This article first appeared on my substack in March 2026. Subscribe here.
About a thousand years ago, I used to work in marketing and communications. It seemed natural, having developed policy and content for a UK charity’s web site and its newly emerging social media presence that I would do the same thing for my art. It was an almost effortless transition from talking about the worthy activities of my colleagues in the organisation to talking about myself.
Almost.
Niggling at the back of my mind was a tiny cringe. Self-promotion, it turns out, didn’t flow as easily as promoting other people’s work. I put this down to growing up in a culture where hiding your light under a bushel was a national pastime and any kind of success would be met with dismissal. “I kent his faither” is a publishable Scottish put down. In Australia, where I now live, we talk about “tall poppy syndrome”. Don’t get above yourself.
So, I shut out the niggling wee voice in the back of my head and piled in to social media self-promotion. For a while – years in fact – it seemed to be working. Instagram followers increased to the maximum allowable unless you pay for more, Facebook interactions were ticking along. Occasionally one of the platforms would encourage me to “engage” more, or suggest ways that I could “monetize” my feed, but I felt able to ignore that stuff.
Then TikTok arrived and the knee-jerk reaction of Meta was to force us into making portrait format reels to compete for visibility. It’s what the kids want, right? Suddenly artists are videoing themselves spinning their paintings around in attempt to make their static portraits, still-lives and landscapes exciting in the new environment. So I did too.
But it didn’t sit well. I began to do Dry January off of social media. That’s summer in Australia, so it was pretty easy to be out and about and away from my phone. Each year though, the scope of Dry January crept outwards until last year it began in late November and… well, it’s now March.
It took three years to wean myself off the dopamine of likes and follows. I’m pretty happy I did. I’ve been released from wondering if anyone will like a painting, of feeling that my “feed should reflect a consistent brand” and I’ve got back to experimenting. Playing. Getting back to some of that joy that the social media treadmill had crushed. It’s awesome.
I’ve also stopped doom scrolling and my contentment has increased by 56%. Measure it.
I’ll still check in on social media, as there are organisations I work with who need the promotion, and I’ll use it to promote this Substack too, of course.
As a business move it feels like I’m taking a chainsaw to the branch I’m sitting on but then, I’m suspicious of any sentence where the words “art” and “business” occur together. Art’s too important to be just a business, it’s not a career and it doesn’t fit into any of those suit-wearing 1980s categories that seem to define so much of our lives now.
art about place 