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Seriously, I'm starting to think the only reliable way to reach people who actually care about my work is through my email list. Like, I spent ages on this new glaze technique, posted it everywhere - Insta, TikTok, even tried a few boosted posts on Facebook. Crickets. But then I sent an email about it, just a quick note with a photo, and bam! Sales. Like, actual orders came in within an hour. I know people say 'build your email list,' but joder, it feels more critical than ever when the social platforms are just these black boxes where your reach can go poof overnight. Anyone else feeling this intense pull back to the fundamentals?

ok so this happened tuesday and I'm still weirdly annoyed about it. There's this watercolorist I've followed since like 2019, I have her book, I've basically studied her washes. She reposted one of my gouache pieces to her story. I sat there refreshing like a maniac. 40 new followers in two days, which is more than I usually get in a month, and I was SO sure this was it, this was the breakthrough, I'd finally have to figure out how to do a mailing list properly. Two people emailed me. One of them asked if I could paint a portrait of their dog for $60 because "it's just a small one." The other was a company asking if I'd do a free piece in exchange for exposure. Meanwhile the thing that's actually kept me fed since I quit the café is a 3-person email list (ok slight exaggeration, it's 91 people) where I send a photo of whatever's on the easel and a paragraph about how it's going, and I sell something almost every time. It's ugly and unglamorous and I keep trying to make it prettier than it needs to be. I think I've been chasing the wrong number this whole time and I don't totally know how to stop. Followers feel like a scoreboard. They're not. Anyway if you have a mailing list, what actually goes in it? Because mine is basically a group text at this point and I'm not sure if that's the secret or if I'm just getting lucky with 91 very patient people.

Six weeks ago I deleted the app off my phone. Not the account, just the app, because I kept opening it while standing at the sink and I couldn't tell you one thing I'd seen. Came back last week, posted a detail shot of the piece I've been chewing on since March. Somewhere around the fourth layer of acrylic the paper starts lifting and you get these little blisters that look like the surface is breathing. That's what I photographed. 11 likes. Two comments, one of them from a guy who wants me to check out his print-on-demand service. Here's the part that surprised me: it didn't sting. Usually I'd post, then check my phone forty times over two days, then feel like a vending machine that nobody was putting coins in. This time I posted it, closed the app, went back to the studio and tore a page out of a 1970s phone book for the next layer. I did lose something though. A woman who'd bought a small piece in 2022 messaged asking where I'd gone. I hadn't seen it for three weeks. That one actually bothered me. So now I'm trying to figure out if the account is worth keeping at all, or if I should just have an email list of eleven people and a note on the wall. Anyone else cut back and find the math worked out better than they expected?

My first solo show, years back, the gallery did almost nothing to promote it. No press, no email list worth the name. I stood in the room for three nights watching people wander in off the street. Barely sold a piece. When I finally said something about it, the owner shrugged and said "that's just how it goes, build relationships for next time." I've heard worse from friends since. A gallery that lost their work. One that "forgot" to pay for three months. The red flags you walk past when you're desperate for a wall. What's the worst thing a gallery has done to you and you still stayed, because what else were you supposed to do? Or the thing that finally made you walk?

Not the collectors, not the buyers. The gallerist. Two weeks after I sent the new list, an email that had begun "Lukas, I have something exciting for you" became "let me think about the timing." I had expected pushback from the buyers. There was none. The three works that sold this spring went at the new numbers without a single negotiation, and one of them was to someone who had asked about the price in 2019 and gone quiet. So it was not the market that flinched. It was the person whose cut got smaller in relative terms, because a 30% raise on my side does not lift his commission in the same proportion he was used to. I am not sure what to do with this. I spent fifteen years being told the price is a signal, that cheap work reads as unserious, and mostly I believed it and still could not bring myself to charge it. Now I did, and the consequence is not more buyers or fewer buyers. It is a quieter phone. The studio does not care either way. I am working on three panels, 180 by 140, cold wax over a red ground, and the scraping back is going badly.

I'll settle this one. I walked into a gallery cold once, portfolio under my arm, no appointment. Woman looked at the first three photos, put them down, asked if I did anything smaller. I said no. Got a coffee out of it and a no. Never did that again. Second time I sent an email with six images and a price list, plain as a hardware invoice. That one led to a real show. So I'm in the email camp. Slower, less humiliating, and you can tell who actually looked. Which way did you land your first real gallery? Walk in with the work and take your chances, or send it and wait?

