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I got so sick of the game I just stopped. No stories, no posts, nothing. Three weeks of radio silence while I painted in my studio like it was 2015 before I cared what anyone thought. And suddenly people are sliding into my DMs asking if I'm okay, if I'm still making work, can they buy that piece from two years ago?? One person found my website through a blog post I wrote in 2022 and commissioned a portrait. A PORTRAIT. Off a blog I forgot existed. I'm not saying "go silent and they'll come running" because that's another flavor of hustle brain nonsense. But damn. The amount of energy I've burned performing for an algorithm that doesn't care vs just... existing and letting people find me when they need to. I don't know what to do with that information honestly.

ok so this is going to sound so small and obvious but I've been doing the whole "post consistently and engage in comments" thing for months and it's fine but it's also like... waiting for people to find you? and I got sick of it?? So last week I picked 12 accounts, not big influencers, just people with really good eyes who share art they love, some are collectors, some are just normal people with nice feeds. And I sent each of them a genuine message, like "hey I saw you reposted [artist]'s work the other day and I think you'd like what I do too, here's my latest piece" with a photo attached. No templates, no pitchy stuff. Six of them wrote back. SIX. One bought a small study on the spot, two said they'd keep me in mind, and the other three just had really nice conversations that made my whole week. One of them runs a tiny gallery I didn't even know about and invited me to submit for a group show. I think I got scared of DMs because it feels like bothering people? But if you're genuine and you actually looked at their feed and you're not just copy-pasting, it's... not bothering them?? It's just a person saying hi?? Anyway I'm doing it again this week with a different batch. Thought I'd share in case anyone else is staring at the algorithm like it owes them something lol

Went through the grid on sunday, coffee going cold, and deleted about forty posts. all the ones from the two years i was posting three times a week because some course told me consistency beats everything. the close-ups of brush texture. the flat lays. the "process" shots where nothing was actually happening, i was just holding a palette knife near the canvas for the camera. here's the part i didn't expect: engagement dropped maybe 15%. nothing. two years of unpaid labor, roughly 300 posts, and the audience i built on it never bought anything. the people who actually show up to a show or send me a DM asking if a piece is still available found me through a friend or a wall, not through a texture close-up. what did change is i stopped dreading opening the app. i post maybe once every ten days now, usually one bad photo of the studio with stuff piled on the floor, and it does about as well. the thing i keep circling is that i can't tell if the 15% was worth it. there's no clean answer. everyone says the algorithm rewards volume and maybe it does, but volume was making me hate the work, and the work is the only part i can't fake. anyone else cut back and just... not noticed a difference?

For years my replies to enquiries were a paragraph about materials and then a number. Maybe one in six ever wrote back. Three months ago I changed one thing. Instead of the price I say: I'm setting glass until the 14th, then I'm free, do you want to come and see it on the floor before it's grouted. Nothing else. Twelve enquiries since. Nine of them got in the car. Seven commissions out of that. Same work, same prices, same photos on the page. I think people don't actually want a mosaic. They want to know what they're getting before they hand over 3,000 euros to a stranger with a hammer. A number in a message doesn't answer that. Standing over it in bad light in my workshop does. Two of them signed before they'd seen the whole thing, just the corner where the smalti catches. What annoys me is how obvious it is and how long it took me. I was treating a message like a quote, when it's really the first five minutes of a long job. It has made my week lumpier though. I'm a person again on Thursdays instead of a form. Some days I'd rather just cut stone and be nobody.

