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🍃 ​Last year I got to interview Emma Hopkins, the well-known Brighton-based portrait painter.

🎨 Emma paints what’s fragile in humans, based on personal insights of her sitter’s histories. Her work is raw, personal, honest and bold, strongly expanding the canon of contemporary portrait painting.

🙎 We all know Emma’s paintings - but who’s the person behind the work? I was curious. As of March 2018, Emma is followed by 109k people on Instagram - apart from being a painting master, she’s a public figure. What does all that even mean?

🎥 I finally released the video - Emma discusses her working process, human’s contradictions, how she developed her language, and social media censorship. If you want more, there’s another​ ​video of her, published earlier on the same channel.

🌈 If you want to support my YouTube channel, simply subscribe to it.

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Creating Content in 2017

I’ve been a content creator my whole adult life. While this started with studying several instruments, it eventually changed to photography, programming video games, studying painting - and finally writing a PhD thesis: today, my professional life consists of producing paintings, as well as curating exhibitions (also I’m doing a videography project that I’m in love with).

More specifically though, I need to introduce myself as idealistic content creator: over the years, my focus has always been on understanding a craft’s quality, in order to then implement it as best as I could. My mission was craft, and time not spent on advancing that mission felt wrong - as a result, business topics (branding, marketing, business development etc.) were never on my mind. My thinking was that any focus on PR would manifest my own disbelief in my work’s quality: once I started to get my head into PR space, wouldn’t that be the final nail in the coffin of self-disbelief, in my own work?

I never saw the arrogance in this.

I didn’t used social media to proactively push my content (or myself) as a brand. It felt wrong to even read PR material: I understood social media as distraction, as today’s television: a neverending stream of garbage and pushed egos - why would I subject my work to that? As a side effect, this let me stick to my comfort zone: my craft, and the believe that if I’d be good in it, middlemen would eventually take care of the rest. Ultimately, I subscribed to the romantic notation of quality guaranteeing success.

Social Media Today: A Currency

With social media having been around for over a decade, I want to recap the situation that today’s content creators find themselves in:  there are more of us than ever, with more potential visibility than ever. Social media hosts an endless amount of individuals too, whose lives could be enrichened by our creations - if only they’d know about it: potential customers, 99% of whom have never heard of you or seen your work (let’s quickly recap the numbers too: Facebook 2 billion. Instagram 800 million. LinkedIn 467 million. VKontakte 447 million. Tumblr 345 million. Twitter 330 million. Pinterest 200 million).

While we thought that having websites would result in our work being discovered, we now know that they offer zero discoverability: they mostly make sense today as digital homes and archives, for those who already know us. While special-interest forums can be used for personal networking purposes, they don’t easily offer audience growth. Ultimately, neither websites nor forums offer what seems to be the most important aspect of today’s content creation reality: social media as currency.

While some of us ignored social media as distraction (“It’s virtual! A bubble! You’re wasting your time!”), others embraced it to gain visibility. They did so by showing their work, their processes, their lives - and accumulated followers over the years. In retrospect, it’s obvious that many of us idealists missed the real-life consequence of social media: it being a currency. Those that worked for years to gain followers aren’t just “more visible” today, on their specific social media platforms: If Harding Meyer has 29k followers on Instagram, if Emma Hopkins has 84k followers on Instagram, if Katie Mack has 211k followers on Twitter (WHAT! It was 180k just three months ago!), this changes how the world sees their works, and listens to them - it’s an impact that’s not limited to the “virtual” world at all. It changes our relation to them in the real world:  if you’re a professional, there’s nothing virtual about social media. Social media isn’t just “a currency”: it’s a real-life currency.

With whom will middlemen (galleries, publishers, labels; universities, employers etc) want to collaborate: with me, a painter with less than 500 followers - or Emma Hopkins? The situation today is very straight-forward: social media makes our marketing efforts transparent. If you don’t put the hours into it, you will appear sloppy to those who do: you risk being seen as hobbyist, independently of your work’s qualities.

As a professional, ignoring social media is like not brushing your teeth: while this doesn’t create problems today, it has consequences when disregarded for years. If you want to operate autonomously, if you want your work to be visible, then you need to embrace social media. Social media changed the landscape not only for its users, but for everyone else too. If you ignore it, your visibility and relevance will implicitly fade: it’s a visibility-tide that keeps rising, with you being able to chose whether to work with it - or have your visibility drown.

Ethics and Marketing

My words make it sound futile to resist, while ultimately participation is still a personal choice; my goal is not to have you start posting erratically, but to slowly get aware of a situation: don’t be the frog who didn’t know about the rising temperature. It’s your choice how to proceed. But I do want to tell you that nearly all established professionals, in nearly any field, use social media to strengthen their voices, to speak to their followers, to spread their mission.