I've been sitting on a list of four galleries for maybe three months now. Two of them I've written the email for, more or less. I have not sent either one. There's a polite version and a shorter version and I keep switching between them and neither feels right. The other option is to just walk in with a small folder of prints. Which is terrifying, but at least it's over in ten minutes instead of me refreshing my drafts folder every evening. So which is it for you? Email first, or walk in and take the chance that someone's at the desk? And if you email, what actually went in the first line, because mine currently starts with "I hope this finds you well" and I already hate it. I know one person who got her first show because she walked in with wet hair from the rain and the owner felt sorry for her. I'm not sure I can arrange weather on purpose.

I run a small letter, once a month, and about a year ago I stopped sending it to the whole list. Now roughly half of it goes out in the post, printed on the same paper stock I use for my study sheets, folded, hand addressed. It costs me a fortune in postage and an afternoon I could spend painting. The reply rate is around thirty percent. The email version gets maybe two percent. What those replies actually contain: a woman in Devon asking what blue I use in the shadows of white flowers, a retired pharmacist who noticed I'd labelled a specimen with the wrong collection date, a teacher who wanted the whole letter in the classroom. None of that happens by email. Email replies are "lovely, thank you." The envelope gets a letter back. The part I did not expect is what it does to my teaching. Everyone tells you to grow the list, run the free download, build the funnel. I did the arithmetic and it says the opposite. Four hundred people who open an envelope are worth more than four thousand who open a tab, and I cannot explain that to anyone selling me a course on audience growth. I am not recommending this. It is expensive, it does not scale, and I am fairly sure it will never make me a name people recognise at a market stall. I just know which version of my work is actually reaching someone, and it is the one with a stamp on it.

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.

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.

She set the account up in March and then talked me into a price list. "People need to know what things cost before they ask." So there's a page now. Small maquette, £1,200. A one-metre limestone figure, £9,000. A welded piece depends on the steel. Three months. Two emails. Both from sculptors asking how I got the stone at that rate. The commissions that did come in this spring came the old way, from a man I did a fireplace surround for in 2011 who passed my number to his brother-in-law. No prices discussed until he stood in the yard and looked at the thing. I'm not saying the page is wrong. I'm saying I haven't figured out who it's for. Somebody with £9,000 to spend on a garden piece doesn't want to comparison-shop it like a fridge, and somebody without it isn't my customer anyway. If you sell work at this kind of money, what do you actually put on the site. Numbers, or just the work and a phone number.

ok so I want to hear the real stories, not the polished ones. mine: I got my first "gallery" because I was doing a market in Ruzafa, a woman bought two small vessels, and three weeks later she messaged me saying she ran a space and wanted to show my stuff. I said yes before I even googled her. Turned out it was a bar with one wall and a very good wine list. Sold nothing. But I learned how to hang a show in one afternoon and I still say "my first exhibition" about it, so. how did yours actually happen? cold email, walk in with a box of work, someone's cousin, a group show you almost didn't apply to? and was it a real gallery or a bar with a wall? honest answers only

Two people this month have suggested I start a Substack newsletter. A former student who now does very well on social media told me I was "sitting on a goldmine of expertise" and letting it go to waste. The gallery that represents me sent an email suggesting it would help with "audience building." I have a small pile of beautiful, unused Moleskine notebooks and a perfectly good fountain pen. I also have a quiet studio, a waiting list for my classes, and more work than I can comfortably finish. I am not sure what problem Substack is meant to solve for me, and at 47 I find I am becoming less interested in solving problems I do not have. I understand the argument. I teach techniques that are hard to find elsewhere. I have opinions about pigments and paper that people might want to read. But the pitch always assumes the thing you are not doing is the thing you should be doing, and I am not convinced that is true. Writing a proper newsletter takes time and thought. I would rather put that into another painting or a better lecture for my students. Has anyone else here pushed back on this pressure and been glad they did? Or do I sound like someone who will regret this in a year.

I keep hearing about the obvious ones, the ones people spot and walk away from. I want the other kind. The one that looked fine at the time and only made sense later. Mine: a small space in Warsaw, very polite, very excited, offered me a "solo show." Then the list of participating artists came, and there were four of us, and the shared wall was one wall. I signed anyway because someone wanted to show my pastels, which honestly was enough for me at that point. I spent three weeks framing things for a single wall. It was not a solo show. I still say yes too easily, so maybe I am asking this to learn. So what is yours? The clause, the email that went quiet, the "we'll handle the printing," the commission that turned out to be on everything including work that never sold. Anything that took you months to see. Small ones count too. I am convinced the small ones are the real ones.

a gallery took my stuff in for review when I first started, never replied. fine, that happens. but TWO YEARS later they email like "hi Mira, we'd love to see what you're doing now!" no apology, no acknowledgment. like the first eighteen months just didn't exist. I didn't even answer it. petty? maybe. but that silence said everything about how they'd have treated me if I'd signed with them. what's the most disrespectful thing a gallery has done that you just... took? because you wanted it bad enough or you didn't know better yet. I've got a list.

