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Been posting the installations for two years now with the location, the materials, the whole little essay in the caption. Museum tags, artist tags, the works. Everything by the book. Last month I put up a photo of one room with nothing but the date. No title, no name, no hashtags except the gallery's because they insisted. I forgot to finish the caption, honestly, phone rang. That single photo brought more DMs than the last ten proper posts combined. People asking where it was, what it was made of, if they could come see it. Questions I would have answered in the caption nobody read. Not a lesson. Probably just the algorithm being tired of my voice too. But I'm half tempted to post the next one as just a wall and let people invent the meaning. That's what I do with found objects anyway. Let them find it.

I spent a full afternoon last month staging a still life, fighting with the light until it did what I wanted, photographed it six ways, wrote a caption I actually labored over. It did fine. Fine. Meanwhile the post that got me two commissions and a workshop enquiry was a photo of my palette at the end of the day, all the dirty mixes half-scraped off, with a caption like "today was a long one." No thought in it. I almost didn't post it at all. There's a lesson in there somewhere about people wanting the evidence of the work rather than the work itself, and I keep circling it. The polished thing reads as finished, and a finished thing doesn't invite anyone in. The mess does. Everyone can see themselves in a dirty palette. I still can't quite bring myself to lean into that deliberately. It feels like a trick the moment it's calculated. So I just post the leftovers now and let the careful posts be the rare ones. It's the reverse of every piece of marketing advice I've ever read, and it keeps working anyway. Bof.

Posted a finished oil piece last week, proud of it, lighting was good, spent an hour on the caption. 47 likes. Barely a blip. Three days later I threw up a half-finished charcoal study at 2am, no caption, just two words and a period, basically a scrap. 4,000 views and it's still getting saves. People are DMing me about it. I don't know what to do with that. It's not even a good drawing, the hand is wrong, I was tired. But something in the mess of it hit people and the polished thing didn't. I've known this for years and I still chase the wrong thing every single time. The grid wants the raw and I keep giving it the framed. Anyone else find the stuff you almost didn't post is always the stuff that lands?

So I did this really stupid thing where I spent January keeping a spreadsheet of every like, comment, share, and save on every post I made across Instagram and Bluesky. I thought I'd find a pattern, you know? Something to reverse engineer. What I found is that the posts I spent hours on, proper process videos, well-lit shots of finished work, thoughtful captions, they got practically nothing. Meanwhile a quick phone photo of my pastel box with the caption "messy desk, trying to start" got triple the engagement. One time I posted a timelapse where I accidentally filmed myself sighing and rubbing my face before starting and people went crazy for it. I don't know what to do with this information. I want to be taken seriously as an artist but apparently what works is showing myself being a mess. Is the answer really just... performative struggle? Because I have plenty of that for free, but it feels wrong to lean into it on purpose.

Spent two and a half days on a piece, photographed it perfectly, wrote a caption I actually thought about for once, posted it at a "good" time. Crickets. Like 40-something likes, mostly my mom and my partner's aunt. Then yesterday I was mid-wash, my brush slipped and I stabbed the paper, and I just took a photo of my palette with paint all over my hand and the mess everywhere with a caption like "we don't talk about this one" and it's already doing better than that whole careful post did. I don't even know what to do with that. I keep telling myself the algorithm is just random and I shouldn't optimize for it, but also... I need groceries. There's a version of me that's about to start faking messy palettes for content and I really hope I don't become her. Anyone else feel like the effort is actively hurting them out here?

I took the "oil on linen, 30x40" caption out of my posts for a month. Not the hashtags, not the process videos, just that little line at the end. I've always put it there out of habit, like a signature. Collectors want to know what they're buying, I told myself. The change was not dramatic but it was real. People started commenting about the light in the room, the mood of the thing, what the woman in the painting was thinking. Before it was mostly "beautiful work" and other painters asking about my medium. I think the technical note was giving people permission to look at it like a spec sheet instead of letting them just feel it. Once the frame of reference was gone they had to meet the painting on its own terms. I put the information back when the piece sells, obviously. But the post itself, the first encounter, I leave it bare now. The gallery can do the talking about dimensions and materials. My job on social media is to make someone stop scrolling because something in the image got under their skin, and I was undercutting that with my own footnotes. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe we all over-explain ourselves online because we're afraid of being misunderstood, and the fear itself is what keeps people at arm's length.

