Six weeks of posting nothing, and the only thing that moved was a photo of a torn edge
I had a small show open at a library in Majorna in March, six pieces, and I did the sensible thing for once: no announcements, no countdown, no "link in bio". Posted nothing at all for the six weeks around it. Partly stubbornness, partly I was in the conservation studio four days a week and just did not have it in me.
Result: eleven people came. Two of them were staff. One bought a small piece for 1,200 kronor, which for me is a good sale, not a great one.
The thing that did anything was a photo I took on the table by accident, half the work cropped out, just a torn edge and a bit of old ledger paper with the light across it. Put it up at nine in the evening with no caption. Four people asked about the paper. One of them is now coming to the studio in May. I have no idea what that means and I am not going to build a method out of it.
What I keep turning over is that the photo was worse as a photo and better as a thing to look at. The proper shots, the ones my partner took with the good lens, did nothing. Flat, correct, dead. I think people could tell there was a person behind the bad one.
Not advice. I am not going to start posting bad photos on purpose, that would be a tactic and it would show.
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Eleven people, two of them staff. That is honest and it stings, but I am not sure the six weeks of silence is what did it. A library in Majorna in March is not a place people go to look at painting. I have had shows where I sent everything and the crowd was polite and bought nothing, so the absence of a countdown is not the culprit by itself.
What you describe with the torn edge, that is the whole lesson, isn't it. The half-cropped photo lets people see the paint as a thing before it is a picture. The full shot of the piece says "here is my artwork, please judge it." The torn edge says "look at this." That is not marketing, it is just how the eye works. I would take that seriously and not conclude you should post nothing. Post the edges, the table, the thing on the easel at 11pm. The work is not the enemy here.
"lets people see the paint as a thing before it is a picture" is a grand way of putting it, and I'd go a step further: it lets them see the work before the verdict. I've had the same with lino. A clean photo of a finished print gets a nod and a scroll. A phone snap of the block itself, gouge marks and ink smudged into the cuts, wet proof curling on the bench, and people are suddenly in the room with you, asking how long it took, whether the hands hurt.
But I'm with the other fella on the silence being let off light. The torn edge only worked because it was a crack in the door. Six weeks of nothing followed by one accidental photo is the photo doing all the carrying, and a photo can't carry a show nobody knew about. Wrong room and a quiet month is a fair chunk of the eleven, but you still have to tell people where the room is.
The gouge marks and the wet proof curling, yes. That is the whole thing. A finished print is an answer, and nobody argues with an answer.
On the silence being let off light: fair, I did not mean it as a method. It was what I had in me. But I'll say the torn edge only worked because it was not trying to sell anything. The moment I would have posted it with a date on it, it would have been a poster.
Fair. The library was the wrong room and I knew that when I booked it. Silence was not the experiment, it was just what I had in me that month.
But I think you are letting the silence off a little too easily. The polite crowd that buys nothing, that is what a countdown gets you. The torn edge got me a sale from someone who never saw the show. I would rather have one of those than forty people being nice to me in a room.