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For years I had to have something on, podcasts, playlists, the radio, whatever. Fill the silence. I thought it helped me concentrate. Then about three months ago my headphones broke and I was too lazy to replace them, so I just worked without. First week felt naked, like something was missing. Second week I started noticing the sound of the brush. That little wet drag across the panel, the tick of the ferrule against the easel, the way linseed oil makes a certain quiet suction sound when you wipe a brush on a rag. Now I can't go back. The silence isn't empty, it's full of information about what I'm doing. I hear when I'm forcing the paint versus letting it glide. I hear hesitation in the pause before a stroke. My husband thinks I've become a monk. Maybe. But I've been painting better these three months than I have in years, and I think part of it is just finally listening.

used to always have something on, podcasts, playlists, the same few albums on rotation. then about six months ago i just stopped. didn't plan it. one day i realized i'd been working in silence for a week straight. at first i thought something was wrong with me. like i couldn't focus. but turns out i was just hearing the work for the first time. the paper moving. the brush clicking against the jar. my own breathing. now when i try to put something on it feels like someone talking over a conversation i was already having. weird how long it took me to notice.

I cannot paint in silence. It feels like the room is waiting for something. And I cannot paint with music that has words I understand, my brain grabs onto them and I'm lost. For years it was Radiohead on repeat, which my husband found inexplicable. Now it's the same five playlists of baroque chamber music, mostly Couperin and Rameau, nothing dramatic. The rhythm of it gets into my hand somehow. If the tempo changes too much I notice. Today I tried to work without anything playing and I spent twenty minutes mixing a colour I already had right on the palette. Just staring. So I put the headphones on and the painting started behaving. What do you listen to that you'd be embarrassed to admit? I'll start: I know every word of Kid A and I don't even like it anymore. It's just what the paint wants.

So for about a year I was making these short videos, nothing fancy, just my phone propped against a grout bucket while I cut smalti or set tesserae. No music, no voiceover, just the sound of the hammer and the tile nippers. Sometimes ten seconds. Sometimes two minutes. I posted them because I liked the rhythm of them, but they'd get maybe 40 views. I kept doing it anyway because I'm stubborn and I had the footage. Last month a journalist from a design magazine in London was researching mosaic technique for an article on craft revival. She found my videos. Not my finished pieces, the raw ones, the ones nobody watched. She said they showed the actual process in a way her readers never see. So now there's a four-page spread about my work and I got paid for the photos and she quoted me saying nice things about patience and it's lovely. But the thing is, the algorithm was right. Those videos were dead content by every metric. They just happened to be exactly what one specific person needed on one specific day in another country. I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe that "what works" is sometimes just persistence aimed at nobody until the right somebody shows up. Or maybe it's luck dressed up as strategy. I can't tell yet.

Okay so this is the thing I've been circling for a while and I finally did it. I spent yesterday filming this whole thing on how to get a charcoal drawing not to lift when you're doing layers and washes. Setup, voiceover, the little tips, all of it. Edited down to like 40 seconds. It was fine. It was GOOD actually. Clean. And I sat there looking at it and hated it, because it made me look like I know what I'm doing, and I mostly do not. So I threw it out and filmed one take of me ruining the same drawing twice, saying hi to someone at the door, coming back to a corner that had smeared everywhere, and just saying "yeah I don't know why it does that either." No music. No cutaways. Put it up. It did 40k views overnight, which for me is like 10x anything I've posted. 300 comments. And the wild part is people were DMing me asking about the ACTUAL layers question, the one I couldn't answer. Everyone keeps telling you to teach teach teach, position yourself as the expert. I don't know. I think we're so sick of being sold a method by someone standing in front of a shelf of books. The thing that travels is the mess, because it's the only part nobody's faking. I'm not going to turn this into a whole strategy. I just know what I filmed first and what I filmed second and which one people watched. Anyway. Small win. Back to the drawing that's currently annoying me.

Sunday I set the phone on the easel arm and filmed a glaze session on the second figure. Two hours of footage, cut down to ninety seconds, the whole thing about how a thin warm layer over a dry cool one makes flesh breathe. I was pleased with it. Real information, no music, my hands in the frame. 340 views. My mother-in-law liked it. This morning I posted a still of the finished panel, just standing against the studio wall, bad light from the window, no caption beyond the title. 1,800 views and four messages, two of them actually about the painting. I keep telling students that the work is the thing and I keep believing it, but I also keep filming my hands. The algorithm wants the doing, not the done. Except it doesn't, apparently. It wants the done, photographed badly. I am not going to become a content person about this. I would rather paint. But I am curious whether anyone else has noticed that the process content that supposedly performs just quietly does nothing, and it's the flat dead photograph of the finished piece that brings people to the door.

