bit about answering an email putting you into the correspondence about the painting rather than the painting, that is the whole thing, and nobody says it out loud. A week of delay costs you almost nothing and a broken morning costs you the day.

I have done some version of this for years, out of laziness more than discipline, and the only ones who ever got upset were other artists chasing me about their own thing. Institutions wait. They have no choice, their own calendars are worse than ours.

The part I would watch: Tuesday becomes the day you spend explaining yourself to everyone, and by Tuesday evening you feel like you have done a week of work and made nothing. I started keeping one hour after the answering for the studio, even if it is just moving a thing from one corner to another. Otherwise the correspondence quietly becomes the job.

Lukas BrandtOP·2d

The other artists chasing you, yes. There is a particular kind of email from a colleague that arrives with a deadline attached to their own deadline, and it always seems urgent in a way that the institution's never does. I have learned to read those on Tuesday too and to answer them last.

Your warning is the right one. Tuesday has already started to become the explaining day. I have begun writing shorter answers than I used to, which is probably healthy, and I have started saying no in the first sentence instead of the fourth, which is definitely healthy. The pile does not get smaller by being understood better. It only gets smaller by being refused.