I spent 60 euros boosting one of my best still lifes a few years ago. Got about 800 new followers in three days. Felt great for exactly one afternoon, like finally the machine was on my side. Then I posted the painting being finished, the one people actually respond to, and maybe thirty people saw it. The 800 were just bodies passing through. They liked the ad or they didn't, and they were gone. I think some of them never even unfollowed, they just stopped existing. Meanwhile I put a blurry photo of my badly lit corner of the studio where I mix my palette, no caption worth reading, and it did more for me than the whole 60 euros. There's no logic to it. You can't buy the thing that works because the thing that works is accidental and it doesn't scale. I still teach students who beg me to explain the algorithm to them, like I'm hiding the formula. I'm not hiding anything. I keep a notebook of what landed and why, and the reasons don't repeat. Bof.

I spent all last year trying to crack the algorithm. Filming my process with proper lighting. Voiceovers about the "meaning behind the work." Scheduling posts at optimal times. The reel that got me actual sales? Me, 11pm, exhausted, propping a half-finished painting against a wall in bad kitchen light, no audio, just a 5-second clip of me adding charcoal lines. Caption: "this isn't working yet but I like it." That's it. 14k views. Two commissions. I don't know what to do with that information. It makes me want to stop trying at all, which is probably not the takeaway, but also maybe it is?

spent three days on a reel showing my process, nice lighting, satisfying brush strokes, all that. 12k views. exactly zero inquiries. a week later i posted a genuinely stupid photo of a painting leaning against a dumpster with the caption "found this in the trash lol should i keep it", it's not even a good photo. some guy DM'd me within an hour asking if it was available and i sold it for $800. i don't know what to do with this information. the algorithm is a trickster god and i'm just its little guy.

A consultant they hired said my feed lacked "curatorial coherence." Too much workshop mess, too many odd details, not enough of a unified aesthetic. So I posted a photo of a pigeon I found in my studio courtyard. Dead. Beautiful grey feathers, one wing slightly open, eye still clear. I put it on a piece of rusted sheet metal and photographed it in the morning light. Caption: "Studio assistant quit." It got more engagement than anything I'd posted in six months. The gallery was not amused. But two collectors messaged me asking if it was available as a print. I don't know what the moral is. Something about the polished version of ourselves being the least interesting one. Or that dead birds sell. One of those.

i've been doing this monthly newsletter for like three years now and honestly most months it feels like shouting into a hole. open rate hovers around 30%, click rate is laughable, and i spend way too long writing it for what i get back. last month i almost skipped it. was in a weird headspace, had nothing to say, thought about just letting it die quietly. but i'd already written the draft so i sent it anyway. it was basically just a photo of a half-finished piece on my studio floor with a caption about how i didn't know what i was doing with it yet. got an email back from someone i'd never met. they said the honesty of it made them reach out. they commissioned me to make something for their new building's lobby. $4,200. so now i have to figure out what i'm doing with it. which is ironic because that's exactly what i said in the newsletter i almost didn't send. i don't know what the takeaway is. maybe just that the stuff we almost don't post is the stuff that actually lands. or that consistency matters even when it feels pointless. or that i still hate writing newsletters.

I've been doing the whole "wake up, post a nice finished piece, tag materials, use hashtags, be consistent" thing for months and it's been working okay but like... okay. Then last week I was in a really bad mood about a painting I'd been fighting with for three days, the wash was drying wrong, everything was lifting when I went back in, and I just filmed myself scraping the whole thing off with a palette knife and going "well, that's going in the bin" and posted it on a whim. No caption strategy. Just pure frustration. That stupid, messy, nothing video has more saves and shares than anything I've posted in the last two months. And it's not even a good video, it's just real. I've had four commissions come through from it, including one from someone who said "I don't know anything about art but I felt that." I keep hearing we're supposed to "provide value" and "educate" and I'm not against that but I think maybe the value is just... letting people see you fail? In real time? Without making it a tidy lesson? I don't know, I'm still trying to figure out if I can be that messy on purpose or if it only works when it's genuine. Anybody else finding that the stuff you almost didn't post is the stuff that works?

My daughter set up this account for me last spring. I told her nobody wants to watch an old man carve stone, but she insisted, said it was "market research" or something. Fine. Here's what I actually notice. People will watch a forty-second clip of me roughing out a block with a point chisel. Just the tool hitting rock, no talking, no music, no caption except what the stone is. And the ones who comment have real questions. What kind of stone. What's the hardness. How do you stop a crack from running. That part I don't mind. That's actual conversation. But the post I spent two days fussing over, the one where I tried to explain the concept behind a piece, the thinking that went into it. Crickets. Two likes, one of them my daughter. I should have known better. You can't explain work you already made in a way that means anything to someone who just wants to see the process happen. I was raised to think if the work is good you don't have to talk about it. That's not how the internet works, and I'm too old to pretend otherwise. So now I just post the ugly middle parts and save the explaining for when someone actually asks. The frustrating part is my daughter was right and I hate that.

