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so this is small but it nags at me. for two years my instagram bio listed the materials. acrylic washes, charcoal, torn paper, found photographs. it read like a recipe. people scrolled past it. fine. last month a small space in the city put me in a group show, the kind where the wall label gets more attention than the work. the curator asked me to send the "proper" line, the one that goes on the checklist. so i copied it into the bio. the full formal thing, medium and dimensions and the year. two days later a follower was gone. no comment, no DM, just gone. probably the "torn paper" phrasing being replaced by something with a semicolon in it. the strange part is the enquiries actually went up. three of them. all the same flavor, asking if the piece was for sale and where. so the dry formal line is doing the work the soft bio refused to do. i keep thinking i traded a description for a job listing and i don't know if that's a loss. the label says what it is. it doesn't say what it is. and the person who left never bought anything anyway. still. i miss the old line a little.

been running an experiment since mid october. put "8x10 = $180, 18x24 = $650" right in my bio, top line, before the "i don't do logos for exposure" bit. not one person has mentioned it. no lowball offers. no "wow that's expensive" DMs. nothing. what i did get: three inquiries that skipped the whole "so how much would something like this be" dance and went straight to "can you do a 16x20 of my dog." closed two of them in under a week, which for me is warp speed, normally i lose people in the four-day gap between their first message and my reply because i'm bad at email. the weird part is i put this off for a literal year because i was convinced a number in the bio would scare off the casual followers and make me look like a shop instead of an artist. turns out the casual followers aren't the ones buying and the buyers just want to know if they can afford you before they invest emotionally in liking the work. still not sure it's "working" so much as it's not actively hurting. the sample size is like five people. but i've stopped writing the price paragraph in every second message and that alone is worth it. curious if anyone else has tried the same thing and gotten the opposite result, because i keep waiting for the other shoe.

I changed my bio a few months back from the usual "artist, mosaicist, available for commissions" to something that just said what I actually do: I sit on the floor and put small pieces of stone together, it's slow, here's the work. That's it. No hype, no "transforming spaces through ancient craft", no keywords. And I started getting messages that were different. Not "check out my page" or "can you do a logo for my cafe for exposure" but people asking real questions. Where do you source smalti. Do you cut your own. Can I come watch you work sometime. I think there's a whole strip of people who are tired of the polished performance and just want to know what's really happening. Nobody needs another artist who sounds like a copywriter. I'd rather lose the ones who want shiny than lose the few who actually care. The irony is my follower count dropped a bit and my enquiries went up. Make of that what you will. 🙂

I finally sat down and looked at where last year's sales actually came from. Three paintings, all three to people who had seen the work in person first: one at a two-day botanical illustration symposium in Asheville, two through my open studio weekend in October. Not one sale came from anything I posted. Not one. Meanwhile I've spent a year learning how to shoot vertical video, which I am not good at and do not enjoy, and I'm reasonably sure I've converted the account into an audience of people who like watching paint dry in the literal sense. They came for the process and they are not buyers. That's not a complaint about them. It's a complaint about me not noticing for twelve months. What I have not worked out is whether the online thing is genuinely wasted effort or just too slow to measure, and I suspect nobody can actually tell me. The symposium cost me a table fee, four nights in a hotel, and a week of framing, and it paid for itself in the first hour. I'm keeping the account. I've stopped pretending it's a shop.

Small thing I did in January, mostly out of fatigue. I took the shop link and the "commissions open" line out of my Instagram bio and left only the studio address. I didn't announce it. I wanted one place online that wasn't selling something. Two pieces sold in February. Both buyers mentioned the studio, which is a walk-up on the second floor with no sign, so I don't think it was that. I think it was the absence. Not a strategy, I was just tired. What I noticed: people stopped asking "how much" in DMs and started asking about the paper. Which is the conversation I actually want. The price question is a dead end either way. "How much" has one answer and then you both wait. "Where does that grey come from" has ten answers. I'm not going to pretend I understand why it worked, or that it will keep working. Half of what I do happens because I can't stand the alternative. But the bio is still empty.

