Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

Today is the second anniversary of this here Cubo-Weirdist blog here. As I wrote on the first anniversary back in the Covid days (which are over, right? one can dream!), I'm pretty proud of myself for keeping it going. I know I'm re-hashing here, but it often does seem kinda narcissistic to be doing this, let alone spending most of my time creating my own art and screaming into the social media void: "look at my art! You can even buy my art!". I do often think I could be doing something useful for society like–I dunno–helping people? Or animals? Something not so "me" centered? I know a lot of people start blogs and abandon them after a few weeks or months, so I think it is a bit of an achievement to have kept it going this long. I have to admit that I've had ideas for blogs that never happened, such as the Stupidist Blog that would have been musings related to the Stupidist Manifesto. I even had the idea of doing the Stupidist Podcast, but I've never followed through because everyone has a podcast. Including tonnes of celebrities who I suspect are taking audiences away from non-celeb podcasters. Plus I suppose doing one would take time away from painting. But then again, I make a lot of paintings, so maybe I need to spend more time doing something else? [...]

So I'm gonna be honest here. Next week is the second anniversary of the Cubo-Weirdist Blog. As I said on the first anniversary, I'm pretty proud of myself for keeping it up. I even feel like I should do something special to celebrate next week. Like maybe take a week off? Nah, I'm not gonna do anything that drastic! But there is a temptation. Especially this week as I sit here staring at my blank screen really feeling like I don't have a lot to write about this week. I have a couple of things to announce in the coming weeks, and I was hoping to write about those for this week's post. But due to circumstances beyond my control, I am not ready to do that yet. So I guess this blog post will be all about the struggles of marketing oneself as an independent artist. I'm not represented by a gallery, so I have to do all of my marketing myself and a lot of the time I feel like I'm just doing busy work. I have to dedicate a substantial portion of my week to that aspect of my job and I feel like a lot of what I'm doing just makes me feel like I've done something to promote myself. [...]

For two years now, my nieces have been telling me that I need to get on TikTok so that I have another social media venue to promote my work. Plus, they know I'm a ham, so they probably figure I could make some amusing videos. And I have to admit it's probably time I finally took that plunge. With the changing algorithms on the other social media platforms, I kind of feel like things have stagnated a little. Of course that also means that I probably need to up my game on those platforms too and the fact is, I've been slacking for the last couple of months. Lately I've only been posting two or three times a week. I guess I needed a break. The truth is there are so many things I need to do for for my social media presence that it's kind of overwhelming. It's really hard to keep coming up with new ideas and to keep up with all the different types of posts. For example, most of my posts are simply photos of my work with a bit of a micro-blog to accompany them. But if you follow me, you'll know that I've also made a number of videos for IGTV as well as Instagram Reels, which are good practice for TikTok. But I suppose I should've just been posting those to TikTok all along. I actually made a TikTok account a couple of years ago, so I could have been doing that. I just didn't. Also, I haven't been posting to Instagram and Facebook stories and I should start thinking of what to do with those too. It's too much! Ugh! [...]

I know I've been going on and on for the last few weeks about my new series of portraits of the people that most of think of as national treasures. I've asked people for suggestions as to who I should paint in this series and I've gotten a lot of good ones. What I mean to say is that they're good in the sense that they do fit the category. But I think what I'm going to do is let the social media algorithms decided which ones I will paint. More precisely, I'm making the decisions based on how I'm guessing the algorithm will behave. The thing is, most of my sales these days are coming through social media, and while I haven't sold any of the "National Treasure Series" yet, I want to get them in front of as many eyeballs as I can in order to increase the odds that one of them will sell. And so far, they haven't done that well. It's been interesting that my post of Martin Short on it's own was a a dud, but when I posted him with Steve Martin, it did decently. I'm wondering if it was because I chose better hashtags for that post? [...]