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

Last week I took a break from my usual practice of making two to three portraits on small canvases each week. Well, I should say I took another break, because I've been doing some larger paintings that take a little longer on occasion. But as a general rule I still do those small canvases most weeks. So what you ask did I do? Well, I went to an adult art camp! Okay, it's an Artist's Retreat, but I call it camp. Because it takes place at a kid's camp. This camp is just outside of Riding Mountain National Park here in the province of Manitoba and it takes place every year. Except the last two years. You can probably guess why. Oh and just as an aside Riding Mountain is not a mountain. It's an escarpment. Nobody knows why they call it that! Okay, someone probably does. Maybe even Wikipedia. I'll look it up later… [...]

Recently FASO, (Fine Art Studios Online), the company through which I have my website, introduced a feature whereby an artist can display a price for their work but also add a "make an offer" button. Now before I get into that, I should mention that the last couple of Fridays, I decided to experiment with making a post on Instagram with some of my old work and letting people know that I'm open to offers on those selected works. So I'll let you know if it works when a post actually gets some decent reach! So why you ask have I decided to do such a thing, are you not undervaluing your work? Well, the answer to that is: I hope not. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in this here Cubo-Weirdist blog here that most of my income comes through commissions. So that means I have a fair inventory of my other work. Most weeks I paint two to the three small or medium sized canvases and while some of them do sell, I have quite a few on my own walls and in storage. So it just makes sense to me to try to sell some of them. [...]

Today I'd like to talk to you about Instagram and perhaps ask you for your advice. Over the last two and a half years or so, I've managed to grow my Instagram following to around 1,700. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of said followers are not bots but real actual humans who took the time to set up an account and decided to follow me. Of course every artist on the platform would like to see their following reach into the tens of thousands but 1,700 is not too shabby and seems like progress, especially since I started the year at around 1,500 and I'm still growing. One thing that I find interesting is that this growth continued in spite of the fact that I took an extended break from posting regularly. Call it Instagram fatigue. For a good year and a half I posted Monday to Friday every week. Even when I was on holidays. So far this year there have been many weeks where I only posted twice. The one thing I've kept up is posting new work every Tuesday and Thursday as I have been doing since the beginning of the pandemic. I'm not planning to change the strategy any time soon, but that could happen eventually. [...]

It's no secret that I make a lot of paintings. I mean A LOT. I'm not saying I'm the most prolific painter in history, that might be Picasso or Jean-Michel Basquiat. I'm not sure. But few would argue that two to three paintings most weeks is quite a few. So why, you ask, do I make so many paintings? Part of it is that I just feel accomplished when I make a goodly amount of work. I'm not sure I would feel less accomplished if I painted large incredibly detailed canvases that took months to create and thereby only made a few paintings a year. But I might. I suspect if I worked that way I'd try to find a way to speed up the process because I'd really really want to see what the end result looked like. That's just part of my personality, I suppose. Or maybe it's a cultural influence, you know how we all seem to want instant gratification? [...]