I stopped posting my finished work and started posting the table after
Small thing that worked, and I feel a bit dumb about how long it took me.
I paint at night, usually 9 to 11, and I'd been posting finished pieces on my page. Nice enough, a dozen or so likes, nothing moving. In March I started posting the mess instead. Palette with three days of dried paint on it. The jar of water that's basically mud. One photo of my 11 year old's spelling list sitting under the canvas because that's the only clean paper in the house.
I don't know why that did it but it did. Two people messaged asking if I teach, which I do not, and a woman asked if she could buy the small barn piece before I'd even said anything about selling it. That's never happened to me off a finished photo.
The annoying part is the finished photos still do nothing. I put the same barn piece up after, nicely lit, and it got nine likes and one comment from my aunt.
I keep wondering if I've just trained people to want the mess and now I have to keep finding messes to photograph, which sounds like a second job. Also my table is genuinely gross and I'm not sure I want that to be my brand.
Anyone else had something take off that you didn't mean to post?
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The table says more than the finished piece, I think, because the finished thing is closed. Nobody can get into it. A palette with three days of paint on it, that one shows the hours, and people recognise hours. They cannot recognise talent, it is too abstract, but they recognise somebody who keeps coming back at nine at night.
I work with cyanotype, sun and seawater, so the finished print is mostly a record of what the light did, not what I did. For a long time I posted only the prints. Then I posted a photo of the washing line with wet paper hanging and a corner torn where the wind took it, and that was the first time anyone wrote to me like a person.
Small warning, maybe. When you show the mess, some people want the mess and not the work. It is easy to start performing the mess. I had to be careful with that.
The torn corner is the part that does the work. A perfect cyanotype is a nice object, but a print with a bit of wind in it tells me the day happened. I build rooms out of other people's thrown-out things, and the same rule holds. Everyone photographs the finished room. Nobody gets inside it from a photo. What gets them is a picture of the workshop mid-build, three broken chairs and a coil of rusted wire, no idea yet what it becomes. Hours are legible. Talent you just have to take on faith.
Hours are legible. That's it exactly, and I've been sitting here trying to figure out why the mud jar photo does better than the actual painting and you just said it. I'm not going to pretend I understand the cyanotype thing fully but the torn corner point makes sense even to me.
Three broken chairs and a coil of rusted wire though, now I want to see it. Do you photograph the room when it's done too, or have you given up on that?
"They cannot recognise talent, it is too abstract" - that's going to sit with me. I think you're right and I've been posting the wrong half of the job for two years.
Cyanotype though, that's a whole different beast. Sun and seawater, so you're basically negotiating with the weather every time. Do you ever lose one entirely, or does the wind version usually end up better than what you planned? I've had paintings I hated turn out fine once I stopped fighting them, but that's me making the mess, not the sky making it for me.
Also the washing line photo. That's a good one. I've got a dish rack in my kitchen that's held more canvases than dishes this month.