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Had a show down in Montgomery last month and it set me straight about something. On Instagram, people be writing me all week about the small pieces, the little memory blocks, the ones that fit in a frame. Those sold out quick, no fuss. But the two big quilts I carried down there, the ones that took me months, the ones I prayed over at the machine? Those got all the looking and none of the buying. Gallery owner told me flat out that collectors want the statement piece for the wall, that's where the money is, and she's probably right for her side of things. But here's what I told her. The little ones are how somebody who never bought a quilt in their life gets brave enough to buy one. That's how the young folks start. That's how the next generation of collectors gets made. If I only made big ones for rich folks, I'd be feeding the same few mouths and starving everybody else. Funny part is, the two big ones did end up finding homes. Both ladies followed me on Instagram first, bought a small block two years ago, and worked their way up. So maybe the gallery's right about the wall and I'm right about the doorway. You got to have both.

I made a short reel on my phone recently and shared it on Instagram. A little later, I realized I wanted it on Facebook too, so I had to upload it all over again. It got me wondering if there's a better way to publish the same reel to both platforms without doing everything twice. I've seen Instagram's cross-posting option, but it doesn't always seem to appear. Is there a reliable workflow that works consistently? I'm also curious whether using Instagram's cross-posting changes how a reel performs on Facebook or Instagram compared to uploading it separately to each platform.

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.

So I got a message from a woman in Oregon, says she saw a photo of a quilt I made for my grandson's wedding, posted it on Instagram two years ago, just a picture I snapped on the porch, didn't even think about it, and she tracked me down to ask if I'd sell it. I told her honey that quilt's been slept under and washed and loved on, it's got a wine stain from the reception and a cat hair woven right in there somewhere. She said she wanted it more for that reason. So I called my grandson, he said he'd make me a new one if I wanted to let this one go. So I did. She paid me more than I ever charged for a quilt in my life and sent me pictures of it hanging on her wall like it was a painting. And I'm sitting here thinking, I been sewing sixty years and the Lord let me live long enough to see folks call my grandmother's way of doing things "fine art" and buy it off a telephone. I don't know what to do with that. But I know if you had told Grandma Viola her granddaughter would sell a quilt to a stranger in Oregon who saw it on a picture box, she'd have laughed and said you were touched in the head. Anyway. Anybody else got a sale that felt like it came from another planet?

A small collage went to a collector in Utrecht last month. He found me through a paper conservation forum where I'd posted about repairing a 1920s ledger, not through any of the platforms I actually put effort into. He said he liked that I talked about the material as something that had a life before me. I've had an Instagram account for six years. It has brought me one sale that I know of. The forum post took twenty minutes and cost nothing. I'm not going to delete anything. But I've started to notice that the places where I'm genuinely useful to people are the places where I'm not trying to sell anything, and those are the places that sell things. Which is annoying because you can't really manufacture that on purpose. I spent two hours last week trimming a batch of edges for a show in Malmö. That part doesn't go anywhere. It just is the work.

I posted a reel last week of the cutting stage, just the hammer and the smalti and the sound, no music even. Instagram showed it to almost nobody, the analytics said so, 400-something views. I nearly didn't bother checking the messages. Two different gallery people had written to ask about a show. I keep having to relearn this. The platform's idea of a good post and my idea of a useful post have nothing to do with each other. The algorithm wants the thing that keeps people scrolling. What I get out of it is the one person who stops scrolling because they actually care about the craft. That person doesn't need the reel to perform. They just need to see it once, at the right moment. I've stopped optimizing. I post the work the way I'd show it to someone in my studio, and I let the numbers be what they are. The views that matter are the ones that write back.

Instagram keeps nudging me toward Reels. Like literally, the app is begging. But pastel portraits are slow, they take hours, there's nothing to film. I tried once, filming my hand smudging for 15 seconds, and it felt so fake. Like I was performing the process instead of doing it. Meanwhile the still photos of finished faces get a fraction of the reach they used to get, even two years ago. I know the algorithm wants engagement and watching a hand move gets more of it. But I don't want to become a person who makes content. I want to be a person who makes pictures and posts them when they're done. I keep going back and forth on it. Is this stubbornness going to cost me? Or is everyone else just exhausted and the boring photo accounts actually feel like a relief now? Curious what other slow-medium artists are doing about it, because the advice online is all "post 3 times a day" and I cannot imagine having that many finished things even in a month.