I got my first real representation sideways. A group show in a converted factory space in Plagwitz, maybe 2003, and the gallerist spent the whole evening in the corner eating the cheap sausages and barely looked at the walls. I assumed nothing. Three weeks later she called and asked if I had more work in that direction. I had four canvases and a lot of nerve, so I said yes. That was it. No portfolio, no polite emails, no follow up. I have never once got a gallery by sending an application cold, and I have sent many. So I am curious how it went for others: what was the actual door that opened the first time? A friend who knew someone, a studio visit, a juried show, a bartender, your mother's neighbour? And was it luck or did you do something deliberate that worked? Tell me the real version, not the tidy one you put in the bio.

numbers check for anyone who still thinks follower count is the thing: instagram: ~14.2k, been there 6 years, average reach on a painting post is like 900 accounts. sold 2 originals off it this year. newsletter: 61 people, started it in march because a friend bullied me into it, zero growth hacks, just me rambling about whatever's on the easel. sold 4 pieces off it. same paintings. same prices. the difference is that 61 people chose to get an email and i'm not renting their attention from a company that keeps changing the rent. the annoying part is i can't tell you how to grow the newsletter because i don't know. half the list is people i already knew. the other half found it through a link i stuck in my bio that maybe 30 people have ever clicked. it's not a strategy, it's just a smaller room. anyway i'm not deleting the account, i still need it for the freelance stuff and i like the shitposting. but i've stopped treating it like a storefront and started treating it like a billboard that happens to be free. the store is 61 people in an inbox.

Sold a small piece at the flea market on saturday. Lady asked what the torn paper was about, and I told her it was from my brother's old notebooks. She bought it before I even finished the sentence. No reel, no hashtag, no "link in bio." Just me standing there with cold coffee and my actual story. Meanwhile I've got 40 something posts on instagram this month, maybe three genuine interactions. Someone called the same kind of piece "cluttered" in a review a while back and I've been second-guessing the layering ever since. The lady at the market didn't care about composition rules. She wanted to know whose stuff it was. I keep thinking the market is the hobby and the feed is the real thing. It's backwards. The market is the only place people actually look at the work with their eyes and take it home. The feed is just me performing being an artist for strangers who scroll past. Don't really know what to do with that besides keep hauling the tent on saturdays.

So I've been full-time for eight months now which means I've been doing all the "okay so I guess I have to market myself" stuff that nobody prepares you for in art school lol. And the thing that actually worked, the thing that got me my first real gallery relationship, was the most humiliating process ever. I spent a weekend sending 40 cold emails. Like, proper ones, with images and links and a real bio. And I got one reply. ONE. And honestly for like two days I was so embarrassed I almost didn't open it because I assumed it was a no too. But it was a yes. A small gallery in a city I'd never been to, but they liked my work and wanted to talk. That one yes turned into a group show, which turned into two commission requests from people who saw the show, which turned into enough money to pay rent for three months without panic-ordering takeout. Anyway I'm not saying cold emailing is the secret sauce, mostly it's just brutal lol. But I think sometimes we hear about the one reply and not the 39 silences. So here's my question I guess: what's the thing you tried that felt stupid or embarrassing or like it wasn't working, and then it kind of... did?

So I've sent probably 30 cold emails to galleries over the last three years. Got maybe four replies, one actual meeting, nothing signed. But I did learn there's a version that works and it's not the one I started with. The first ones were long. Bio, statement, five images, "I'd love to be considered." Nothing. The one that got a real response was three lines and a single image, and I opened with the specific show of theirs I'd seen, not with me. Cold, a bit blunt. She replied in a day. Which makes me think the whole "here's my portfolio" approach is dead and we all just keep doing it because we don't know what else. So what's yours? The email that got an actual reply, or the opener that got you in the door. Word for word if you remember it. I want to see if anyone's cracked something I haven't.

My first real gallery came out of nothing I did well. I was sharing a studio in Berlin, and a woman who had the space next to mine was curating a small group show about the copy. She needed one more printmaker because someone dropped out two weeks before. She asked me, I said yes, that was it. No portfolio, no email, no strategy. Total accident. I have been trying to reverse-engineer that accident for eight years now and I still don't know how to do it on purpose. So the question: how did your first one actually happen? Not the version you put in the bio, the real one. I want to know if anyone got in by anything resembling a plan, because everyone I know seems to have got in sideways. And a second thing, since I am curious: who did the asking? Did you approach them, or did someone hand you the door already open? I think the second happens more than we admit and we pretend it was all our hustle. I will say mine: nobody handed me anything, a curator needed a warm body with a press. Tell me yours is better.

