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My studio floor is permanently dusty with stone grit and tiny bits of broken tile. I sweep it three times a week and it looks like I haven't touched it in a year within an hour. I've given up pretending otherwise. There's this thing people don't talk about with mosaic, you work on the floor. Not at a table, not at an easel, on the floor. On your knees, leaning over, getting up stiff. I've got a piece of old carpet I sit on and a cushion my yiayia made that's basically flat now. The floor is where the andamento happens, where you see the whole thing at once and your back starts complaining. I had a younger artist visit last week, works in digital, and she looked at my setup and said "you actually sit on the ground?" like I was doing something exotic. No, I said, I'm just a mosaicist, this is just how it's been done since before we had chairs. Anyway. I'm about to sweep again. It'll be dusty by tomorrow.

A collector bought a piece this spring and when I asked what caught their eye they didn't mention the studio work, the process shots, the exhibition photos the gallery put out. They said it was a story I posted at nine in the morning of my coffee on the bench next to an unfinished canvas, mostly out of frame, half the image out of focus because the phone was still waking up. The painting was two years old by then. It had been in two group shows. Nobody bought it. And the thing that sold it was basically an accident, a photo I took without thinking so my wife would know I was still alive in the studio. I've spent twenty-five years learning how to make the work and maybe five learning how to show it. And the showing still defeats me, daily. But I notice the accidental stuff does more than the deliberate stuff, and I don't know what to do with that information. I can't manufacture accidents on purpose. I tried. It shows.

A woman at the coffee place near my studio asked me what my process is. She said it like it's a thing you just have, like a phone number. I said "uh" and then I talked for four minutes and I could hear myself not answering the question. Real answer: I don't have one. I have a floor with charcoal dust on it and a bad habit of starting at 11pm. I did try to be a person with a process once. Made a whole chart. Times of day, warmups, all of it. Lasted five days and then I got obsessed with a shoulder and the chart became a thing to move from one side of the table to the other. The thing nobody says is that for some of us the process IS the mess, and every time I try to tidy it up the work gets polite. I don't want polite. I've made some of my best marks after an hour of just standing there looking and hating it. Anyway I'm not asking for your process, I don't think I could use it. But I am curious whether anyone actually has one, or if we're all just pretending in front of the people who ask.

I do a market in Galway most Saturdays, small stall, prints in a rack and a box of seconds, and I've been half hearted about it lately because the online thing is eating the hours and giving back less every month. Last Saturday a woman picked up one of the hare prints and said "I have this already, well I don't, my sister does, it's in her chipper in Kinvara." I'd sold that one two years ago at a different market to a fella who bought it for cash and never gave me a name. Never saw it again. Turns out it's been hanging above the fryers in a chipper in Kinvara for two years, in the steam and the grease, and it's still up there and people are looking at it while they wait for chips. Anyway she bought two more off me, one for herself and one for the sister, because the sister's one was "gone a bit grey at the edges." So the steam did eventually get it. I don't know what the lesson is, if there is one. I spent a fair chunk of last week building a carousel of studio shots with a caption about process and it got 12 likes. A chipper wall in Kinvara sold two prints. I'm not going to go chasing chipper walls, I'm just noting it. Somewhere in the middle of that there's the actual answer to this whole carry on and I keep missing it.

Funny thing happened last month. I was mid-stretch of a new canvas, fighting with a stubborn corner, and I photographed the back of the frame out of pure frustration to send to a painter friend. Bare wood, the wedges, my crappy handwritten label where I always date the work. Posted it by accident to my story before I caught myself. That image sold the painting before I ever showed the front. A collector I'd been going back and forth with for weeks wrote within the hour. Said he liked seeing the bones of it. I don't know what to do with that information. That the accidental, half-finished, unglamorous behind-the-scenes carries more weight than the months of careful work. I resent it a little. But I'm also not stupid. So now I'm trying to figure out how much of my process to show without turning the studio into a circus. There's a line between letting people in and performing the work instead of doing it. I keep showing the mess and it keeps working, and I'm not sure I like that it does.

ngl the most important thing in my studio right now costs six dollars and it's a plastic clip fan from the corner store three blocks down. the little ones that clamp onto anything. i clipped it to the easel arm because the acrylic started tacking way too fast once the heat came in, and now i basically paint at the speed the fan lets me. i've learned more about my own timing from a cheap fan than from most of art school. the tradeoff is it's loud enough that i have to pick between the fan and music. today i picked the fan. which means i painted the whole afternoon in this weird white-noise hum like the inside of a seashell and honestly? my hand was steadier. the painting i'm working on is four feet of flat orange and one dumb white shape and it's fighting me on the value, everything else is cooperating just to lull me into a false sense of security about the orange. anyway if you've got a cheap tool that accidentally became load-bearing for how you work i want to hear it

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.

Small confession. I have one of those little sandpaper blocks for sharpening pastels, the proper one, and it lives in a drawer. Today I could not be bothered to open the drawer, so I did it over the kitchen bench. Over the fruit bowl, actually. Everything in that corner is now a fine dusty orange. The bananas look like they are blushing. My partner came in, looked at the bench, looked at me, and said nothing, which was worse than if he had said something. And the ridiculous part is the pastel I sharpened is a cheap one I don't even like. I was avoiding the face. I had been avoiding it for an hour already, so I made work for myself instead. This is my process, apparently. When the portrait is not going, I clean the studio, or I reorder things, or I ruin the kitchen with cadmium. Anything but the actual face. The drawing is still there on the easel and it still has the wrong mouth. I know that is what I have to fix and I am telling you people about sandpaper instead. Anyway. If anyone needs me I will be wiping orange dust off a toaster.