Okay so I've been trying to figure out this whole "get your art in front of people who actually buy it" thing instead of just posting into the void and hoping. I kept reading that you're supposed to DM interior designers and stylists but nobody ever says what you're actually supposed to SAY to them?? Like "hi I'm an artist" feels so flat. So last week I just went for it. I picked 12 designers who post the kind of spaces I could actually see my work in, warm, natural light, not super minimal. And I literally just said something like "hey! I'm a watercolor painter and I've been obsessed with how you use color in [specific project they posted]. Just wanted to share a few pieces I think would sit nicely in that kind of space, no pressure at all but thought I'd throw it out there" and attached 3 photos. 3 replied. One asked to set up a call. One said "send me your portfolio" and then went quiet lol. One just said "beautiful work, I'll keep you in mind" which could mean nothing but also could mean something?? I don't know. The thing is I felt so awkward doing it. Like I'm bothering them. But also nobody saw me do it so who cares right. I'm gonna do another batch this week and actually follow up with the ones who went quiet because my friend who's a freelancer said that's the part everybody skips. Anyway just wondering if anyone else has tried this and whether it actually turned into sales or just polite replies that go nowhere. I'll report back if that call turns into anything 🙃

I stopped photographing my work the way galleries want. No seamless backdrop, no tripod, no little grey card for the white balance. I shoot it where it lives. On the studio floor with the tray of cut smalti still spilled beside it, the broom somewhere in frame, cement dust on everything. A gallery person told me last year it looked "unprofessional." Fine. The last three pieces I sold went to people who saw them on my kitchen table, next to a half-finished cup of coffee and a cat tail at the edge of the shot. Two of them told me it was the floor mess that made them trust it, that the polished shots looked like something from a catalogue and they stopped looking. Meanwhile the gallery took its own photos for the exhibition. Beautiful. Bright. Completely dead. A visitor walked straight past the actual mosaic on the wall, which is standing there glowing, and looked at the printed photo on the label card for forty seconds. I watched her do it. So now I'm sending out images with my knees in them and my father's old tile nippers lying there and I've made 2 sales this month from DMs about the background clutter, not the work. I don't fully understand it. I just know that the beautiful photo has stopped doing anything.

For two years I filmed from the clean corner. One square meter of clean bench, nice light from the window, everything else out of frame. Neat little reels of a finished vessel turning on a banding wheel. Perfectly fine, perfectly invisible, about 400 views each and then nothing. In February I broke my phone tripod, so I propped the phone on a bucket of dry clay scraps and just filmed where I work, which is a disaster. Dust, a coffee cup from three days before, my grandmother's old knife I use for everything, half a head that failed in the glaze looking at the camera like it's disappointed in me. That video did 60k. Not a tutorial, not a before/after. Just me wedging clay and swearing in Valencian at a piece that kept cracking. Since then I film the mess and I stop deleting the boring parts. Saves went from maybe 20 a post to 60, 70. But here's the part that annoys me: comments went down. People save the messy ones and don't say anything. So I have no idea if it's working, I just know my DMs are fuller and my shop had 14 orders in March vs 4 in the whole autumn. I think what changed is there's no performance in it. Like people can smell the tidy version. But I also can't shake the feeling I just got lucky with the algorithm on one dumb video and now I'm chasing it by deliberately leaving my studio dirty, which is a very strange thing to be strategic about. Anyway if you film your work, do you clean first? I genuinely don't know anymore.

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.

Okay so I finally caved and paid $60 for a feature from one of those big art accounts that posts "emerging artists" to their 50k followers. Figured it'd be my big break you know, get some eyes on my stuff that aren't just my mom and the same 12 people who like everything I post. The post did get decent likes. My follower count went up maybe 40 people, and I got three follows from accounts that look suspiciously like the same kind of account. And zero actual inquiries about my work. ZERO. Not even a "do you do commissions" message. I spent $60 to get an audience of people who apparently scroll past art the way I scroll past ads. Meanwhile last week I posted a video of me just cutting paper for a frame and that got more actual comments and DMs than anything in months. Like literally cutting paper. Me being mildly annoyed at a crooked mat knife. I'm not saying shoutouts never work for anyone, clearly they do for some people, but I think I finally get that followers aren't the same as people who buy things. The folks who buy my stuff are the ones who've been hanging around my tiny account watching me paint the same window for three months. They feel like they know me. A stranger seeing my work in a feed of 30 other artists is not that. Anyway I'm $60 lighter and slightly humbled. Anyone else had a paid promo flop or is it just me 😭

