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I spent years tweaking my website. Better photos, cleaner navigation, more process shots, less process shots, SEO keywords my friend who works in tech kept telling me to use. And I'd get maybe three inquiries a month, usually from students asking about internships I don't offer. Two months ago my domain expired and I just... didn't renew it. Put together a single PDF with recent work, editions, prices in a table, and my email at the bottom. It's ugly. It's just a document. I send it to people who DM me or write. That's it. And somehow this feels more honest? Like the website was performing professionalism for nobody in particular, and the PDF is just me handing someone what they asked for. I've sold more prints in the last eight weeks than in the previous six months of having a proper site. I don't know if this scales or if it only works because I'm a printmaker with edition sizes I can count on one hand. But I'm starting to think the whole "you need a professional web presence" thing was built for a different kind of practice, or maybe a different decade.

Honest one. My first gallery, years ago, the owner asked me at the opening what my prints were about and I gave her the whole thing, the multiple, the copy, Benjamin, the whole architecture. She nodded for maybe ninety seconds and then said "so, they are nice, but what are they about?" I still think about that. She was not wrong to ask and I was not wrong to answer, but I had planned the answer and not the room. Lately I try a version that is one sentence and then I stop talking, which for me is a discipline. What is yours? The real one you say out loud, not the one on the website. And does it change depending on who is asking, the gallerist, the collector, the other artist in the corner? I want to know if anyone has cracked this or if we are all just improvising badly.

Had a place reach out. Wanted a full portfolio, resume, artist statement, project proposals. All before they'd even agree to a studio visit. I just sent them a link to my website and said that was all I had. Anyone else get requests like this? Feels like a lot of hoops to jump through for a shot in the dark.

I'm realizing the red flags are easy to list (we've all done it) but the green flags are harder to name, and honestly more useful. For me: I was emailing with this tiny gallery in a converted house, kind of half expecting nothing, and the owner asked me what time of day I usually paint and whether my work looks better in morning or evening light. Nobody had ever asked me that. Not a single person. And I was like oh. You actually look at the work, not just the jpeg. Ended up showing there and it was a genuinely good experience. So what's the thing that flipped it for you? A question they asked, something they said no to, a way they talked about another artist, whatever. The small signal that made you go okay, these people are real. Also curious if anyone's had the opposite where a place looked perfect on paper (nice space, nice website, says all the right things) and then you got in the room and something was just off. My partner thinks I'm too suspicious of nice websites and I need to know if I'm right haha.

I was reading the recent posts here about handwritten notes and old-fashioned outreach, and it made me think about something I haven't told many people. Five years ago, I wrote a letter to a gallery owner in Connecticut whose program I had admired for years. Not an email. A letter. On Arches hot press, with a small watercolour study of a trillium I'd painted that spring tucked inside. I told her honestly that I wasn't sure if she was accepting new artists but that I respected what she was doing and wanted to introduce myself properly. She wrote back. She said the letter sat on her desk for three weeks before she called, because she kept looking at the trillium and trying to decide if it was worth the risk of meeting me. She took me on. That gallery remains the steadiest source of my serious sales. Not Instagram. Not my website. A letter. I don't think the lesson is that we should all be sending letters. I think the lesson is that the real connections happen when you do something that costs you something real -- time, skill, the vulnerability of putting a small original painting in an envelope and hoping it lands with the right person. It is harder to ignore than a form submission. I still send a letter occasionally when a connection matters to me. I have never once regretted it. I have regretted the polished emails I overthought and never sent.

Okay so I saw that post about ugly websites converting and it got me thinking because honestly? My own marketing feels like that sometimes. Like, I'm supposed to be this "artist" with a clean brand but my process posts are always so chaotic, sometimes I even accidentally show my dirty mug or a paint smudge on my arm and omg, the engagement on those is SO much higher than the perfectly curated ones. People seem to like seeing the actual work and not just the finished product. It feels super counterintuitive to the whole 'aspirational' vibe that marketing gurus push, but I'm getting more comments and saves on the messy stuff. Anyone else finding that the more you lean into the imperfect, the better things perform? It’s kinda making me want to just dump all my WIPs and sketches everywhere lol.

Not the work. Not the process shots, not the long text about the 2009 installation in a former slaughterhouse that took me four years and a divorce. One photo, from 2016, of the empty room before I filled it. Bare floor, bad light, a radiator I never removed. I spent maybe six weeks building that website. A friend's son did the code for a case of beer and I wrote the texts myself, badly, in two languages. The whole thing performs like a shop window and the only thing people stop to look at is the space before anything happened in it. I don't know what to do with this. Part of me wants to take the photo down out of spite. Part of me understands exactly why it is the one. People want to see the room they could walk into, not the thing I finally decided to put there. Anyway. I am not going to optimize anything. I am 58 and I have watched too many artists become their own marketing department and I would rather spend the four hours rebuilding the radiator section than in a dashboard. But I looked, and now I know, and it is a little funny and a little sad.