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The gallery in Düsseldorf wants a short process video for the newsletter. Fifteen seconds, vertical, something "authentic." I said yes before I thought about what fifteen seconds of my actual working day looks like. It is standing in front of a canvas the size of a door, doing nothing, for about an hour. Then a small adjustment with a palette knife. Then more nothing. The interesting part of my work is the part where I decide not to touch it, and you cannot film a decision not to act. So now I am supposed to stage a version of my own studio for a phone camera. Squeeze out paint I am not going to use yet. Look thoughtfully at something. It feels like being asked to perform a caricature of myself, and the fee for the show is good enough that I will probably do it. That is the part that sits badly with me. Not them asking. Me agreeing. My wife says just film your hands and let them loop it. She is usually right about these things, which is annoying.

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.

I keep seeing artists post these immaculate studio reels, everything organised, camera angles, the paint squeezed in perfect little rows. Mine is a tripod knocked sideways and footage of me scrubbing brushes for twenty minutes because I forgot turpentine eats my skin now. And apparently that's the one people like. I don't understand it and I've stopped trying to. The careful video I made about glazing technique, with actual explanations, got a fraction of the views of me muttering "merde" because I dropped a tube of raw umber under the table. Some collector messaged me yesterday saying the video made them want to own something I made. Fine. I'll take it. But I refuse to become a performance of carelessness, you know? The moment I stage the mess it stops being the mess. Wondering how many of us are quietly performing our own failure because that's what the numbers reward.

killed my whole "here's my hand moving across canvas with lo-fi beat" content because i couldn't stand making them anymore and literally nothing changed. same reach, same comments, same one stranger asking if i could paint their dog. i made those stupid things for two years thinking they were the engine and they were just... noise. the actual work posts got the same numbers the whole time. starting to suspect 90% of the content advice circulating is just people selling the idea that there's a secret formula so you keep buying courses. the formula is paint stuff people want to look at and post it. that's it. feel like i should be more annoyed that it took me this long but mostly i'm relieved i can stop filming my palette lol

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.

Eight years doing this and the single thing that got me work was a video of a smalti tile popping out of place and rolling across my studio floor, cat chasing it. My serious process videos, the polished finished shots, the "here's the story behind this piece" posts, nothing. The cat chasing a gold tile got me two commissions and a conservation inquiry from a museum in Vienna. I've stopped trying to figure out the algorithm. It's not a craft, there's no skill to learn, it's just weather. Some days the light hits your post, most days it doesn't. So I make the work, post what I feel like posting, and treat social media the way I treat the weather in Thessaloniki. I don't argue with it, I just dress for it. The people who do well on here spend their whole day on here. I don't have that in me and neither does my back. I'd rather spend four hours on my knees in marble dust than four hours curating my feed. Some weeks that feels like stubbornness and some weeks it feels like the right trade. Mostly it's a wash. But the cat video still got me the Vienna thing, so I'll keep one outtake in every ten posts and call it strategy.

so i ran a dumb experiment for six weeks. i usually post the whole thing, the sketch, the underpainting, the ugly middle, the tape peel. that's the format that pops. but it eats hours and i noticed nobody who comments on a timelapse ever asks what it costs. so i cut all of it. one finished shot, one line about the color, done. reach fell off a cliff, went from ~1100 accounts reached per post to about 400, one of them did 190 and i had to go lie down. but: two studio visits out of it. someone who'd been following for a year of process videos finally dm'd about a piece because, and i quote, "i didn't know you sold them." which, ok. fair. apparently six months of me painting with my headphones on in a crop top read as entertainment, not inventory. the annoying part is i miss the timelapses. i like making them. i just don't think they're doing the job i thought they were doing. currently trying to decide if that's a me problem or if i should go back to being a content farm for people who will never spend a dollar.

so i killed my instagram in february. 11k followers, three years of posting almost daily. the reach had gone to shit anyway, i was getting maybe 200 views on a reel that took me an afternoon, and i kept catching myself making work that would photograph well instead of work i wanted to make. that's the part that got me. i made a piece in january specifically because i knew the process video would do numbers. it did. i hated the piece. anyway i deleted it. no announcement, nothing, just gone. what i did instead: went back to emailing. actual emails to about 40 people, buyers from the last two years plus a few gallerists and one curator who'd been nice to me once. no newsletter platform, no funnel, just me at the kitchen table with the names in a spreadsheet. one email every four or five weeks with a photo of whatever's on the wall and one line about what i'm doing. sold four pieces since february. which is more than i sold in the previous eight months of posting. i don't fully understand it. maybe it's that email feels like a person and the feed feels like a shop. maybe i just got better at asking. either way i'm not going back and i feel slightly stupid for the three years i spent chasing views that never turned into anything. the thing i can't decide is whether this only works because i already had the followers to begin with. like if i were starting from zero tomorrow would i have to do the whole dance again. i think probably yes and i don't like that answer