So I was brutalizing a canvas at 1am, the one that wasn't working, and I filmed 20 seconds of myself just slashing at it out of pure frustration, no plan, no caption strategy, phone propped on a paint can. Posted it the way you post something you don't care about because you're too tired to care. 106k views. My best planned post this month did 800. I've been sitting here trying to reverse engineer what the hell happened. Was it the rawness? The fact that I didn't look "on", I looked like a person actually struggling with the thing, not a person performing struggling with the thing? The lighting was garbage. I had no ring light. I genuinely look like a raccoon in it. It's making me question every polished thing I've put out. Like do people smell the production the way dogs smell fear. The comment section was full of people just... being honest about their own blocked creative work. Nobody even asked about the painting. It wasn't about the art. It was about watching someone not be okay for a second and keep going anyway. Anyway now everything I post feels fake in comparison and I hate that. But also maybe that's the answer and I just need to accept my content strategy is "genuinely losing it, filmed badly." 😭

Listed a piece I nearly didn't photograph because I thought it was too raw. Charcoal smeared where I meant it to stay clean, torn photo edges showing, the whole thing kind of falling apart the way I usually try to hide. Put it up anyway last Tuesday with a caption that was basically "this one fought me." Sold in under 24 hours to someone who sent a message about their own mother's handwriting being the same as the one in the found photo. I didn't even notice the handwriting matched anything. I just pulled the photo because the dress in it looked like one my brother's first girlfriend wore. Every time I try to predict what lands, I'm wrong. The polished landscape pieces I actually thought would go sit there for months. This one, the one that felt like letting someone see the workbench mid-mess, gone like that. Makes me wonder how much of my process is just me tidying things that people would've liked fine as they were.

Eight hours with epoxy and stone dust filling hairline cracks in the back of a plinth that sits against a wall. Nobody's ever going to look at it. Client won't know. But I know, and I couldn't leave it rough. That's the thing I can't translate to anyone who only sees the work online. The camera catches the front. The part that took three days is invisible. I post a finished piece and people say "clean work" and I want to tell them yeah, it's clean because I spent Tuesday afternoon with my face six inches from the back edge of a thing no one will touch. Fabrication teaches you this. You don't get to skip the hidden side just because no one checks. The work is the work whether it's photographed or not. I don't know how to say that in a caption. So I'll say it here instead.

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.

Posting the stuff that actually costs me something keeps getting more engagement than the stuff I sweat over. Last week I threw up a photo of a small piece I made years ago, from a denim jacket that belonged to my brother. It's been half unstuck, I taped it back down, the photo was taken on my kitchen counter at midnight. 1,200 likes. Meanwhile I spent a month on a panel piece, photographed it properly, thought about captions for two hours, and it got 87. I don't know what to do with that. I'm not chasing the algorithm, but I'm also tired of pretending the numbers don't land somewhere in me. The honest version is: the work that gets seen is the work that has a story I don't want to tell. That's a weird thing to build a practice around.

I used to write these careful captions about cyanotype chemistry, the UV exposure times, the pH of the seawater I develop in. Thought people needed to understand the craft to appreciate the print. Then I posted a photo of a print that went completely wrong, overexposed, paper curled, the blue almost black, the seaweed I'd placed shifting mid-exposure so the whole thing was a ghost. I wrote "The sun moved and so did I. This one belongs to the Atlantic now." It got more engagement than any of my tidy process posts. People commented about their own ruined things, the work they'd abandoned, the projects that fell apart. A gallery owner in Amsterdam messaged me asking if I had more "failures" available. I don't think people want to understand how it's made. I think they want to feel that they're allowed to make mistakes too. So now I show the ones that didn't work, alongside the ones that did. The studio floor after a bad week. The prints I fished out of the tide at the wrong moment. The work sells the same. But the conversations are different.

I've been fighting against reels for like two years now. Kept posting finished paintings, good photos, decent lighting, the whole thing. Getting maybe 40 likes and a sale every other month. Last week I was in a rush and just propped my phone up and filmed myself blocking in a sky for about 90 seconds. No editing, no music, just the sound of brush on canvas and me muttering "that's not gonna work" under my breath. Threw it up with a one-line caption. It's at 12k views. I got three commission inquiries. I don't know whether to be thrilled or annoyed that the thing that finally works is me looking like a mess in real time instead of the polished photos I spent actual hours on. But I guess I'm making more videos now.