Not a growth tactic, more a survival measure. For years I answered everything the day it arrived, and the day it arrived was usually a morning I had planned to work. One email about a group show in Antwerp and the whole morning gone, because after answering I am no longer in the painting, I am in the correspondence about the painting. So since March I answer on Tuesdays. Everything. Piles up, I read them Tuesday morning with coffee, answer in one go, and the rest of the week the studio door is shut properly. What surprised me: the fairs and the institutions do not care. They wait a week. Two commercial galleries dropped me off their list of people to ask for things, which honestly I count as a gain. One collector I have known for eleven years wrote back after nine days and said it was a relief, he had assumed he was the only one drowning. The thing it did not fix: the actual selling. Being unavailable makes you slightly more interesting to some people and simply absent to others, and the others are the ones with the money in the room. I have not solved that and I am not pretending the calendar solved it for me. But I have had eight uninterrupted weeks in the studio since March, which is more than the whole of last year, and the work is better for it. That is the whole of my marketing strategy at the moment. A closed door on Wednesdays.

ok so mine is currently the wall above my partner's desk at their office because their boss said "sure, bring some in" and I have never said yes to anything faster. two of my window paintings are just... there. next to a printer. and honestly it's the most people have ever seen my work in one room?? which is kind of sad and kind of great. before that it was a laundromat. the owner had a nail already in the wall and I asked and he said "as long as it doesn't fall on a machine." so what's your weirdest one. coffee shop, dentist, your aunt's hair salon, the back of a bar, your own bathroom because you ran out of wall. I want the full list. and also tell me if it ever actually led anywhere because I'm starting to think the laundromat guy has better instincts than half the galleries I've emailed. tell me I'm wrong.

So I'll tell you what happened and you can decide if I'm codding myself. Start of the summer I got sick of the whole rigmarole. The Facebook page was at me every day, "boost this", "your reach is down", and I was spending a solid hour a night liking other people's posts so they'd like mine back. Feels like being back at school doing favours for lads who'd still not sit beside you at lunch. So I just stopped. Six weeks. Didn't delete it, just left it there like a shed you don't open. Two things came out of it. First, nothing happened. No cliff, no fall off a ledge, the exact same trickle of sales as before. Which tells me the hour a night was doing absolutely nothing except making me feel busy. Second, and this is the bit I can't fully explain. I stuck a wee sign on the table at the Saturday market in Galway. Just a laminated card, "if you'd like to hear when there's a new print, write your email here". Real pen, real paper, and I stand there like an eejit with a clipboard. Went from 61 names to 128 over the six weeks. I think people are just tired. They'll give you their email when you ask them face to face and there's a crayon involved for the small one, but they won't click a link you put under a photo of a heron. I've gone back on the page now, but it's down to one post a week and I don't read the comments on the boosted ones anymore because there's no speaking to them. Anyone else find the thing you were most afraid to stop doing was the thing doing the least?

I had a newsletter for almost two years. Every two weeks, a studio note, what I was printing, the tide tables that week, a dried piece of seaweed I pressed between pages. Nothing pushy. Just the work. I stopped six months ago. Not because of open rates or unsubscribes. Because I realised I was writing for an audience I couldn't feel. The emails went out and something went into a void and maybe someone read them somewhere and maybe they didn't. I had no way to tell. I know the advice. Build your list. Own your platform. But I think there's something honest about admitting that not every kind of reach is worth having. The newsletter worked better on paper than it ever did in my gut. I've been quieter online since then. Posting less. Selling more through the people who find me through word of mouth and the local shop that carries my prints. It's slower. It also doesn't feel like I'm feeding something that never looks back. Anyone else stopped doing something that was supposed to be essential and found it didn't matter?

People keep asking me how I sell paintings, and they seem disappointed when I tell them it's not the social accounts. I run a modest Instagram for the studio, maybe 4,000 followers, and it's pleasant enough. But the collectors who have actually commissioned work from me over the past few years nearly all came from my newsletter. The plain text one. No templates, no design, just a note every month or two about what's on the easel and which pieces are about to be released. I started it back in 2016 out of frustration, because I was tired of watching a carefully composed post disappear into the feed after an hour. Today it has 700 subscribers. Last year three commissions and two gallery introductions came directly from those emails. That's a better conversion rate than every platform I'm on combined, by a wide margin. The social accounts are fine for visibility and for students finding my classes. But if you want someone to spend real money, you want their inbox, not their feed. The feed is a hallway. The inbox is a sitting room. I'd rather sit with seven hundred people than wave at four thousand.