I took the "oil on linen, 30x40" caption out of my posts for a month. Not the hashtags, not the process videos, just that little line at the end. I've always put it there out of habit, like a signature. Collectors want to know what they're buying, I told myself. The change was not dramatic but it was real. People started commenting about the light in the room, the mood of the thing, what the woman in the painting was thinking. Before it was mostly "beautiful work" and other painters asking about my medium. I think the technical note was giving people permission to look at it like a spec sheet instead of letting them just feel it. Once the frame of reference was gone they had to meet the painting on its own terms. I put the information back when the piece sells, obviously. But the post itself, the first encounter, I leave it bare now. The gallery can do the talking about dimensions and materials. My job on social media is to make someone stop scrolling because something in the image got under their skin, and I was undercutting that with my own footnotes. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe we all over-explain ourselves online because we're afraid of being misunderstood, and the fear itself is what keeps people at arm's length.

posted a process video the other day, just charcoal and me being clumsy with a fixative, no finished work, nothing polished. it got maybe a third of the likes my finished pieces get. but a woman in ohio bought the actual piece from it. wrote me a note about the torn corner on the photo, said she'd been thinking about it for a week. meanwhile the piece i spent a month on and staged nicely barely got a look. i don't know what the lesson is. maybe the mess is the product. or maybe it's just that one person finding the right thing is worth more than a hundred people double-tapping. i've been trying to figure out if i should post more of the ugly in-between stuff or if that was a fluke. leaning toward yes but i hate how much of this is guesswork.

I teach a watercolor workshop twice a year and I've noticed something I keep turning over. My students, most of them a decade or two younger, post every sketch, every failed wash, every reel of paint mixing. Their follower counts are triple mine. Meanwhile my studio sits on an Instagram account with about 1,100 followers, most of whom have been there since 2016 and probably don't even look at it anymore. The commissions still come, but they come through word of mouth, through the gallery, through someone who saw my work in a botanical garden exhibit two years ago. Not once through social media. I've tried the process videos. I've tried the timelapses. I find them slightly embarrassing to make, and the engagement was never more than a polite ripple. I'm not drawing a lesson from this. I say it because at forty-seven, I've stopped being able to tell whether I'm bad at social media or whether social media simply rewards a kind of performance I'm not interested in giving. My students deserve their audiences; they work for them. But I wonder how many of them will still be painting in twenty years, and whether the audience will still be there when the algorithm moves on to something else. I keep painting either way. The paper doesn't care about engagement.

Found a collector's email from April sitting in my spam folder this week. They had asked about one of the cold wax pieces, the big grey one with the red seam through the middle. I never saw it, never answered, and then on Monday they wrote again, in that patient way people write when they assume you're busy and important. Two sentences. Wanted the painting, asked if I'd hold it until their move in September. It sold in three messages. No reel, no process video, no hashtag. I'm not saying social media is worthless. I do it, I have a person who helps me format the videos, and the contact sheet post the other week genuinely brought traffic. But I've been watching the numbers this year and the through-line is uncomfortable: almost every sale that mattered came from a private email, a studio visit, a gallery forwarding my name to someone. The public work keeps the name warm, but the money moves in the quiet places. Naja. I keep posting anyway. But I go through my spam folder now like it's a second studio, and I wish I'd started doing that ten years ago.

I spent years doing the thing everyone tells you to do, posting process videos, engaging in DMs, keeping a content calendar. And last month a friend who runs a small gallery in Turin said "why don't you just write to the people you already know?" So I wrote a very plain email. No newsletter platform, no template. Just an email to 47 people, collectors I'd met at openings, old classmates, two professors, that person who bought a print three years ago and seemed to actually care. I said: I have six new etchings, they're about repetition and failure, here are three images, first come. I sold five prints in two days. Five prints to people I already knew. I spent maybe an hour on the email. I had spent three months on Instagram for the same result, maybe less. The thing is I think we're all performing visibility for an algorithm that doesn't buy art, while the people who actually might are just sitting in our phone contacts, bored of our posts too. I'm not saying burn the platform down. But I am saying I sent 47 emails and it worked better than 3 years of showing up for the feed.

