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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.

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. 🙂

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?

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