Search

The older I get the more I think I've done this all wrong. When I was young and hungry I would walk into a gallery in Lyon with paintings under my arm, no appointment, nothing. Half the time nobody even looked at them. The other half I got a card and a promise that went nowhere. These days I send an email with three or four images, clean and simple, and I wait. It feels more respectful. But I also wonder if the walk-in shows something the email can't, audacity, nerve, that you actually exist in a body and your work has weight to it. I landed my first real gallery because the owner saw me set up painting the market on a Tuesday morning. Not the work, the process. She came over. So what do you do? Knock on the door with a portfolio, or fire off the email and hope? And has either actually worked for you, or is it all luck either way?

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.

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.

I keep a small notebook beside the board for every painting. Not the finished work, the process: pigment, brand, ratio, paper batch, the temperature of the room, and a one line verdict on whether the wash behaved. It is a habit left over from the laboratory and my students find it faintly ridiculous, but it has saved me more than once. This morning I was laying a first wash of French ultramarine over a hellebore leaf, thinned further than I usually dare, and it bloomed at the tip exactly where the veins tighten. I checked the log. The same thing happened in November, same paper, same paper batch stamp, same dilution, and I had written "too wet for this sheet, size it first" and then evidently forgotten. Two hundred and fourteen pages and I still repeat a mistake I had already identified and written down in my own hand. The log is honest. I am not always. I have started underlining anything that went wrong, so at least the failures are the things my eye catches first when I open to a new page. It feels a little like keeping a book of my own errors on purpose. Which, I suppose, is what it is.

was cleaning up after a run of prints and my phone died mid-scroll so i just snapped the floor. pile of charcoal dust, torn paper scraps, half a cup of cold coffee sitting in the middle of it. posted it half as a joke, titled it "the actual studio." it did better than any finished piece i've put up in months. 4x the engagement, two dms asking about commissions, one guy asking if he could buy a print of the photo itself. and it's not even the first time. the messy shots, the process shots, the "here's my hands covered in paint" stuff always outperforms the clean documentation of the actual work. every single time. part of me is like, well, this is what people connect to, lean into it. but the other part wonders what it says that the actual art is the least interesting thing i post. like the product is boring and the labor is the spectacle. i keep posting the finished work anyway. i don't even know why anymore. stubborn probably. or scared that if i go full process-bro, the work just becomes content and i lose whatever i have left of the point of it all.

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?

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.

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.

My daughter set me up on Instagram a while back. Fine. I post work photos, some process stuff. It's whatever. But last winter I decided I needed a proper website. Portfolio, about page, contact form, the whole thing. Spent 6 months on it. Every angle photographed right, every weld visible, the stone properly lit. Copy I rewrote 4 times. Pages about commission process, shipping, all of it. Launched it in March. Check the analytics last week. 47 visitors. Total. In 8 months. Pretty sure 15 of those were me. The Instagram post of me dropping a 200 pound chunk of limestone on my boot? 12,000 views. I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Maybe the thing you work hardest on isn't the thing that reaches people. Or maybe the website is for the 3 people who actually want to commission something and the rest just want to see something fall on my foot. Either way I should have just spent those 6 months in the studio.

spent three days on a mixed-media piece for a show, documented the whole thing in a nice polished reel, lighting, process shots, the works. maybe 200 views. next day i throw up a phone photo of the back of the canvas. just the staples and the raw edge where the paper tore. no caption, just "back side." 2.4k likes. people asking if it's for sale. i don't know what to do with that information. i don't want to just start posting half-finished trash for engagement. but also the stuff i labor over barely registers and the throwaway gets seen. feels like the platform is actively training me to make worse work.

Every week a gallery or a fellow painter tells me I have to show more of the work in motion. The brush going down, the glazing, the palette. And I get it, people watch that stuff. But there is a reason I stopped filming my hand a few years ago and it's not laziness. When I film myself painting, I paint for the camera. Not consciously. But the hand becomes a performer. The strokes get more theatrical, the pauses disappear, the whole thing becomes a demonstration of painting instead of painting. That's not the same activity. I spent my thirties unlearning performing, I'm not going to spend my fifties picking it back up for a views count. The strange part is the numbers agree with me. My studio shots, the finished work, even the messy shelf where I keep my mediums, those posts do fine. Steady. Modest. The kind of engagement that actually brought me two commissions this year. And when I did post a reel a few months ago, close on the palette, the reach was higher and the inquiries were zero. People want to watch the paint move, they don't want to buy the painting. That tells me something. I'm not saying nobody should show process. Go ahead, it works for plenty of people. I just think some of us are better served by being a bit less available. The mystery of how it gets made used to be part of the value.