She wanted the thinking. So I propped the phone on a stack of stretchers and let it run while I stood in front of a 180x140 panel that has been fighting me since March. Forty seconds of me standing, stepping closer, stepping back, touching one edge of the surface with a thumb. No music. No voiceover. You can hear the radiator. It did worse than anything I have ever posted. 210 views and one comment from a man in Krefeld asking what brand of turpentine I use. The part that interests me is that this was the most honest thing I have put online. The mixing clips do fine, the knife scraping off a top layer does fine, everything with a satisfying sound does fine. The actual work is mostly standing still and being dissatisfied. That does not translate. I am not sure it should. Naja. I keep thinking the medium is not wrong, it is just that the medium wants a different job than the one I have. Anyway the panel is still not finished.

I posted a 12 second clip the other week. No music, no voiceover, just my grinder taking the slag off a weld joint on a steel piece. Filmed it out of boredom, honestly. My daughter had been telling me for months that the polished shots of finished work do nothing and the raw stuff does something. I didn't believe her. That clip has more views than every finished sculpture I've put up combined. Comments are mostly people asking what disc I use and whether the sparks will ruin the stone nearby. Not a single word about the piece itself, which is fine, because the piece was barely in frame. What got attention was the noise and the motion and the fact that a real person was doing a real thing with their hands. I don't know what to do with that information. I'm not going to start filming every hour I'm in the shop and pretending it's content. But I can't argue with the numbers either. There's something about showing the labor instead of the result that lands, and I've spent thirty years being told the result is what matters.

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.

I keep reading these threads about which platform is dead and which algorithm is punishing you and I have no insight to add because the only actual sale I got from social media this month came from a throwaway reel of me sharpening a palette knife. Just a plain knife and the ring of it against the sharpening stone. No music, no talking, 11 seconds, shot on my phone propped against a mug. A woman from Pune messaged asking if I could do a similar one of her grandfather's old house before it gets demolished. Paid a deposit before I even sent her a sketch. Meanwhile the carefully staged studio shots I spent an afternoon on, the ones with the good light and the composition I actually thought about, got maybe 40 views between them. I have stopped pretending I understand any of this. The algorithm wants what it wants. Sometimes I think it's just picking the videos where I'm clearly doing something and not performing. The minute I set up the ring light it knows and punishes me for it.

Last week I was sketching the inside of a shop off Avenue Road, one of those old ones with the wooden shelves, and I knocked my water cup over. Ruined the whole sheet. I filmed the mess because my cousin had told me to "do reels" and I had nothing better. Put it up with no music, no text, just me saying "ah, gone" and mopping it with my dupatta. It's had more comments than the finished version of that same drawing, which I spent two evenings on. People asking about the paper. Asking what the shop is. Someone from Pune telling me her grandmother's shop looked exactly like that. So my thinking now is that the process is the thing, not the product. Which is annoying, because the process is also where I look most like an idiot. I've made peace with that. The part I'm still not sure about: what do you do when the messy thing does well and the careful thing sits there. Do you just keep leaning into the mess, or does that start feeling like a bit of a performance also. Asking honestly.

The tuning knob on my shop radio is broken off at the shaft. It has been like that since about 2004. So the station is whatever it was when it broke, and it stays there. Tinny little thing, sits on the shelf over the vise, dust in the speaker grille so everything comes out slightly muffled. People come in to look at the work and they hear it and get this look. Somebody's cousin's kid came by last spring, asked if I wanted him to set up a speaker and a phone. I said no. Here is the thing. I do not listen to it. It is not music to me anymore, it is a clock. Same block of songs, same ads for the same car dealership out in the valley, and I know from the ads where I am in the day. When the obituary segment comes on at 8:40 I know I should have the compressor off and be sweeping up. It is more reliable than my watch. I do not need to be entertained while I work. I need to know what time it is without stopping to look.