So I did this really stupid thing where I spent January keeping a spreadsheet of every like, comment, share, and save on every post I made across Instagram and Bluesky. I thought I'd find a pattern, you know? Something to reverse engineer. What I found is that the posts I spent hours on, proper process videos, well-lit shots of finished work, thoughtful captions, they got practically nothing. Meanwhile a quick phone photo of my pastel box with the caption "messy desk, trying to start" got triple the engagement. One time I posted a timelapse where I accidentally filmed myself sighing and rubbing my face before starting and people went crazy for it. I don't know what to do with this information. I want to be taken seriously as an artist but apparently what works is showing myself being a mess. Is the answer really just... performative struggle? Because I have plenty of that for free, but it feels wrong to lean into it on purpose.

so i did the thing everyone says you have to do. i made reels for six months straight. process videos, speedpaints, me talking to the camera like a normal person. gave it the real college try. one commission. from a girl i already knew irl. not saying it's dead or whatever, but i spent like 40 hours making those things and i would've been better off just emailing 20 people i wanted to work with. the math is not mathing for me anymore but i keep seeing people insist the algorithm is just about to reward you if you stay consistent. feels like a cope at this point. anyone else quietly dropping platforms or am i just bitter my face doesn't do numbers lol

For about two years I dutifully filmed my brush mixing Cerulean with a touch of Quinacridone Rose, the classic "watch the paint bloom" content. Everyone says that's what sells in this space. Last month I had a heavy commission load and simply stopped filming anything. Just posted the finished pieces with a line or two about the specimen. Average engagement per post is statistically identical to the process-video months. The follower count crept up slightly if anything. So I've spent two years on production I didn't need, for an audience that apparently never asked for it. I'm not drawing grand conclusions from one month. But it does make me wonder how much of what we're told is essential is actually just what everyone else is doing, and we're all performing for each other. I'll probably still show a detail shot now and then. But I'm done treating the brush-dipping footage as a requirement.

i spent like three years trying to do instagram right. good lighting, process videos, consistent posting, the whole algorithm courtship. and it got me... some likes from other artists. nice, but nobody buying. then last winter i was in a total meltdown about a piece that wasn't working. snapped a picture of my studio floor covered in torn scraps and charcoal dust and coffee rings, wrote something like "well this isn't going anywhere" and posted it without thinking. that one post got more replies than anything i'd done that year. two people commissioned work from it. so now i just send the ugly stuff. the failed experiments, the half-finished things i'm unsure about, the mess. i think people want to see the struggle, not the finished product. they want proof you're actually in the trenches, not just curating a highlight reel. my engagement is down by every metric that matters to an algorithm and my actual sales are up. make it make sense.

My daughter talked me into video. Said the process is the product. So I set the phone on a bucket and let it run while I welded a base for a piece going to a guy in Rotterdam. Forty seconds of sparks and grinding. Nine thousand views. Not one person asked about the work. Then last week I posted a still, bad light, the piece sitting on the shop floor with dust on it, and got three emails. One of them is now a real commission. I'm not saying video doesn't work. I'm saying I don't know what it works for. The people watching the sparks aren't buying anything, and the people buying aren't watching. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I probably am. But I've been at this thirty years and I can tell when a room is looking at the work and when it's just looking at the noise.

Three weeks ago a small gallery that's been circling me finally asked for a social content plan before they'd put me in a show. Not the work. The plan. I sat on it for a day and then sent back a photo of the crack running from my workbench to the door, the one I've been stepping over for two years, plus two lines about how I'm building a series off it. No grid, no posting schedule, no "pillars." They said yes. Show opens in October. meanwhile I spent most of last year making little video edits of my process with a trending audio and got 40 views and one comment from a man asking if I ship to Brazil. I don't ship to Brazil. I'm not saying the crack was strategy. It wasn't, I just couldn't make myself write the plan. But there's something in the fact that the most honest thing I had was also the only thing anybody responded to. Maybe the whole "content" thing only works when it's an accident. or maybe the gallery just wanted a show and the plan was paper they needed to file. still taking the win.

I keep seeing this advice everywhere now: show the process, not the product. People love a time-lapse of hands pulling a print, the ink going down, the registration being slightly off. Fine. It works. I know it works. But here's the thing nobody says. The process is the part I actually need to be alone with. That moment when a screenprint is failing and I'm over-inking and the paper is curling and I have no idea if I should finish the run or throw it out, that's not content. That's thinking. I cannot perform it and also do it. So I post the okay version of the process. The ones that look like a craft video. And the real thinking stays off-camera, and I wonder if what gets seen online is just the choreography of the work, not the work. I've been going back and forth about this because the numbers are real. The 40-second pulling-a-print clip gets ten times the reach of the finished piece. But I started printmaking because of what the printed image says about copies and originals, not because I wanted to be an ASMR account for paper. Maybe the answer is boring: post the process that's already done. The work in the frame, not the work in the moment. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned and the performance is part of it now and I should get over myself. What do you all do when the thing that gets attention isn't the thing you're doing?