Had a gallery owner on the phone today, wants me in their spring group show. Flattering, fine. Then he asks, casual, like it's nothing, if I could "streamline" my process a bit, maybe work on a couple of panels at once so I'd have more pieces ready. Streamline. As if the drying time of linseed oil is a scheduling problem I should negotiate with. I paint maybe four or five serious pieces a year. That's not a shortage of effort, that's the pace the medium demands. You can't rush an oil painting the way you can't rush a pregnancy, and nobody asks a pregnant woman to streamline her gestation for the spring calendar. I told him I'd have two, maybe three. He went quiet. Then he said that might be "tight." Bof. I'd rather show two honest paintings than five rushed ones. I've seen what rushed looks like on a gallery wall, and it smells like varnish over regret.

A gallery in Barcelona wants to do a small solo show in October, my work, but also some documentation of process, which is fair, the whole thing is basically tidepool alchemy. They asked for my notes on the seawater development, dilution ratios, exposure times, how I account for different salinity levels. And I sat down to write it and realised I have none. I just know. I've been doing this so long I can feel it, the weight of the paper, the way the light sits, the smell of the water. I never standardised any of it because every print is a different day, different sun, different batch of Atlantic. I told them I'd put something together and now I'm staring at a blank page trying to remember how to explain something I only understand with my hands. I think this is the gap between making work and showing it. The making is private and intuitive and full of failure and small victories nobody sees. The showing asks you to translate all of that into something legible. I don't know how to do that without flattening it.

When I first showed the cyanotypes, the woman at the desk looked at them a long time and then asked if they were finished. The white edges, the brush marks, the slight bleed where the seawater got past the tape. She meant it kindly, I think, but it stayed with me for weeks. I said yes. They are exactly as finished as I want them. But I drove home wondering whether I should have said something better. So, what is the strangest or most useful thing a gallery has said about how you make the work? Not the price talk, the process talk. Did it change anything, or did you keep going as you were?

I still remember the first gallery that treated me like a professional rather than a hobbyist. It was a small natural-history gallery in a town I'd driven past a hundred times, and the owner didn't just hang my work, she asked about my process. Asked what pigments I used, whether I'd done the studies myself, wanted to know about the specimen sourcing. That was the moment I thought, this person actually sees the craft, not just the product. It taught me to tell the difference between a gallery that wants a wall filler and one that genuinely values the work. The ones that ask questions, that show curiosity about how you make things, those are the keepers. What was your first gallery that took you seriously, and how did you know it was the real thing rather than just a polite yes?

I spent years putting only the final work online. Perfect lighting, good photo, the painting resolved. Crickets, mostly. A few likes from other painters. A few months ago I was frustrated with a figure painting, the hand was wrong for the fourth time, the whole thing looked a mess, and I took a photo of it on the easel with my palette旁边, just to vent to a painter friend. I put it on Instagram almost without thinking. That post got more comments than anything I'd put up in six months. People like to see the struggle. They like to see that you also don't know what you're doing for a while. I think for a long time I thought showing process would somehow diminish the finished work, like revealing the trick. But most people aren't painters. They have no idea what goes into it, and watching something get ugly and then get pulled back out of the ugly, that's the part they actually want to see. I'm still not comfortable with it. I was trained to show only the resolved thing. But I can't argue with the numbers, and more to the point I can't argue with the fact that the conversations are better. People ask real questions instead of just saying "beautiful." Wondering if anyone else has found that the unfinished, uncertain thing gets more traction than the polished final version.

I sent work to a small gallery in Gothenburg years ago with no idea what "consignment" even meant. I signed the paperwork without reading it properly and spent the whole opening night hovering near my pieces like a nervous parent. Nobody told me I'd spend most of the night talking about process instead of looking at the work. What do you wish someone had told you before your first showing? The practical stuff especially, the stuff nobody puts in the contract.

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.

Someone on here mentioned process shots not moving the needle. Opposite for me. A couple weeks back I posted a rough shot of the workbench, half-carved piece still in the stone, dust everywhere, chisels out. Not staged. Just where I left it at the end of the day. That one brought more commission inquiries than any finished piece I've put up this year. Makes sense if I think about it. People don't buy a sculpture, they buy watching it get made. The finished thing is already decided. The messy middle leaves room for them to picture themselves in it. Funny part is I almost didn't post it. Looked like a mess to me. My daughter posted it for me while I was still grinding. She's the one who runs the account, I'm just the labor. Still feels backwards that the work no one was supposed to see does the best. But I'll take it over chasing trends.

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.