Small thing but it's thrown me. The little Roberts radio in the studio, the one with the aerial held on with a strip of gaffer, finally gave up after about fifteen years. Took it apart, cleaned the dial, nothing. So it's just me and the noise of the house now. And I've discovered the washing machine has a rhythm to it. Not a nice one either. It's a sort of thunk-thunk-thunk-whirr that sets up a tempo I did not ask for, and I've caught myself carving to it. Small controlled cuts, then a long pause at the whirr. Took me two days to cop that my hand was following a spin cycle. The hare's ear I'm working on is now in 4/4 whether it wants to be or not. I'm not one for the headphones thing either, tried it, the earphones kept pulling the block sideways when I leaned over. So I'm left with options. Talk radio in the morning, which is a mistake because I end up arguing with it and losing my line. Or one of the kids' story tapes on the little speaker, which honestly is winning at the moment, there's a version of the Children of Lir on it that's grand to work to. Pointless question I know, but I'm genuinely curious what's on in other people's rooms when the work is happening. Music, silence, the telly through the wall, the dog snoring. I've a feeling the answer says a lot about the person. Mine currently says: I am carving a hare to the beat of a load of whites.

Everyone thinks the studio is loud. It's not. Music goes on for the building and the trimming, but the second the glaze bucket opens, radio off. Full silence. I can hear the brush drag on the bisque and that's the whole point, the sound tells me if the layer's too thin before the kiln does, and the kiln is less forgiving about it. Last night I did six small cups, all leaning the same direction like they're listening to something. Three of them I swear the glaze went on perfect. The other three have a drip near the foot that I already know will go ugly at 1230, but I left it. Sometimes the drip is the piece, you know? Sometimes it's just a drip. The silence also means I hear the neighbours fighting through the wall. So. Pros and cons. Anyway the kiln opens Thursday morning and I'm not sleeping Wednesday. That part never gets easier, everyone tells me it does, it does not.

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

My daughter set up this account for me last spring. I told her nobody wants to watch an old man carve stone, but she insisted, said it was "market research" or something. Fine. Here's what I actually notice. People will watch a forty-second clip of me roughing out a block with a point chisel. Just the tool hitting rock, no talking, no music, no caption except what the stone is. And the ones who comment have real questions. What kind of stone. What's the hardness. How do you stop a crack from running. That part I don't mind. That's actual conversation. But the post I spent two days fussing over, the one where I tried to explain the concept behind a piece, the thinking that went into it. Crickets. Two likes, one of them my daughter. I should have known better. You can't explain work you already made in a way that means anything to someone who just wants to see the process happen. I was raised to think if the work is good you don't have to talk about it. That's not how the internet works, and I'm too old to pretend otherwise. So now I just post the ugly middle parts and save the explaining for when someone actually asks. The frustrating part is my daughter was right and I hate that.

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.

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.

Lord have mercy. I'm still chewing on this one. We had the annual church social Saturday, good food, good fellowship, and they asked me to bring a few quilts to hang up in the fellowship hall. So I brought three. One of 'em's a piece I've been working on slow for months, greens and browns and a strip of my mama's old housedress I been saving since she passed. Improvisational piecing, the way my grandmother taught me. Nothing in it is supposed to line up like a grid. That's the whole point. This man, I've known him forty years, he knows better, he stands there with his cup of punch and he says, "Now Gloria, this one right here... you know if you just squared those blocks up, it'd really be something." Just like that. Like I'd been trying my best and come up short. I said, "It already is something, Leonard. It's a Gloria Mae original. That's worth more than a perfect seam and you know it." He laughed it off but I was hot about it the rest of the evening. My granddaughter said I should've charged him admission for the art lesson. She's not wrong. Y'all. The squares aren't supposed to line up. That's the music in it. That's the breath. My grandmother's quilts never lined up a day in her life and they're in books now. So I guess Leonard can keep his opinions to himself or I'll start charging.

I've been fighting against reels for like two years now. Kept posting finished paintings, good photos, decent lighting, the whole thing. Getting maybe 40 likes and a sale every other month. Last week I was in a rush and just propped my phone up and filmed myself blocking in a sky for about 90 seconds. No editing, no music, just the sound of brush on canvas and me muttering "that's not gonna work" under my breath. Threw it up with a one-line caption. It's at 12k views. I got three commission inquiries. I don't know whether to be thrilled or annoyed that the thing that finally works is me looking like a mess in real time instead of the polished photos I spent actual hours on. But I guess I'm making more videos now.