I had a small show open at a library in Majorna in March, six pieces, and I did the sensible thing for once: no announcements, no countdown, no "link in bio". Posted nothing at all for the six weeks around it. Partly stubbornness, partly I was in the conservation studio four days a week and just did not have it in me. Result: eleven people came. Two of them were staff. One bought a small piece for 1,200 kronor, which for me is a good sale, not a great one. The thing that did anything was a photo I took on the table by accident, half the work cropped out, just a torn edge and a bit of old ledger paper with the light across it. Put it up at nine in the evening with no caption. Four people asked about the paper. One of them is now coming to the studio in May. I have no idea what that means and I am not going to build a method out of it. What I keep turning over is that the photo was worse as a photo and better as a thing to look at. The proper shots, the ones my partner took with the good lens, did nothing. Flat, correct, dead. I think people could tell there was a person behind the bad one. Not advice. I am not going to start posting bad photos on purpose, that would be a tactic and it would show.

I'll start. My first real gallery came from a group show I nearly skipped. A friend pushed my name in, I sent two paintings, and one of them was hung in the worst corner you can imagine, behind a column. The gallerist walked the room at the end and stopped in front of it anyway. Three weeks later she called. No email, no follow-up, just the phone. That was 2009 and I don't think it happens this way now. Which is my question: how did you land your first one, and if you were starting from zero this year, would that same move still work? Not asking for a perfect formula. I want the real story, the accidental one, the one you'd never put in a bio. Mine was a corner behind a column.

Not a joke. The email said "links to your socials and a sense of your recent practice," so I sent four photos of the floor at 11pm: dried acrylic pools, a torn-up photo of my mother's kitchen, and the charcoal dust that's been there since March. Plus one line saying most of my work lives on the floor before it lives on a wall. They replied in 20 minutes. Studio visit booked for the 14th. The last time I sent a proper press kit with a bio and an artist statement, that gallery never wrote back. I've spent years trying to look like a professional and the only thing that ever got me in a room was looking like a mess with good light. Anyway. Not convinced this is a strategy so much as luck, and I'd like to know if anyone else has had the sloppier version of themselves land better than the polished one.

Okay I have to tell someone. That same window I've painted like forty times, the one from my bio, one of them finally got into a group show at a little gallery near my old school. Not the big versions, the small study, the one I almost didn't submit because I thought it was too plain. Someone bought it last night. Like, an actual person walked in and paid money for the thing I've been staring at alone in my apartment for months. I cried on the phone to my mom about it and she cried too which is very on brand for us. She kept saying "the little window is leaving home" like it was a kid going off to college. I'm still a nervous wreck about the money month to month but this felt like a sign that maybe I'm allowed to take myself seriously. Anyway if you've got a piece sitting around that you think is too boring to show, put it in anyway. Someone else might see something in it that you can't anymore. 🙂

So I decided to actually log everything I did to promote my work in February. Not just guess, actually write it down. 27 hours. Twenty-seven hours of scrolling, posting, hashtag research, replying to comments, writing newsletter drafts I never sent, reading articles about algorithms, changing my bio three times. And you know what came from it? Two commission inquiries that both ghosted after I sent pricing. Meanwhile the one thing I actually sold last month came from someone who saw a piece in a café window where I'd left a business card months ago. Zero effort. Zero hours logged. I'm not saying marketing is useless. I'm saying I spent 27 hours doing stuff that felt productive and most of it clearly wasn't. I don't even know what to cut because it all felt important in the moment. Has anyone actually tracked this and changed what they do based on it? Or are we all just spinning plates and hoping?

tell me the real reason you started. not the tidy bio answer, the actual one. mine: i was eight, home sick from school, and my nan shoved a tin of dried-up watercolours at me just to keep me quiet. something happened in my chest that i have been chasing for thirty years since. what's yours