ok real question. everyone talks about the polite email, the cold open call, the submission portal that eats your soul. but has anyone ever gotten in somewhere sideways? i'll go first. i got my first group show because i was standing in the gallery trying to decide if i even wanted to submit and the owner came out and asked if i needed help. i was so flustered i just pointed at a piece on the wall and said "i could make that better." absolute foot in mouth. she laughed, told me to prove it, and i brought something in two days later. still don't know if that was confidence or sheer stupidity but it worked. so what's yours? walked in with a piece under your arm? slid into their DMs? emailed so many times they finally answered just to shut you up?

Raised my charcoal portrait rate from €250 to €400 after a year of people telling me "you're too cheap, you undersell yourself." Everyone said do it. Everyone. Lost every single client. All of them. The two commissions I had booked cancelled the next week. Three months now, nothing. I keep checking my DMs like a loser. And the worst part is I know the work is good. It's not impostor syndrome talking, this batch of pieces is some of the best stuff I've ever made. But nobody will pay the price that's actually fair for what goes into them. I'm sitting here genuinely considering dropping back down to €250. And I hate that because everyone warned me this is the trap, this is exactly what they said would happen, that I'd cave. But rent doesn't care about my dignity. €250 for 22 hours of work is €11 an hour. I know that's insane. But it's food money. Anyone else just... hit the wall and folded back to the old number? Or actually waited it out and survived?

ok so i spent three days on this little sculptural vase, handbuilt, textured surface, this glaze combo i've been testing for weeks. really proud of it. posted a reel of the process, lighting nice, good music, the whole thing. got maybe 300 views. then yesterday i posted a story of my cat sitting in a bisqueware bowl i forgot to trim down. phone footage, bad lighting, my thumb in the corner for half of it. 4.2k views. 14 dms asking if the bowl is for sale. i don't know what the game is anymore. i'm not even mad, just... confused. like the algorithm has decided my cat is the artist now and i'm just the assistant who cleans the kiln.

so I've been tracking every reel for two months because I have a spreadsheet and no chill, and honestly the numbers are embarrassing in a way that's kind of freeing? my neat overhead timelapse of a finished iris, edited, music, the whole thing: 1,200 views, zero dms. the one that actually moved a painting was 47 seconds of me at 6am in my gross cardigan saying "ok I'm doing a wet on wet and I'm pretty sure I'm about to ruin it" and then NOT ruining it, and a woman messaged me asking if the original was available before the video even finished uploading. sold it for $380 which is real money to me right now. which is annoying?? because I spent actual hours on the pretty one and it did nothing. and I hate that the lesson is "be messy and relatable" because that's what everyone says and it makes me want to crawl out of my skin. but I think the real difference is that the messy one shows the decision, not the result. people can't buy a result they can see is already done. they can watch you choose, though. the thing I'm stuck on: does it have to be the struggle? like can I show the decision without performing anxiety? because I'm eight months into doing this full time and the money is genuinely scary and I don't want my whole feed to become me being nervous at a window. that's not the work. the work is the work. also unrelated but I underpainted a sky in cobalt violet this morning and it's doing something to me

for years I had "DM for pricing" at the bottom like everyone told me to. the reasoning was always that talking to people gets you further than a number on a page. then a friend who sells furniture online said something that stuck. she said the only people who ask about price are the ones who already want it, and you're making them jump through a hoop to find out they can't afford it. so in march I put actual numbers up. the torn paper pieces at 240, the big charcoal ones at 900, a couple of small ones at 85. lost nothing. no angry messages. what I did lose was about an hour a week of the same conversation, the one where someone says "and what would something like this run" and then goes quiet. and I got three sales off people who told me later they'd been watching for months and only bought once they saw I wasn't going to ask them to negotiate over DMs like it's a rug in a market. the thing nobody warns you about with hiding prices is that it makes you look like you're deciding how much each person is worth. I wasn't doing that. I just didn't want to be told my numbers were too high. which is its own problem, and putting them on the page mostly cured it, because the number stops being a thing I have to defend in a chat window and starts being a fact on a page.

