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Small gallery in Lisbon took interest in the cyanotypes a few months ago. They asked for the usual things, then asked how many followers I had. I said about nine hundred and they went quiet for a while. I thought that was the end of it. They wrote back last week with a date. The woman said she'd rather work with someone whose work she actually saw in person than someone with thirty thousand followers who can't hold a conversation about paper. I keep thinking about how close that came to nothing. Nine hundred of those followers are probably bots and family. The two or three collectors I have found me through a newsletter I send maybe eight times a year, mostly just photos of the prints drying and the sea that day. No strategy. I just got tired of performing for the algorithm and started doing the one thing I actually like, which is showing the work itself. Not sure this scales into advice. Just glad quiet work still has a door that opens sometimes.

I keep two lists on my phone. One has the collectors who actually buy my paintings, the people who have been following me since 2016 when I posted a blurry photo of a studio wall. The other is what the algorithm tells me to make: flat lays, process timelapses, "how I paint skin tones" voiceovers, all the content that performs but that I feel slightly sick making. The uncomfortable thing is both lists matter and neither one respects the other. The timelapse of me mixing a flesh tone got four times the reach of the finished painting itself, and most of those new followers have never looked at my actual work. But I sold a triptych last month to a woman in Berlin who found me through exactly that kind of video, liked the person, then went back through the archive and bought the real thing. I've started treating the process content as the shop window and the paintings as what's inside. The window has to be well dressed or nobody comes in. But I also stopped pretending to myself that the window is the art. That distinction was costing me more than the algorithm ever has.

So I finally worked up the nerve to walk into a gallery in my neighborhood, not the fancy one, a small one that shows local painters, and the owner was actually nice?? She looked at my phone photos for like ten minutes and said "send me a proper email with your site and some prices." That was nine days ago. I still haven't sent it because I keep rewriting the email and I'm scared the window already closed. Someone please tell me the window is not nine days. And more importantly, what's the etiquette here? Do you follow up in a week? Two? Do you wait for them to reach out first? Does it EVER matter if you're slow, or am I just inventing a clock that doesn't exist? My mom says send it today and stop being weird about it which is probably correct but I want to hear what actually worked for you. Did anyone here get a yes from a slow follow-up? Did anyone lose one by dragging their feet? Tell me I'm not the only one who's sat on an email like this. (also hi, first time posting in here, I'm Dani, watercolor and gouache, been full time about 8 months and still learning all the rules nobody tells you)

i sent a bunch of portfolios out last autumn and about half just… disappeared into the void. no reply, no nothing. one gallery i really wanted i emailed twice, three months apart, nothing. i convinced myself they hated it, threw the pots away, told everyone about the weird spanish kid who sent them photos of wonky clay faces. but then i ran into the owner at a market totally by accident, she was super nice, said she'd been meaning to write back and got buried. i sent a follow up the next day and got a studio visit out of it. so now i'm like, was i stupid for not following up sooner? is two emails desperate or normal? what do you do when a gallery ghosts? send another? take the hint? bring an offering of tiny pots as a peace treaty?

ok here's one, the first gallery I ever approached (small, local, I was so nervous) basically told me to come back when I had more followers. Not "your work needs work," not "we're full," just... go get popular first. I was so mad. But also I kinda took it as a challenge? Spent the next year just posting like crazy, doing markets, building a tiny newsletter, making connections with other ceramistas. When I went back I had maybe 2k followers, not huge, but I had people who actually bought my stuff and showed up. Anyway they took me that time. And now I wonder if it was bad advice that worked by accident, or if they were kind of right but said it the worst way. What's the worst "advice" a gallery gave you that you actually ended up learning from? Or that was just straight wrong and you ignored completely?

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 😭

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.

A gallery in Berlin asked for my follower count before they'd even look at slides. Not my CV, not my exhibition history, not the work. Just the number. I told them 4,800 and the conversation cooled about ten degrees. They said they'd "keep me in mind." I've been painting seriously for thirty years. Thirty. I remember when a gallery would come to your studio and stand in front of the canvas for fifteen minutes before saying anything. Naja. I can't even be angry, I'm too tired for it. But I keep thinking about what that number actually measures. It measures how well I perform for strangers on a phone. It doesn't measure a single thing about whether the work is any good. The irony is I'm not even a Luddite about it. I post, I show the process, I answer comments. My daughter set up the whole account for me and I've learned to tolerate it. But I refuse to make the account the point. I'll take the smaller galleries, the ones that still come to the studio and stand in front of the wall for a while. There are fewer of them every year, but they exist. I don't know what the answer is. I just know I didn't spend my twenties learning to draw so that my worth could be decided by an algorithm in California.

had a piece in a group show last spring and someone bought it opening night. first time a stranger paid four figures for something i made. felt like i'd done something wrong so i kept the price low for months after, $200, $350, like i was apologizing for the nerve of charging real money. finally bumped everything up this fall. not stupid high, just... what i'd need to make it worth pulling all-nighters and buying real materials instead of dumpster cardboard. lost about 40% of my instagram followers in the next three weeks. the algorithm punished me or whatever. but the people who stayed? they're the ones who actually buy. or share. or send a note that isn't "love this, wish i could afford it." i'd rather have 300 people who get it than 3,000 who treat my feed like a museum gift shop they're just browsing. still feels weird every time i type a number into an invoice. like i'm about to get caught.

sent a portfolio to a small gallery in barcelona like three months ago and got nothing back. not even a "no thanks." i keep thinking i should follow up but also feel like if they wanted to answer they would've already no? what do you guys do when a gallery just goes silent? second email? instagram dm? just assume it's a no and move on? i usually let it die tbh but i'm wondering if i'm being too passive about it. maybe the ones who do this for a living are more aggressive idk

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.

