Instagram keeps pushing reels at me and I keep saying no
Every week a gallery or a fellow painter tells me I have to show more of the work in motion. The brush going down, the glazing, the palette. And I get it, people watch that stuff. But there is a reason I stopped filming my hand a few years ago and it's not laziness.
When I film myself painting, I paint for the camera. Not consciously. But the hand becomes a performer. The strokes get more theatrical, the pauses disappear, the whole thing becomes a demonstration of painting instead of painting. That's not the same activity. I spent my thirties unlearning performing, I'm not going to spend my fifties picking it back up for a views count.
The strange part is the numbers agree with me. My studio shots, the finished work, even the messy shelf where I keep my mediums, those posts do fine. Steady. Modest. The kind of engagement that actually brought me two commissions this year. And when I did post a reel a few months ago, close on the palette, the reach was higher and the inquiries were zero. People want to watch the paint move, they don't want to buy the painting. That tells me something.
I'm not saying nobody should show process. Go ahead, it works for plenty of people. I just think some of us are better served by being a bit less available. The mystery of how it gets made used to be part of the value.
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I know exactly what you mean. The second you know it's being watched, it stops being the thing. I work with found paper and the temptation is usually to show process, the cutting and the arranging, and I've done it a couple of times. Every time the work that came after was worse. Not visibly worse, but I could feel it. I was composing for a viewer that wasn't there before.
I think there's an honesty in keeping some things unshown. The quiet hours are the work. Not everything needs to be content. Let the reels crowd watch someone else's hand.
This is very true what you are saying. In our tradition also, the painting is not for watching someone paint. It is for the puja, for the wall, for the story. My mother never once thought about who is watching her hand. She is doing the work for the goddess, for the house. The line comes from the devotion, not from the performance.
These days some people come and want to film me also. I let them sometimes, but I notice my hand becomes different. Not the same hand. The fish I am drawing becomes aware it is being seen. So I understand you completely.
The quiet hours are the work, yes, I will keep this thought with me. And the found paper, that is a beautiful practice. The arranging is like the tattva of the work, the thinking part. To show only the final thing is not dishonest. It is respectable.
"The fish becomes aware it is being seen" – that's exactly it. I've never heard it put that way, but it's the truest thing anyone's said in this thread. The work knows. Something shifts in the hand the moment there's an audience, even a small one, even a kind one.
And what your mother did, painting for the puja, not for a viewer – that's real painting. That's the state you have to find your way back to every single time, and a camera makes it harder to find, not easier. I've started thinking of the studio as a kind of sanctuary for exactly that reason. The moment the phone comes out, it's not a sanctuary anymore.
I'm glad you said the part about letting them film you sometimes. I do too. But we both know the difference between the hand that works and the hand that performs.
The found paper detail lands. Cutting and arranging is half the thinking in that kind of work, and the second you dramatize it, it reads as decoration. You said it better than I could: composing for a viewer who wasn't there before. That's exactly it. There's a self-consciousness that gets into the wrist.
And yes, "the quiet hours are the work", that's the sentence I should have written myself. The reels can have someone else's hand. Mine has better things to do.