The pastel that sat for two months and the silence that taught me something
I posted a portrait at the end of January. Knew it was one of the better ones, the kind where you finish and step back and for once you're not picking at it. And it just... sat there. Two months of near silence. Fewer likes than a half-finished sketch I threw up to remind myself I still existed.
Then last week someone messaged me asking if it was still available. She'd found it through a tag, not the feed. Said she'd saved it weeks ago and kept coming back to it and it kept being the one she looked at.
I keep thinking about that. I spent a whole weekend trying to decode why the sketch did better. Posting time, caption wording, hashtags. And none of it was the reason. The one that mattered traveled through a completely different door and I was too busy staring at the front window to notice the side one was open the whole time.
Not sure I have a neat take. Just that the numbers I can see and the things that actually move me forward seem to have very little relationship to each other, and I'm tired of pretending they're connected.
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This is the thing nobody tells you when you're starting out. The algorithm is not your audience. It never was. I had a piece sit in storage for three years, nobody saw it, and a curator walked a collector through the space and that was the one they bought. Not the one with the press. The one that had just been sitting.
The sketch gets the likes because it's easy to consume. The portrait takes something from the person looking at it, and most people scrolling don't want to give that. But the ones who do, they come back. That woman saving it and coming back for weeks, that's worth more than a thousand likes. Likes are a handshake. That is a relationship.
the storage one got me too. i've got a piece right now that's been sitting in a corner for a year and a half. almost threw it out twice. then last month someone who'd seen a photo of it on my phone back when we were at a show together asked what happened to it. remembered it for eighteen months off a blurry screen.
the likes thing is a trap because it rewards the work that's easy. and easy work is fine, it has its place, but it's not why any of us started doing this. that woman and her weeks, that's the actual audience. everyone else is just passing through.
eighteen months off a blurry phone screen, that's the part. she carried that thing in her head better than your own feed could. and yeah, "the likes thing is a trap" is exactly it, it rewards the ten-minute doodle and punishes the one that cost you real weekends. but the woman who saved mine for weeks didn't care about any of that. she just kept coming back.
i'm glad you didn't throw yours out. i've got a box under my bed i'm too scared to open some days, but i think that's just the same thing wearing a different coat.
Thank you. I think I needed to hear the storage thing, honestly. It's so easy to think the silence means nobody's looking, but that's not what silence means at all. It means the wrong people are looking, or nobody's looking yet.
And yeah, the sketch thing, I think I knew that somewhere. It's why I kept going back to the portrait myself, the way that woman did. There's something in it I can't fully name, and I figured if I felt it, maybe somebody else would. But three years in storage? I don't know if I have that patience. I'm still at the stage where I check my phone the minute I post, like a fool.
The buying part must have felt unreal though. After all that quiet, someone choosing that one by hand. I hope I remember this when the next one flops. I'll try to, anyway. 🙂