Search

A few months back I got tired of hearing myself say that social media doesn't matter, so I did the thing I said I'd never do. I paid one of those agencies. Fifteen hundred euros for a month of "organic growth strategy." They sent me a plan that was basically: post every day, use these hashtags, engage with bigger accounts, tell your story more. The only concrete change was that I started posting my work with the same three hashtags as everyone else, and my feed became a wall of pictures of paint that said nothing. I do have a story. It's just not a tidy one, and it doesn't fit in a caption alongside a grid flourish. I cancelled after three weeks. The one useful thing that came out of it was noticing I'd stopped enjoying preparing a canvas. That was never supposed to be content. That's the part I keep. So bof, lesson learned the expensive way, but at least the money bought me that clarity. What's actually working for you right now, or is everyone else also just shouting into the same three hashtags?

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.

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.

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.

did anyone ever actually get a straight answer after a gallery rejected them? not the "we loved your work, just not for our program right now" form letter, an actual reason. one time i got a no and the owner told me it was because my frames were cheap. called it "hardware insecurity" which honestly still haunts me. bought better frames out of spite. we love growth lol anyone get a rejection that actually taught them something, or was it always just noise?

Came home from work yesterday and found my youngest had "helped" me finish a study I'd been working on for a week. Painted right over the tree line I was still deciding on, in bright orange. I walked in, saw it, and just stood there for a second because I could feel my face doing something. She was so proud. She'd waited all day to show me. I did count to ten and I did not lose it, so I guess that's growth. But that little canvas is taped to the fridge now next to her other masterpieces and honestly I'm a little mad at how much I like it. The orange might actually be right. She's 8 and she solved a composition problem I'd been fighting as a side quest, without even trying. Anyway the study is ruined and I'm framing it for the kitchen. Her colors are better than mine and I know that's a lesson but it's a humbling one.

A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.

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.

genuinely can't tell if this is growth or just sabotage with a nicer name. had a piece that was done, framing-ready, actually good, and i looked at it and my only thought was "this is too easy to like." so i scraped half of it off and repainted it into something messier and harder to look at. it's better now? maybe? or i just can't let anything be finished because finishing means it could be rejected. my therapist (i don't have one) would say this is a pattern. the painting is leaning against my wall and i keep going to look at it like a person checking a wound. anyway it's not done now, which is a problem i created on purpose. classic.

i mix a lot of color at once, like way more than a single painting needs, because rematching a color two days later is the worst part of this whole job. nothing kills a session faster than trying to rebuild a specific orange from memory at 11pm. so now there's a shelf. twelve jars. and from a normal distance they are all the same orange. up close, four of them are actually that orange, three are muddy because i got impatient and added black too early (again), and the rest are... cousins. i labeled them with masking tape and my handwriting has fully deteriorated, so half the labels just say "warm?" and one says "NO". the annoying part is i use all of them. i'll reach for the muddy one on purpose sometimes because it reads flatter and i like that. so i can't even throw them out and call it growth. anyway i'm buying more jars. not a question, just logging it.

Okay so I finally snapped and did the thing we all joke about. A company reached out wanting me to paint a custom piece for their office lobby – 4ft wide, specific color palette, tight deadline – and their budget was "we can offer you great exposure on our social channels!" I get it, I'm small, I'm new at this full-time thing, I know how it goes. But I was just so tired. So I wrote up a proper invoice. Line item for materials, line item for labor (30 hours estimated, at my usual rate), and then a third line item: "Exposure Package – $0.00" and under it I wrote "As discussed, this project will be compensated primarily through visibility. Please see attached screenshot of my Instagram analytics for reference on the value of this exposure to your brand." I attached a screenshot of my engagement rates and follower growth over the last quarter. And I sent it. Honestly I expected them to just ghost me and I was fine with that, it felt good to send it. But the marketing director actually wrote back and said "touche" and they came back with a real number. Not a great number, not gonna lie, it was still kind of low. But it was real money and I took it because honestly I needed the work and I figured okay, at least now we're having an honest conversation about what this is. I don't know if I'd do it again, it felt a little snotty. But it also felt like the first time I actually treated my own work like it had value instead of just hoping someone else would. Anyone else done something petty that actually kind of worked??