The one social post that ever worked for me was a mistake outtake
Eight years doing this and the single thing that got me work was a video of a smalti tile popping out of place and rolling across my studio floor, cat chasing it. My serious process videos, the polished finished shots, the "here's the story behind this piece" posts, nothing. The cat chasing a gold tile got me two commissions and a conservation inquiry from a museum in Vienna.
I've stopped trying to figure out the algorithm. It's not a craft, there's no skill to learn, it's just weather. Some days the light hits your post, most days it doesn't. So I make the work, post what I feel like posting, and treat social media the way I treat the weather in Thessaloniki. I don't argue with it, I just dress for it.
The people who do well on here spend their whole day on here. I don't have that in me and neither does my back. I'd rather spend four hours on my knees in marble dust than four hours curating my feed. Some weeks that feels like stubbornness and some weeks it feels like the right trade. Mostly it's a wash. But the cat video still got me the Vienna thing, so I'll keep one outtake in every ten posts and call it strategy.
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The cat thing is so true. I hung a painting on the wall to photograph it properly, nice light, no clutter, and my 8 year old walked in holding a pb&j. The look on her face made the photo better than any finished shot I've ever staged, and that's the one that got shared around the local group. It's like people don't want the art, they want the life going on around the art.
I still can't quite give up on the curated posts though. I keep thinking one of them will finally land and prove I'm a real painter, not just someone whose kids and pets happen to wander through the frame. Maybe the weather thing is right and I should just stop worrying about it.
Now that right there is the truth, child. All my life I've watched folks chase the perfect piece, the clean shot, the one that's gonna prove something to somebody. But the Lord put the mess and the life in with the making, and most times that's what folks see their own selves in.
That little one with the pb&j, that's your life hanging there with your work. That's the part nobody can copy. You can stage a thousand pretty pictures and they'll all look like somebody else's pretty picture. But that ow face on your baby, that's yours alone. That's what got shared, and you know it's because it made somebody smile and remember their own kitchen.
Now listen, you keep making your paintings, honey. You a real painter all along, the curated post ain't got nothing to do with it. But I'm gonna tell you from a long life of it: the day you stop waiting for one post to prove who you are, that's the day the work starts showing up like it's supposed to. Mm. You just keep painting and keep that baby close.
Amen to that. The pb&j face is exactly it, the kid doesn't know she's in the shot, doesn't care, that's why it lands. Nobody can fake a kid who's about to eat their lunch over your work.
I think that's what took me so long to learn. I spent years thinking I had to make the work presentable enough to deserve attention. Turns out people just want to see something alive. The mess is the honest part.
The pb&j face, that's the one. Kids and cats don't know they're ruining your glossy shot, and that's exactly why they make it better. Nothing staged ever has that.
But I get the curated thing, I really do. There's this part of me that thinks if I just get the lighting right and the background clean, the work will finally speak for itself and someone will take me seriously. And then the dog steps on it or the tile rolls away and that's the one that pays. Eight years and I still haven't fully made peace with it either.
Maybe the trick is to stop thinking of it as two separate things. It's all one messy studio and one messy life. The finished shots are part of the story, the dog and the kid are part of it too. The weather might just be that nobody's interested in the painting until they see the room it's painted in.