finally did it. bumped my base commission price from $200 to $275 after like three years of telling myself i'd get around to it. two people had inquiries sitting in my DMs. both went "ok thanks!" and vanished into the ether the second i gave the new number. not even a counter or a "let me think about it" just gone lol. i know $275 is not insane. i know i'm worth it. i know the people who actually want the work will pay it. but man that immediate ghost hit different. feels like i just priced myself out of my own market and i'm the one who set the price. anyone else raise a number and immediately regret it before you even gave it a chance to breathe? or is it just me staring at my empty inbox

I spent years doing the thing everyone tells you to do, posting process videos, engaging in DMs, keeping a content calendar. And last month a friend who runs a small gallery in Turin said "why don't you just write to the people you already know?" So I wrote a very plain email. No newsletter platform, no template. Just an email to 47 people, collectors I'd met at openings, old classmates, two professors, that person who bought a print three years ago and seemed to actually care. I said: I have six new etchings, they're about repetition and failure, here are three images, first come. I sold five prints in two days. Five prints to people I already knew. I spent maybe an hour on the email. I had spent three months on Instagram for the same result, maybe less. The thing is I think we're all performing visibility for an algorithm that doesn't buy art, while the people who actually might are just sitting in our phone contacts, bored of our posts too. I'm not saying burn the platform down. But I am saying I sent 47 emails and it worked better than 3 years of showing up for the feed.

I got my first gallery by walking in off the street with a portfolio case, which today people act like I'm confessing to something embarrassing. But I walked in, asked if I could show the director my work, she had ten minutes between meetings, and she took me on. I know it's not the usual way now, everything is email, submissions, Instagram DMs. But I also know artists who've done it recently and it worked. So I'm asking: did you ever just walk into a gallery cold and get somewhere with it? Or is that completely dead and I'm just old? Me: Lyon, 2008, walked into a small gallery in the 1st, came back three days later with paintings. Stayed with them five years.

I took on a private student a few years back, right after the worst of the crisis here. She was young, maybe 24, no money at all but she wanted to learn mosaic so badly. She showed up at my studio with a five-liter tin of her family's olive oil and asked if we could trade. I said yes because I remembered what it was like to be young and broke and hungry for a skill. She came once a week for six months. She was terrible with the hammer and hardie at first, kept shattering the glass instead of cutting it. But she learned. She ended up getting a commission for a hotel lobby last year. When she sent me photos I actually teared up a little. Meanwhile I get DMs every week from people who want to "collaborate", meaning they want my work for exposure, or they want me to teach them for free because "it would be good for my brand." I don't answer those anymore. The olive oil was good, by the way. Her family makes it near Kalamata. I used it for six months and every time I cooked with it I thought, this is what paying attention to someone actually looks like.

okay real talk, cold emailing galleries. do you actually do it? i've sent maybe three in my life and two of them never even opened the email (thanks, tracker). the one that did open it never replied lol. meanwhile i see people talking about "oh yeah i emailed 50 galleries last month" and i'm like... who ARE you. are you real. teach me your ways. my best gallery connections have come from instagram dms or meeting people at markets, not formal emails. maybe that's the way? or maybe i'm just bad at emails. what's your ratio? do you cold email and get replies or is it mostly a waste of time?

okay I'm dying to know how everyone landed their first gallery. not the dream one, the first one that actually said yes. mine was this tiny cafe-gallery hybrid in a neighborhood that's definitely getting gentrified lol. I literally walked in with a portfolio folder (remember those??) and asked if they'd look at my stuff. the owner was like "sure kid, leave it with me" and I think she mostly felt bad for me but she gave me a two-week show and I sold three paintings. I was SO nervous I almost threw up before the opening. did you email? walk in? get introduced? someone slide into your DMs? I feel like everybody's story is different and I wanna hear the real ones, not the polished version.