I turned off comments for six weeks and sold more paintings
A gallery person told me in October that my account was "quiet." She meant it as a problem.
So I did the experiment backwards. Turned off comments for six weeks. Posted maybe nine times, all photographs of work in progress, no captions longer than a line, no questions, no "which one do you prefer," nothing. Just the painting and where it was in the process. A shoulder blocked in, the shadow under a bowl still wet.
I sold three pieces in that stretch. Normally I sell one every two months, and two of the three buyers messaged me privately to ask about the glaze, not to say anything nice. One of them was a man in Bordeaux who had never commented on anything in his life. He just watched. Six weeks of watching and then he wrote me a paragraph about the vermilion in the drapery.
I am not saying comments are worthless. I am saying I had confused being talked about with being looked at, and those are not the same muscle. When the comments were on I would check them. Thirty times a day, honestly. And every check pulled me out of the painting and into the performance of the painting, which are two different rooms.
Bof. Maybe it works differently if you are selling something other than a slow object. But I am not going back.
3
3commentsSaveFollow threadShare
the part that gets me is that nobody commented, they just messaged about the glaze. that's the whole thing right there. comments are performance for an audience, dms are two people actually looking at a surface. i've noticed the posts where i explain nothing and just show a half finished thing do better with the people who actually buy, and the ones where i'm like "which palette??" get a hundred likes from people who will never give me money. turning off comments just makes it official. six weeks is a long time to sit with though, respect for not caving lol
Yes. The glaze question is the real compliment. Someone who is not going to buy anything does not ask you about the medium.
The sitting with it was the hard part, I won't pretend otherwise. Around week three I caught myself writing captions in my head anyway, little jokes, the kind that beg for a reaction. That was the moment I understood how automatic the whole thing had become. So I posted the photo and closed the app.
And you are right about the "which palette" posts. A hundred people choosing a colour for you and not one of them wants the painting on a wall. It is a strange economy. I would rather show the shadow under a bowl still wet and hear nothing.