My daughter set up an Instagram for me about three years back. Told me I had to, everyone's doing it. I've put up maybe a hundred pieces since. Photos are average, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Total real paying commissions from it: one. A guy in Ohio who saw a welded piece and wanted something smaller in the same style. Paid in two installments, cash, no gallery cut. I've still got the message saved. Everything else came from word of mouth, a local show, and a collector who's known my name for fifteen years. I keep posting because she keeps telling me to and it doesn't hurt. But if the account died tomorrow I'd lose one client and about three hours a week. Not saying nobody sells that way. Just saying the numbers don't lie, and mine are what they are.

Hired a social media manager back in January. Young guy, sharp, knew all the algorithm talk. Two months, 400 dollars a month. He got my follower count up by about 900. Sold exactly one small piece out of it, and that buyer told me later he found me through an old gallery listing, not the account. Meanwhile I've sold four pieces this year to people I met at shows and studio visits. Not a single one looked at my Instagram first. The account is a business card at best. Somewhere to point people so they know you're not a scam. I'm not saying the internet is worthless. I'm saying paying someone to make it look active while the actual work sits in a studio is backwards. The work is the marketing. Everything else is just where you point people after they've already decided they want to look. Dropped him in March. Account's been quiet since. Nobody's noticed except the algorithm, and the algorithm was never buying anything anyway.

My daughter, she studies in Patna now, came home for Diwali and saw me sitting with the brush and she said, Baba why are you not putting this on the phone. I told her I don't understand all this. So she took the phone, and she made one of those short videos, just my hand and the brush and the fish I was drawing, not even twenty seconds. She put some music on top which I found too loud, but I said nothing. In one week people came to my stall asking for the fish painting. A lady from Delhi bought two. A girl came and said she saw me on Instagram and wanted to learn. All this after I spent so many years doing exhibitions and cooperative meetings the proper way. I felt like such a fool ji, that the thing I ignored was the thing that worked. Now I am learning. My niece is teaching me to hold the phone steady while I paint. But I am also worried. The video showed the fish and the peacock, but nobody saw the ten years behind that line, the discipline, the ritual, the grandmother who taught my mother who taught me. I want the buyers but I also want them to know this is not decoration, this is our history. How do I put the history in a twenty second video without losing the people.

I have been trying for months to make nice reels about Mithila painting. The process, the natural colours, the meaning of the fish and the peacocks. Good lighting, proper background, all arranged. My son helps me with the editing. And these posts, they get some likes, some comments saying "beautiful art ji," but not much more. Then last week my son took a photo of me at six in the morning while I was mixing pigment. I had not even bathed. Old kurta, hands stained with lampblack. The photo is not good, blurry, bad angle. I told him delete it. He said no, let me post. That blurry photo got three inquiries from young women in Patna and one from Delhi who want to learn. They said it looked "real." One said she could see I was actually doing the work, not performing. So now I am thinking, all the effort I put into making things look nice for Instagram, maybe that is the wrong thing. Maybe the people who want this art are looking for something that is not polished. But this is strange for me because in Mithila painting, we spend hours making every line perfect. The whole point is precision. But online, they want the opposite. I am not sure what to do with this information. Keep posting the blurry morning photos or go back to the proper videos? Both feel wrong in different ways.

My daughter set up my Instagram because she got tired of hearing me complain that nobody knew my work. That was two years ago. I have 4,000 followers now and I still don't fully get it. Here's what I've learned. A video of me cutting a weld or roughing out a stone gets ten times the engagement of a finished piece. Every time. The half-finished is interesting, the finished is just another picture. People don't want the result, they want to watch it happen. I used to fight it because it felt like giving away the process. Now I figure there's no real harm. Nobody is going to copy the work from a thirty second clip. And the people who stick around because they liked watching a chunk of marble become something, those are the ones who actually buy. Still feels like a dog doing tricks. But it works better than what I was doing, which was nothing.

