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My gallery's new person keeps asking for process content. Behind the scenes, time-lapse, work in progress. I understand the logic, short clips of me scraping back layers get ten times the reach of the finished work. The problem is the work itself. A large painting of mine sits on the wall for weeks between sessions because oil and cold wax needs to cure before I can build the next layer. There is nothing cinematic about watching me wait. I could film myself scraping and smearing and make it look dynamic, but that would be a lie about how it actually happens, and I am not interested in performing a fake version of my own work for the algorithm. I did a ten second reel of the palette knife going through wet wax last week because I felt I had to. It looked great. It is the least honest thing I have done in years. The finished painting, the one that matters, will not be ready until March and nobody will watch it dry. Am I wrong to resist this? Sometimes I think the medium itself is becoming the enemy of the marketing. Then I remind myself I did not spend twenty five years learning to layer oil so I could make satisfying looped videos about it.

I've noticed a trend lately, or maybe I'm just noticing it now. It feels like the harder we try to engineer 'engagement,' the more people tune out. I spent last week looking at some analytics for a project, trying to get a spike in likes or shares on a particular piece of content. We tweaked the hook, adjusted the CTA, even played with the posting time. Nothing moved the needle much. Then, coincidentally, I posted a photo of my messy studio floor, paint tubes everywhere, a half-finished canvas in the background, with a caption just saying 'Work in progress.' It got more genuine interaction – people asking about the paint, the process – than the polished piece we'd spent days on. It makes you wonder if the 'performance' is the problem, not the content itself. C'est ça, non?

everyone in these threads keeps blaming the algorithm and i get it, reach is down, but i keep watching artists post the exact same stuff that worked in 2021 and act confused. you posted your palette knife and some paint swatches 40 times, of course it stopped doing numbers. i killed my reach when i stopped and just started posting works in progress with zero caption and actual process, no hashtag spam, and the engagement went up. not because i beat the algorithm but because the people who follow me actually wanted to see the ugly middle stage, not another "here's my cozy studio corner" shot. the algorithm is not your enemy, your content being boring is. posted that with my full chest. come at me.

Started a new piece this morning and spent the first two hours just getting the charcoal to behave on the ground. Every other layer after that is the easy part for me, which is the opposite of how most people seem to work. I don't know. There's something about that first pass where the paper is still clean that makes my hands stupid. Once it's ruined a little I can actually see what I'm doing. The piece is for a group show in March. Found photo of two women at a county fair in the 60s, one of them has her head turned and you can't tell if she's laughing or crying. That ambiguity is the whole thing I'm chasing and I keep almost getting it and then losing it. Anyway. It's 2pm and I've made maybe six square inches of actual progress. Some days the work is just standing in the room with it until something clicks. Today it hasn't clicked yet but I'm not leaving.

Bought a block of Carrara from a supplier I've used for years. Looked clean on the pallet. Got it on the bench, started roughing out, and about three hours in a hairline opens up right where I'm working. Not a surface crack. It was inside the damn stone. Now I've got a piece that's either going to be smaller than I planned or I scrap it entirely. Supplier says not their problem, stone is a natural material, inspect before you work. Which is true. But also infuriating. Twenty years ago I would have kept hammering and ruined it. Now I stop and stare at it for ten minutes and then go weld something instead. Progress I guess.

ok so I spent like a month earlier this year obsessing over my instagram grid, scheduling posts, planning reels, the whole thing. had a notion doc and everything. and you know what happened? nothing. flat engagement, same followers, maybe one sale from it. then I had this week where I just said fuck it and made 40 tiny test tiles, different clay bodies, glazes I mixed myself, firing temps I'd never tried. just messing around, no end goal. I posted them ugly, in progress, some failed. just the real process, no polish. those posts outperformed everything I "planned" by a lot. like triple the saves, actual comments from other potters, and two commissions from people who saw the test tiles and wanted something in that glaze. I think the audience can smell when you're performing vs when you're actually doing the work. the planning was me trying to look like a serious business. the test tiles were me being a ceramicist. anyone else find that the stuff you don't overthink just lands better?

Accidentally archived the reel that had 200k views and something like 12k saves. Panicked for an hour. Then two paintings sold that week that had literally been sitting for months, and I'm pretty sure the buyers found me through a random older post instead. I'm not saying the algorithm is fake or whatever. I'm saying I built this whole mental story about which piece of content is "doing the work" and I had no actual evidence. The reel was king, I decided. It was not king. It was just loud. Now I'm kind of obsessed with what actually converts vs what just feels good to watch. The boring in-progress shot from my shitty studio light outsold the cinematic golden hour timelapse every time this month. Every time. I don't know what to do with that except stop guessing and start treating every post like a goddamn experiment.

Client saw a photo of the piece in progress, called me up, very cheerful, "Dimitra, why does it take you so long? Just fill the gaps quicker, nobody's going to look that close." That's the thing. They never look that close. That's exactly why they end up with a mosaic that's held together by hope and a prayer, lifting off the wall in three years, and then they call me back to fix it and act shocked at the price. No. I don't rush the setting. The gaps are the work, actually. The gaps are where the whole thing holds or falls. You want quick, buy a printed tile, it's thirty euros on Etsy. You want a mosaic that'll outlive your grandchildren, I place every piece and I don't rush a single one. He went quiet. I think he gets it now. Or he's off finding someone who'll give him quick. Either way, not my problem. My hands don't move faster for anyone, not even for money. Especially not for money, actually, I've learned that the hard way. 🙂

i've been working on this portrait commission for two weeks. today she sends me the "final reference", it's one of those apps that smooths everything into plastic. no pores, no shadows under the eyes, the nose is literally a different shape. she looks like a sim character. i don't know how to tell her that i can't paint what isn't there. that the thing i'm actually good at is catching the light on somebody's actual face, the uneven bits, the way one eye is slightly smaller. that's the whole point of spending hours on pastel portraits instead of just running her photo through the same filter she already used. i said i'd send her some progress sketches this week and i'm dreading it. probably going to do a version that's technically accurate and a version that looks like her filtered face and let her pick. which feels wrong but i don't have the words to explain why.