I stopped tagging my paintings with the medium and the engagement changed
I took the "oil on linen, 30x40" caption out of my posts for a month. Not the hashtags, not the process videos, just that little line at the end. I've always put it there out of habit, like a signature. Collectors want to know what they're buying, I told myself.
The change was not dramatic but it was real. People started commenting about the light in the room, the mood of the thing, what the woman in the painting was thinking. Before it was mostly "beautiful work" and other painters asking about my medium. I think the technical note was giving people permission to look at it like a spec sheet instead of letting them just feel it. Once the frame of reference was gone they had to meet the painting on its own terms.
I put the information back when the piece sells, obviously. But the post itself, the first encounter, I leave it bare now. The gallery can do the talking about dimensions and materials. My job on social media is to make someone stop scrolling because something in the image got under their skin, and I was undercutting that with my own footnotes.
Maybe that's just me. Or maybe we all over-explain ourselves online because we're afraid of being misunderstood, and the fear itself is what keeps people at arm's length.
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I get this completely, though it lands a bit differently for me because mosaic forces the medium out in the open. Nobody mistakes it for anything else, you can't hide the fact that it's thousands of little cut stones. So people either come at it as craft or they don't come at all, and I've never had the luxury of the mystery.
But I know exactly what you mean about the spec-sheet energy. When I put "smalti and stone" in a caption it does something similar, it invites the technical crowd, which I love, don't get me wrong, but it can flatten the piece into a materials list before anyone's actually looked at it. The interesting thing about your experiment is what it says about the viewer, not the work. People need a door in, and the medium was giving them the easiest one, the lazy one.
I've started playing with the opposite trick. Sometimes I'll tag something as "tile" when it's really glass smalti, just to watch people's assumptions shift around. It's a bit mischievous but it's made me think about how much of the looking is really just labelling. Your month-long test is braver than mine though. I don't think I could drop the material note entirely, it's so bound up in how I think about what I make. But you've made me want to try it on a piece or two.
I think you've named the real trade-off, and it's an honest one. Mosaic never gets to be coy, the material is the whole argument before you even make one. Watercolour has the opposite problem, it's so easy to wave away that people don't see the structure underneath it at all.
But I wonder if the answer for you isn't the same one I've landed on after years of this. The medium note in my captions stopped being a fact and started being a permission slip. The people who look at a painting and need to know the ground and the pigment before they can feel anything, they aren't the ones I'm painting for. I keep the material information there for the serious collectors who actually need it, but I stopped front-loading it. The work has to read to a stranger first, on its own terms, and the technical facts can wait until someone asks.
Yours is a harder case because the stone is unavoidable, but I don't think that has to flatten it. Craft at that level is its own kind of poetry, and the right audience sees that. The ones who only want a materials list were never going to see more anyway.
You've got the sharper end of it, I'll give you that. Watercolour can hide under its own reputation for pretty, and nobody thinks to look for the structure. But mosaic, the material is shouting before you've said anything. There's no mystery to point at, you're already fighting the thing people think they know.
Maybe that's the real difference. My medium is a whisper, yours is an argument. I can drop the note and let people find the light on their own. You'd have to work against a thousand years of people assuming they know what mosaic is before you get one honest look.
That's a good way of putting it, the aim. Nobody gives a watercolour credit for light because they've already filed it under delicate and small. But what you said about not tagging at all is interesting to me. Do you find the wrong crowd shows up then? The people who think it's gouache or something, or does the mystery actually buy you a closer look?
I've been toying with dropping measurements too, not just the medium. There's something about a painting that reads as precious once you know it's small. I've got a 15x20 interior that people walk past in the studio, then when they hear the size they suddenly want it. The painting didn't change. Their idea of it did. That still bothers me a little.