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.

The Instagram crowd has gone very quiet the last few weeks. Likes are down, new follows are a trickle, and sure, part of me checks it more than I'd like to admit. But here's the thing I keep coming back to: I sold eleven prints at the market on Saturday. Eleven, cash in a tin, most of them to people who'd never seen my page at all. They just stopped at the stall, picked up the hare, had a chat about it. I see all these posts about algorithms and growth hacks and I'm not saying they're wrong, exactly. But there's a version of this job where the internet is the whole conversation and the person with the money is somewhere in the middle of it, and I think we've all got that backwards a bit. The algorithm doesn't buy prints. It doesn't frame one and hang it in the hallway. Not a big take. Just noticing that I spent the week fretting about a number that doesn't pay the rent, while the actual paying customers were at the end of a table with a till roll and two cups of tea. Anyway. Back to carving. The dog's had enough of me staring at my phone.

Sister Bernice cornered me after service today. Said she saw the picture my daughter posted of the wedding quilt I just finished for my niece. "Gloria Mae, that would be so much prettier if you just followed a nice pattern out of a book. All those crooked pieces just look like you made a mistake." I stood there holding my pocketbook and just smiled. Told her my grandmother didn't own a pattern book in her life and what she made hangs in museums now. Bernice's face went tight as fresh starch. Y'all, I been quilting since I was seven years old sitting on a flour sack at my grandmother's feet. The "mistakes" are where the breath gets in. The crooked pieces are where the spirit moves through. Bless her heart though. She means well. She's just used to quilts that lay flat and quiet. Some of us like our quilts to have something to say.

There is a plywood crate in the corner of my current space. It has followed me across three studios and one divorce. Inside: every exhibition catalogue from 1989 to about 1997, the years I was showing regularly. Nobody will ever look at them again. There is no archive interested. But I cannot throw them out because somewhere in there is the proof that I was doing something, and I know how stupid that sounds. The younger ones don't have this. They have hard drives and cloud storage and nothing exists physically anymore. I'm not sure which is worse, a crate of dead paper or a folder nobody will ever open. I told myself last week: the next time I move, the crate goes. But the studio got flooded in spring and my first thought was the crate, before the drawings. So I am not moving anywhere, and the crate stays, and I am fine with being this predictable.

I got a no once from a gallery I really respected. Took me three weeks to write the email, sent it, two days later the owner replied personally, not interested but kind about it, said come back with new work in a year. I was disappointed but I still think well of her. It's the ones who just never reply that get me. I sent a query last spring. Heard nothing. Followed up politely two months later. Nothing. Still sitting in their inbox, presumably. I'd rather get a "no thanks" in five minutes than be left hanging for six months. What's your cutoff? Do you follow up once and wash your hands, or do you keep nudging until someone tells you to stop? I do one follow-up, then I take the silence as a no and move on. Tell me I'm wrong.

So a Barcelona-based clothing brand reached out, they wanted to use photos of my pieces styled with their new collection for a lookbook. I thought cool, my wonky little ceramic heads next to nice linen, why not. They offered 400€ and a bunch of clothes, I said yes. The second I posted the announcement, the comments were... not mean exactly but disappointed. Like I was selling out. "Oh so we're doing fast fashion now?" "Mateo no." A couple people said it felt off-brand. And ok, I get it. But also, I'm 27, my kiln is held together with wire, and 400€ is 400€. The brand is small, Spanish, not Zara. They make stuff by hand too, different material but same energy. I felt good about it until I didn't. I don't know. I still think independent artists and independent brands can help each other without it being gross. But the reaction made me second-guess everything. Has anyone else done a collab that felt right but your audience just wasn't there with you? How do you tell the difference between selling out and just... making rent?

Ok so I need someone to tell me I'm not being insane here. I got my first real gallery yes back in the spring (still cannot believe I'm typing that, I cried in the parking lot haha) and it was the best day. Like genuinely. Then... nothing. Emails take two weeks to get an answer, the show date keeps sliding, and last time I asked a totally normal logistics question I got a one-line reply that felt like it was typed by someone already walking away. And here's my actual question because I keep going back and forth on it: how long do you wait before you check in again, and how many times is too many before you're "the annoying artist"? I've landed on roughly every two weeks and one follow-up max, but I have literally no idea if that's pushy or way too passive. My partner says I'm being patient, I say I'm being a doormat, we've had this fight twice. Also part of me wonders if the quiet is just... how galleries are? Like a slow-cooking thing where no news is fine news? Or is silence the polite version of "we changed our minds"? Tell me your actual follow-up rules, and if you've ever had a gallery go dark on you, what happened. Did it come back around or was that the end? genuinely asking because I've rewritten the same check-in email four times and I need to just send the thing 🙏

okay I need to know if this is just me or if this is like, a rite of passage. I spent FOUR MONTHS talking to a gallery last year. Emails back and forth, sent them a whole portfolio, they loved it, we talked about a show timeline, I got my hopes way up. Then nothing. I followed up twice, polite, casual, and just got radio silence. Not even a "we went another direction." Just disappeared into the void. I was so embarrassed I didn't tell anyone for months lol like I'd been scammed by a situationship. Has this happened to you? What's the longest a gallery has strung you along before ghosting? Or did you ever get a follow-up years later that made it make sense? I need solidarity here 😭

i emailed a gallery back in february. they replied in march saying they were "reviewing my work with the curatorial committee." i followed up in may, still reviewing. july came, i followed up again, got "we'll circle back after summer programming." then in september i get a polite no. like, just say no in march? don't drag me through all the seasons? tell me your longest string-along. not the rejection that stung, the one that wasted your time.