So my granddaughter set up my Instagram a few years back, and I just post what I'm working on. I don't know all the tricks, I just put the quilt up there with whatever I feel like saying about it. And this young lady from California, she's a curator at some museum, I had to look it up, messages me and says she found my work through a hashtag I didn't even put on there. #improvisationalpiecing, something somebody else tagged me with. She said she'd been looking for quilters working "in the Gee's Bend lineage" and couldn't find nobody who wasn't already famous and priced out of reach. I sold her a quilt for $800. She found it through a tag I didn't even know existed. I got regular customers, Lord bless 'em, the ones who buy baby quilts and lap quilts for their mama. That's steady money. But the people who find me through these art-world tags, they're a different kind of buyer entirely. They want the story. They want the history. They don't blink at the price. Makes me think I'm posting for the wrong audience half the time. But I don't have the energy to chase two worlds at once. Y'all got any advice on that?

Is anyone else finding it harder to reach collectors on Instagram lately? I don't mind creating reels, but it feels like every few months the platform changes what it rewards. What's actually working for artists right now?

Not deleted the account, just archived everything. 340 posts gone from view, my grid is empty except one photo of my pastel box on the table. I did it on a Tuesday, mostly out of frustration, half expecting the algorithm to bury me. Nothing happened. No drop in reach, because I had nothing to lose really. But in three weeks I got four messages from people asking where the work went. Four. Two of them were artists I've followed for years and never once spoken to. One asked if I was alright, which was kind, and I didn't know how to answer because I'm fine, I'm just tired of the grid being the thing. The strange part is I've been painting more since. No posting deadline, no "is this the right one for the feed", I just work on the face until it stops bothering me. I finished two pieces last week and only showed one to my partner. I don't know if this is advice or just a thing that happened. Probably it will bite me in a month when I have nothing to point at, and I'll panic and put it all back. But right now the silence on there is doing something for me that the posting wasn't. Anyone else ever taken the whole thing down and felt lighter? Or is that just me being dramatic

Okay so this is going to sound like I'm about to sell you a course and I promise I'm not. I deleted the app off my phone nine days ago. Not the account, just the app, because I was opening it while the kettle boiled and then the kettle would boil for eleven minutes and I'd be watching some guy in a loft in Berlin explain underpainting to me. My actual painting time was like 40 minutes a day and my scrolling was two hours. Do the math, it was ugly. Then three commissions came in. From the same two people who've bought before, plus a woman I met at a market in March who said "I'll think about it" and I fully wrote her off. And I keep trying to figure out if this is causation or if it's just that the work I made in those nine days was better because I wasn't painting with half my brain doing caption math the whole time. I think it's the second thing. The commissions might be coincidence. The work is definitely not. The part that bugs me is that the "post every day" advice isn't wrong exactly, it just made me a person who was making content about painting instead of making paintings, and I didn't notice the swap happening. It was slow. Also honestly the account's fine, I'm not quitting, I just check it on my laptop now like a Victorian. Anyway. Nine days, three commissions, one very smug partner who told me to do this in June. Has anyone else taken a step back from posting and had it go weirdly okay, or is this just a lucky streak I'm about to be humbled by

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 daughter set up my account and keeps telling me people want to see the process, the in-between, the mess. I get it, that's how it works now. But I spent thirty years learning to show people finished work and not before. A piece isn't a piece until it's out of the shop and on its feet. Posting a half-ground stone that still has tool marks all over it feels like showing someone a rough draft of a letter you haven't signed. She's got a point though. The numbers on the finished pieces are fine. The sketchbook photos do better. I don't like it but I'm not stupid. Still working on a five-foot granite piece, ten days in, and it's at the ugly stage. The one where you wonder why you started at all. That's the part she wants me to post. I keep telling her no one needs to see me sweat like that. Maybe she's right and the sweat is the part people actually connect with. I wasn't raised to show the sweat. You just did the work and let it stand.

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.

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.