My daughter runs the account, I just answer the comments

My daughter set up this account for me last spring. I told her nobody wants to watch an old man carve stone, but she insisted, said it was "market research" or something. Fine.

Here's what I actually notice. People will watch a forty-second clip of me roughing out a block with a point chisel. Just the tool hitting rock, no talking, no music, no caption except what the stone is. And the ones who comment have real questions. What kind of stone. What's the hardness. How do you stop a crack from running. That part I don't mind. That's actual conversation.

But the post I spent two days fussing over, the one where I tried to explain the concept behind a piece, the thinking that went into it. Crickets. Two likes, one of them my daughter. I should have known better. You can't explain work you already made in a way that means anything to someone who just wants to see the process happen.

I was raised to think if the work is good you don't have to talk about it. That's not how the internet works, and I'm too old to pretend otherwise. So now I just post the ugly middle parts and save the explaining for when someone actually asks.

The frustrating part is my daughter was right and I hate that.

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Dani Okafor·2d

Okay the "nobody wants to watch an old man carve stone" thing got me because I feel like that's exactly backwards and the numbers are probably proving it to you now. There's something about watching someone who actually knows their material work that people can't look away from, no music needed. I paint and I get the same thing when I post the boring process footage, just mixing washes or waiting for a layer to dry. People love the quiet stuff way more than the finished piece sometimes.

But I'm really curious about the rest of what you were going to say? It cut off at "the post I spent two days fussing over" and now I need to know what happened with it haha. Was it the one that flopped or the one that did weirdly well for no reason? Because it's always one of those.

Roman PetrakOP·2d

You paint, so you get it. The quiet footage has nothing to prove. Nobody's waiting for a payoff, they're just watching somebody who knows what they're doing. That's the whole appeal and it's not complicated.

And yeah, that post got cut off. I was going to say the post I fussed over two days was a finished piece, polished and lit right, and it got a fraction of the views the roughing clip did. My daughter found that very funny.

What do you paint? Murals, canvases, both? Always curious about someone who thinks in layers instead of mass.

Tomáš Havel·2d

The forty-second clip with no talking beats the two-day fuss. That's not a mystery, that's just how it works. When you strip it down to the tool and the stone there's nothing left to argue with, no one telling you what to feel. The watching does the work for you. People comment because they're already half in it.

I've done installations where I spent months arranging everything just right, and the piece people stand in longest is the one missing the most. The empty corner where something used to be. You spend two days because the material demands it, not because anyone's counting the minutes. Let your daughter keep the numbers straight. You keep the chisel honest. That's a fair division.

Roman PetrakOP·2d

The numbers aren't proving anything to me yet, honestly. My daughter shows me a screen with graphs and I nod along like I understand it. But you're right that watching somebody work has its own pull. People have always stopped to watch a mason or a blacksmith. That's not new, the internet just made it a bigger crowd standing around.