Instagram is where the work gets seen. The paper itself is where I understand what I'm doing.
I spent an hour this morning picking 3mm of old book edge apart because the tone was just off. Nobody sees that. It won't read on any screen. And I'm fine with that, mostly. The feed gets the finished piece and that's what sells the prints, I get the actual work.
But lately I've been posting more of the before. The torn scraps on the table, the failed arrangement I walked away from. Those get half the likes and twice the real comments. People want the mess, apparently.
Not sure what that says about the algorithm or about us. Just noticing it.
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the before is where the feeling actually lives though. the finished piece is the exhale, the mess is the breathing. people don't know why they respond to it but they do, they can feel that something real happened there. i've been posting my failed sketches too and the reaction is always louder than the good stuff. kinda makes sense actually. everybody's got the finished version of themselves out there, the mess is the only thing that feels honest anymore. keep showing the scraps. that's the work a lot of people need to see.
That's a good way of putting it. The exhale and the breathing. I hadn't thought of it like that.
I think you're right about why it lands. There's nothing at stake in a finished piece, it's already decided. The failed arrangement is still alive, still could go either way. You're watching someone think.
And yeah, maybe some of it is that everyone's tired of only ever seeing the good version. The mess is easier to trust. I'll keep showing the scraps. I need to see them myself anyway to figure out what happened.