If you disregard social media as marketing, and marketing as wrong, I have a very basic question for you: do you pursue your craft as a profession, or as a hobby? Because if it is the former, than there’s simply no excuse but to work towards your customers - because you need customers, and you want customers.

I realized only recently that most people’s aversion to marketing is based on their understanding of it as a cheap way to sell crap: to sell a broken care to a blind person that can’t drive. This is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about bringing quality to a world that drowns in superficiality. I’m talking about a world that needs both aesthetics and ethics. I’m talking about accepting your work’s uniqueness and accepting that there are people out there whose lives will benefit from experiencing it - whether that’s a video game, a painting, a theater production, a massage, a repaired car, an exhibition you curated, or a statement against misogyny. 

I’m talking about your responsibility, as idealistic content creator, to embrace your work as a product, and embrace your customers as individuals who want to experience and embrace your world: but who can’t, if you stay silent about it.

Only by believing in your work (and yourself!) will you be able to start marketing it appropriately: not by exaggerating, but by working ethically towards making people see it - people whose lives will benefit from it. Also, think about the alternative: if us idealists don’t enter social media for real (Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, VKontakte, ReddIt, Behance, LinkedIn, Tumblr etc), the level of quality on each of these platforms will strongly be influenced by others whose aesthetics and craftsmanship aren’t anywhere close to “ours”. By people who, in the worst case, aren’t in it for idealistic reasons. By disregarding all these platforms, aren’t we guilty of ivory-tower-ism? What about gamergate: if we’d all have been on Twitter, couldn’t we have made a difference? I don’t know a single painter who’s on Twitter. Why?

I’ll start posting specific steps on how to start your journey - how to embrace an ethical way of accepting marketing for your craft, so you and your work will gradually be seen. How to engage with an international audience, leading to your work becoming better, your motivation to rise, and your sales to increase: by having made the world a better place, in the small way that you can influence the world.

Stay tuned, and subscribe to my mailing list if you’re interested in staying in touch!

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After having used the Polargraph robotic drawing device for over two years, I finally got to know its creator, Sandy Noble, in person. Sandy’s stumbled into electronics somewhat by chance, and today stands out to me as one of its many rolemodels: his care for open-source projects goes the extra mile, his craft thinking incorporates ethical aspects of material resources, plus he constantly questions the dynamics of analog and digital relationships. Today was an awesome day.

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Building Your Digital Home

Once people understand your project, and witness the passion and dedication with which you follow through, they’ll want to support you: eventually, some will ask about where to send their follower’s attention to. This requires a clear, direct answer, which you might not be able to give though. The situation might be especially challenging when operating on a variety of social media channels: Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube – you will have a different audience on each of these platforms, and if successful, there will be a lot of people following you there.

Why then to build a digital home? Because social media can’t ever be your home.

Although social media offers the benefits of free content hosting, as well as the promise of reaching the world’s attention because of their pre-existing user base, it is important to accept the very limited creative control you can ever have on it: you can essentially feed content, but nothing more. Social media sites are known to change their mode of operation continuously, requiring you to constantly stay reactive and adapt. This is part of how to use social media, and isn’t necessarily a problem: Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram etc might have good points in frequently adapting their appearances and modes of operation.

For someone running a business, creative control is of utmost importance though: imagine a studio or working table where you set up your work to be seen, for you to work most efficiently – only to have it be placed differently when you return to work the next day. This frustration costs time and energy, and makes you reactive: you need to work in order to establish a state that was already established.

Anecdote

Zach and Tarn Adams of Bay 12 Games are the developers of the video game “Dwarf Fortress”. They have been working on it non-stop since 2002, sharing it online for free. Their main place of communication is their forum, which they host separately to their company website: As of autumn 2017, 50k members have written 4.2 million posts on 160k topics. While Dwarf Fortress can be found on almost any social media platform, Zach and Tarn can rely on their own hosted forums, as a place where they have full creative control. This had a big impact when they eventually started to set up Patreon for receiving donations: to this day, they never posted any content there: because they knew that their supporters already had the best infrastructure set in place: the Bay 12 Games Forums.

Recap

Your project needs a stable home: a base that can only be changed by you, resulting in a fundament you can rely on – think of your website as a house where only you have the keys. This allows you to relax: no external content will be injected, no ads will appear – unless you want them to, and profit from them.

Goal

Your website can be your business card: you will feel comfortable about its looks and contents: although your internal creative processes might be messy, you can rely on a professional outward appearance that’s accessible, and suits your individual project’s agenda and style.

Your website can become more than a business card though: it can be an archive of your work, let people subscribe to your newsletter, offer links to your various social media experiences, contain the most accurate mission statement, and even include a forum, like Bay 12 Games does.

Think of your website as your home – a home that can grow rooms over time, yet also has outposts elsewhere: on social media. This allows you to benefit from the attention promised by social networks, while not having to stay reactive to these network’s changes. You stay in control.

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Jonathan Blow on Success and Ethics in Software Development