The gallery wants me to show the painting process. The painting takes three months to finish.
My gallery's new person keeps asking for process content. Behind the scenes, time-lapse, work in progress. I understand the logic, short clips of me scraping back layers get ten times the reach of the finished work. The problem is the work itself. A large painting of mine sits on the wall for weeks between sessions because oil and cold wax needs to cure before I can build the next layer. There is nothing cinematic about watching me wait. I could film myself scraping and smearing and make it look dynamic, but that would be a lie about how it actually happens, and I am not interested in performing a fake version of my own work for the algorithm.
I did a ten second reel of the palette knife going through wet wax last week because I felt I had to. It looked great. It is the least honest thing I have done in years. The finished painting, the one that matters, will not be ready until March and nobody will watch it dry.
Am I wrong to resist this? Sometimes I think the medium itself is becoming the enemy of the marketing. Then I remind myself I did not spend twenty five years learning to layer oil so I could make satisfying looped videos about it.
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Ugh, I felt this in my bones. My charcoal pieces are fast, but the oil work sits for weeks too and there's just nothing there to film. The gallery logic makes sense in that hollow way they all talk now, reach this reach that, but they never ask what the content does to the work itself. Making the process perform something it isn't is how you end up painting for the camera instead of for the thing.
And honestly there's something sacred about the waiting. That wall time is where half the painting happens, it just happens inside you and nobody can film that. You're not being difficult, you're protecting the work. I'd rather a gallery person be mildly annoyed than make art that's secretly performing for strangers.
"paint for the camera instead of for the thing" hit me. that's the whole fear right there. once you start thinking in clips you start making decisions that read well on a phone screen and suddenly your work is shorter and louder and dumber and you don't even notice it happening.
the waiting thing is real too. i do acrylics so it's less kiln, more "stare at it for two weeks and hate it, then one day fix the one shape that was wrong the whole time." zero footage in any of that. if they want a timelapse of me sitting on the couch avoiding eye contact with a canvas i could do that for them, real authentic content lol
the gallery's not gonna get it either. they think process is hustle. it's mostly just... being alive with the thing. can't compress that into reels.
The "stare at it for two weeks and hate it, then one day fix the one shape" thing, genau, that's it exactly. The fix looks like nothing on film. Thirty seconds of scraping that reads as action when really it's the end of weeks of staring and not touching. They want the moment of decision but the decision isn't visible. It's already made somewhere else.
Offer them the couch footage. Maybe if enough of us send them that, they'll understand what they're actually asking for. Though I doubt it. They'll just ask for it sped up with music.
"Something sacred about the waiting. That wall time is where half the painting happens, it just happens inside you." You put it better than I did in the post. The work is deciding what not to do next. Nobody has invented a camera for absence yet, and they won't, because there's no ad revenue in it.
You're right about the hollow logic too. They talk about reach like it's a moral obligation. It isn't. It's a metric with a short attention span, and if I let it start editing the work, then the work is just a long advertisement for a faster thing. I've seen painters go that way. The surface gets slick, everything reads in two seconds. Nobody says it out loud, but you can see the camera in the brushwork.
I told the gallery person I'd film a short one, but only the slow version. Me sitting in the studio with the painting half-done, maybe reading, maybe not touching it. Non-cinematic on purpose. They looked at me like I was speaking a language they don't have. Maybe I am.