Duty Bound 

Reactive sharing killed my motivation for a while. 

I was making art through a prolific period of newness. I was amped about sketching anything and everything. I was painting daily, though so little of it was anything but practice art and rough drafts.  But I was damn proud of it, and after I’d finish a piece I’d lay it out on a table and snap a pic with my phone and upload it to Instagram.

Reactive.

Oh sure, I got likes. Mostly from impressed family members or friends who were easily impressed by student-grade art attempts by someone they knew.

None of of it was terrible, of course, but none of it was gallery grade either.

I wasn’t sharing my best. 

I was sharing everything.

Reactive sharing.

Draw, paint, dry, pic, post. (And sometimes I barely even waited for the dry.)

It killed my motivation.

Posting became performance.

Performance became duty. 

Passion became obligation to feed the algorithm.

I remember going for a long walk one chilly winter evening because the pressure had built up in my heart around this sense of responsibility I felt to the dozen or so people who were liking everything I posted, and it was driving me nuts. I wasn’t even enjoying it anymore. I was walking and thinking, thinking and walking, and I decided there in the snowy streets that I was going to break the thread. I was going to stop posting art.

I wasn’t going to stop making art, but I wasn’t going to push it out into social media because doing that part of the creative process had gotten out of hand and was ruining the joy for me.

I still draw. I still paint. I still make something that I’m excessively proud of and I’ll post it, but I do it for the right reasons, I think, and skip the duty to perform almost entirely these days.