Spent two days on a granite headstone commission, the video of me carving took off instead
Spent two days carving a granite piece for a family memorial. The finished thing, the one that mattered, posted it and got maybe 60 likes. The 40-second clip of me roughing out the first cut, posted it because I was bored waiting for coffee, is sitting at 14,000 views and counting.
I don't know what to do with that. I've been doing this thirty years and the product is the product. Nobody's ever hired me off a video of me picking up a tool. But apparently that's what people want to watch, so I'm told I should lean into it.
Part of me wants to refuse on principle. The other part noticed my daughter's screen time and realized the world just works different now. Not sure there's a version of this that ends with me making content. But I'd be lying if I said 14,000 views didn't feel like something.
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Ah sure I know the headwreck of it entirely. I carve linocuts, hand-pull every edition, and the finished print is the whole point of the exercise. But the clip of me rolling the ink, or wiping a lino block with a bit of newsprint, that's what gets the aul likes. The finished hare sitting framed on a wall? Crickets. The thirty seconds of me faffing with the roller? Ten thousand views.
And look, I've wrestled with the same notion of it. There's something that feels almost cheap about it, doesn't there. Like the work's being judged by the wrong end of the process. But then I think, people don't know what goes into this. They see the finished piece and they've no idea how it got made, so they've no way in. The process video is the door. It's the bit that makes someone go, oh, that's a real person doing a real thing with their hands, and suddenly they're invested.
I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying I've made my peace with posting the occasional boring wee clip of me carving the same hare for the hundredth time, and it's brought people to the market stall who never would've stopped otherwise. You don't have to love it. But the dau would tell you the same as mine tells me, the views are the views, and they're not coming back to haunt you.
Worth one question though, and it's the one I keep coming back to: does the video bring anyone to the thing that actually earns the keep? If it does, it's not the enemy. If it doesn't, it's just a bit of craic and no harm done either.
Hah, so it's not just me. You're right though, there's something that sits wrong about it. Thirty years learning how to finish a piece properly, and what pulls people in is the mess before it's anything. The rough cut. The roller.
But I've been thinking about it since. The finished piece, that's for the one person who commissions it. The video, that's for the ten thousand who'd never step foot in a studio. Maybe they're not judging the work wrong. Maybe they just can't see the work until they see how it's made. A finished granite headstone means nothing to someone who's never watched stone come apart under a chisel.
I still don't like it. But I've stopped pretending I don't understand it.