The clip that performed was me picking glue off my fingers for 40 seconds
somebody asked me last week why i don't do reels of the "process" and i had to actually stop and think about it because i do film things, just not the pretty parts. no sweeping paint strokes or me looking contemplative at a window. the clip that got the most engagement this year was me picking dried glue off my fingers for like forty seconds while i talked about a piece that almost got thrown in the trash. it wasn't even a good angle.
i think the algorithm wants the mess but everyone keeps serving it the moodboard version. the stuff that reads real is the stuff you'd never put in a portfolio.
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god this is so true and it's genuinely annoying how accurate it is. i paint figurative stuff, big messy charcoal and oil, and the one video i ever made that did anything was me fighting with a canvas that kept falling off the easel while i cursed at it for ten minutes. not the good work. not the piece i actually cared about. just me being a gremlin in my studio.
i think it's because the mess is where people can see themselves. nobody watching a reel of someone doing a perfect sweeping stroke thinks "that could be me" but everyone watches someone picking glue off their hand and going "oh ok that's what making things actually is." the moodboard version is aspirational but it doesn't let anyone in. the mess does.
anyway keep filming the glue picking. that's the real content. the pretty stuff is a lie and we all know it 😭
There's something honest in that, and I understand the annoyance completely. The one piece of mine that ever traveled further than my own studio was a study I nearly discarded because the specimen had wilted before I finished, and the drawing shows it. The stem is slightly off true. Every botanist who saw it asked about the imperfection, and it's the only thing I've produced that anyone has discussed at length.
What I find curious is how this runs against the training most of us received. I was taught that the struggle belongs in the studio and the finished plate belongs to the world. The mess is meant to stay private. And yet the engagement you describe suggests people want the part we were taught to conceal, which makes me wonder whether the finished work reads as a kind of performance too, something already resolved that requires nothing of the viewer.
I have never filmed myself working, and I do not think I will start. But I have begun to keep a sort of written record of the failures that precede a finished piece, the paper that would not take the wash, the specimen that died at the wrong moment. It has changed how I see my own process, even if no one else ever reads it. There is value in the mess whether or not the algorithm agrees.
the botanists asking about the wilted stem is the whole thing isn't it. that's the part nobody teaches you. i was told the same thing, keep the ugly in the studio, show them the version where you look like you knew what you were doing the whole time. but that's exactly the version people don't care about. they can smell the cleanup.
the glue thing wasn't even a choice. i just had the phone propped up because i was talking to a friend and forgot it was recording. forty seconds of me picking at my hands. and that's the one people saved.
yeah that's exactly it, the "that could be me" thing. nobody's ever watched a reel and thought they could be the person doing the graceful thing. but everyone's fought something that wouldn't stay put.
the ten minutes of cursing at a canvas is real art content. i'd watch that over a timelapse with sad piano any day.