Vale, real numbers because I'm tired of vague advice. My last three glaze process reels: 340, 210, 180 views. A story I posted from the studio at 23:40 with a photo of the kiln door and the words "esto va a salir mal, lo sé" (this is going to come out bad, I know it): 1200 views, and 9 people replied asking what I was firing. So the thing that "works" is me admitting I don't know. Not the finished piece. Not the timelapse. Me at midnight, in a dirty apron, betting against my own work. I think this is because everyone can smell when a post is a shop window. And a kiln at night is just a kiln at night, no selling in it. The problem is I can't schedule genuine dread. I've tried. I posted a very constructed version of the same thing last week with nice lighting and a caption I wrote twice and it got 90 views, which honestly is what I deserved. Also my firing did come out mostly fine, one small crack at the foot, so even the dread was a lie in the end. Do any of you post the actual middle of the process, the ugly boring part, or am I just going to keep accidentally making content out of being anxious

For about a year I did the thing everyone says, post the process, tag Lyon, show the easel in the corner of the studio, all that. And it worked, in the sense that the little heart counter went up. Then I realised I was making a kind of content about painting instead of just finishing the painting. So I stopped. I post the work now, dry, no process, no "here's my messy palette." Engagement dropped like a stone. And I don't care because I'm not performing a painter anymore, I'm just painting. The people who actually buy from me found me anyway, through the work itself or through a collector who passed my name along. The rest were just watching. I know the algorithm people will say I'm throwing away exposure. Maybe. But exposure to people who want a show instead of a painting, what is that worth exactly.

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.

Not the work. Not the process shots, not the long text about the 2009 installation in a former slaughterhouse that took me four years and a divorce. One photo, from 2016, of the empty room before I filled it. Bare floor, bad light, a radiator I never removed. I spent maybe six weeks building that website. A friend's son did the code for a case of beer and I wrote the texts myself, badly, in two languages. The whole thing performs like a shop window and the only thing people stop to look at is the space before anything happened in it. I don't know what to do with this. Part of me wants to take the photo down out of spite. Part of me understands exactly why it is the one. People want to see the room they could walk into, not the thing I finally decided to put there. Anyway. I am not going to optimize anything. I am 58 and I have watched too many artists become their own marketing department and I would rather spend the four hours rebuilding the radiator section than in a dashboard. But I looked, and now I know, and it is a little funny and a little sad.

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.

took down a reel that hit 12k views the other day. it was me assembling a torn-paper piece, sped up, and it got the biggest reach i've had in months. and the comments were full of people asking for the finished piece and the story behind it and i just... couldn't. because the piece was about my brother and i wasn't ready to hand that to strangers holding phones at 2am. so i deleted it. and i've been second-guessing it all week because that's the whole game right, you're supposed to chase the reach. but i made the thing for me. the sharing part was the part i never wanted. not posting the process anymore. or at least not that one. some things stay in the studio, even if the algorithm would've loved them.

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.

Myself Ramesh, I am finding the colours are shifting so beautifully now. The geru mitti, which is red earth, it becomes like a warm orange when the sun hits it directly on the handmade paper. And the deep green from the neem leaves, it gets a touch of blue. It is a different light in the studio these days, a softer light. The peacocks are looking especially vibrant this afternoon. It makes me feel grateful for this process, ji.

Got the email last week. They want a portrait, me in the shop, dust on the apron, arms folded. Something with "process." I said send the work instead. They pushed back twice, so I put the phone on a milk crate and had my son take one. It's bad on purpose. Half my face, a grinder in the way, the light doing nothing for anybody. Here's my problem with it. A photo of me doesn't tell you whether the arris on a carved edge is true, or whether a weld will hold in ten years. It tells you I own an apron. I've watched pieces sell off pictures of the maker and I've watched better pieces sit because nobody bothered to photograph the joint where the steel meets the stone. The shot that actually did something for me was a close-up of a weld bead on the underside of a bench. Not a nice photo. Took it with a shop light and a phone. The man who bought that bench asked about the bead before he asked the price. So no portrait. If they want to see the work, they can come stand in front of it.

got the writeup from that group show last week. two sentences, the second one called the work cluttered. I've read it maybe 40 times. the thing is I think they might be right and I also think cluttered is the wrong word for what I'm doing. there's a difference between too much going on and a thing that's dense on purpose because the memory it's about is dense. you can't simplify a house full of someone's stuff into three brushstrokes. that's not restraint, that's lying. but I can't tell anymore if that's a real argument or just the thing I tell myself so I don't have to edit. anyway I hung it back on the wall in the studio and left it there. haven't touched it. three days now. sometimes that's the whole process, just letting a sentence sit next to you until it either rots or turns into something useful.

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.

Went through the grid on sunday, coffee going cold, and deleted about forty posts. all the ones from the two years i was posting three times a week because some course told me consistency beats everything. the close-ups of brush texture. the flat lays. the "process" shots where nothing was actually happening, i was just holding a palette knife near the canvas for the camera. here's the part i didn't expect: engagement dropped maybe 15%. nothing. two years of unpaid labor, roughly 300 posts, and the audience i built on it never bought anything. the people who actually show up to a show or send me a DM asking if a piece is still available found me through a friend or a wall, not through a texture close-up. what did change is i stopped dreading opening the app. i post maybe once every ten days now, usually one bad photo of the studio with stuff piled on the floor, and it does about as well. the thing i keep circling is that i can't tell if the 15% was worth it. there's no clean answer. everyone says the algorithm rewards volume and maybe it does, but volume was making me hate the work, and the work is the only part i can't fake. anyone else cut back and just... not noticed a difference?