Why Artists Should Consider Ignoring the Latest Trends on Social Media

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Morning artrepreneurs! Welcome to another edition of the Stay Sketchy newsletter.

🤔 Ever wonder why your social media posts aren’t going viral? Maybe it’s because you’ve been chasing the latest trends instead of setting them…

This week we’ve got:

Matt Chessco - Pop Artist, Painter

Matt Chessco knew something was wrong on his very first day of work.

He had just graduated university with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and started working directly beneath the CEO of a small, but very successful, engineering firm in Montreal. It was a great job that had him on a path to become CEO himself one day.

But something didn’t feel right.

After the excitement of the first few hours died down, Matt looked around at the other employees diligently working at their computers and discussing various ins and outs of the business, and he thought to himself, “what am I doing here?”

Curiously, the feeling persisted.

On Day 2, he found himself asking, “what am I doing here?”

On Day 3, he grew alarmed… “What am I doing here?”

On Day 4, he knew he had to make a decision. He went home after work and wrote a Pros & Cons list about keeping the job. The list of cons quickly ran off the bottom of the page, but in the pros column, he wrote just one thing.

Paycheck.

So he quit.

The job made him miserable and he couldn’t imagine doing it for years, let alone decades.

Matt’s boss, incredulous with the fact that Matt had only worked at the company for 4 days, asked what his plan was.

Matt had no plan, but felt like he couldn’t say that to his boss’s face without seeming completely crazy, so instead, he said the one thing that he always dreamt of becoming one day.

“I’m going to be an artist.”

In the weeks that followed, Matt made some money by designing logos and websites for a few clients he had from a previous side hustle. He spent his free time painting and tried for months to improve his skills to the point that he could create work he was truly proud of.

But with his friends distracting him, and his parents pestering him each week about getting a “real” job, Matt felt it was time for drastic measures. If he was ever going to be taken seriously as an artist, he would really need to buckle down and focus.

So he did the only rational thing he could think of and moved to the opposite side of the country where he didn’t know a single person that could bother him or otherwise distract him.

From there, he survived off income from a small part-time job and painted every day for months.

When he was finally producing artwork he was proud of, he spent another 2 weeks filming and editing a creative and highly original video that he could use to share his work on social media.

After posting it on his Instagram account with 200 followers, Matt immediately received dozens of messages from friends and strangers saying how much they loved his work and how unique the video was.

Because of how positive the initial feedback was, he quit his part-time job and began living entirely off his savings. He doubled down on his new-found style and uniquely edited videos, and within 6 months, grew his following across all socials to 500,000 people.

Just as his savings were about to run out, Matt began to make money by selling originals & prints, as well as landing some early brand deals.

In June of 2020 he made the most money in a single month that he had ever made in his whole life up until that point.

Things exploded after that.

Today, Matt has achieved the following:

• Obtained over 5.8 million followers across his social accounts

• Worked with companies like Google, BMW, Disney, and the NFL

• Made art for celebrities like Post Malone, Bella Poarch, and Gary Vee

• Presented at exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto, and Miami Beach

• Holds the title for having created the world’s largest cat painting

• Created and sold an NFT collection of 10,000 Pop Art Cats

• Pursues what he is most passionate about each & every day

Mini Gallery

To see more of Matt’s work, visit his website or Instagram account.

Artist Insights

Matt spends his life working on various artistic pursuits while traveling back and forth between Montreal and Los Angeles. He took some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about what helped him become so successful.

Embrace Originality

When Matt was in college he was exposed to many tech startups. He learned that the most successful among them were the ones that had some uniquely defining feature that made them different from the rest.

Matt knew his success as an artist would depend on this same principle. He had to find a way to stand out from the crowd.

Instead of just creating art that was different, Matt made sure to create content that was different too. This was ultimately one of the key components to his overall success.

After establishing his own style, he brainstormed for a long time how he could create engaging and creative videos that audiences would love and come to know as specifically Matt Chessco’s. When initial feedback was good, he double downed on it.

Leverage Multiple Social Media Platforms

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this.

The wrong way would be to film a bunch of clips from your creative process, search each platform for trending audio, then create and edit separate videos within each platform based on what’s trending there.

We’ll call Matt’s way the right way as it seems to have worked for him.

Matt chooses audio that fits well with his video concepts and creates the video using software like Adobe Premiere Pro.

This way Matt can produce a single video and upload it to every social media platform in just minutes - Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Snapchat… the list goes on.

Matt lets the quality of his videos do the work for him. He doesn’t rely on trends that were started by other creators - he makes his own unique content that speaks for itself and gets shared on a mass scale as a result.

Utilize Efficient Methods of Creating Art

It’s important to make your creative process as streamlined and efficient as possible. This allows for faster and more consistent creation of art, and also frees up more time that can be allocated to other aspects of your business.

Matt uses tools like Adobe Photoshop to create digital previews of his pieces before he paints them. He also designs and creates his own stencils using a special machine that allows him to create each painting much more quickly.

While Matt invests a lot of time upfront, the actual painting process becomes much less stressful as a result. Additionally creating custom stencils gives Matt the ability to reproduce the painting multiple times with very little variation if he ever wished to release more than one original of a particular subject.

Engage with Your Followers

Matt’s very active with the NFT community that he built.

He offers to paint one of the Pop Art Cat NFTs for an owner each week and ship it to them for free. He also has another long-term NFT project, called Pop Art Wonders, that keeps his NFT community engaged and interested in Matt’s work.

Fostering a strong relationship with your followers can help make them more interested in your work, but also allows you an opportunity to make a bigger impact on their lives. Having passionate fans can even rejuvenate your creative spirit and give you the energy needed to continue creating when you’re in a rut.

Matt makes a point to respond to everyone that messages him on Instagram and X (Twitter). If you have questions and are seeking advice, or just want to share your story, he asks that you reach out to him there.

Matt’s Tech Stack

• Website - Shopify

• Video Editing Tools - Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Midjourney, DeepImage, FootageCrate, Storyblocks

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Art Business News (that isn’t a snooze 😴)

• Film yourself stealing? 🥷 - Nowadays, most of us are used to filming ourselves making art. But what if that art was stealing. This was the case when Brazilian art student, Ilê Sartuzi, stole a historic coin from its display case at the British Museum in London. The strange part is, he not only returned the coin by dropping it off in the museum’s donation bin, but he also filmed the heist and shared it on his Instagram account. The video serves as part of his MFA thesis exhibition at Goldsmiths, University of London. Sartuzi states that “the gesture of stealing as a central part of the project brings back the heated discussion about the role of looting in the museum’s foundation.”

• Hope you’re not afraid of heights 🏙️ - Your art form may be painting, or drawing, or maybe working with clay… For Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, it’s “rooftopping.” In the new Netflix documentary, Skywalkers, the couple reveals how they make a living by illegally scaling thousand-foot tall buildings to express themselves. The film took 7-8 years to make and covers everything from their romantic duo’s discovery of rooftopping to pulling off their biggest stunt to date - climbing the Merdeka 118 tower in Malaysia, the second tallest building in the world.

Thanks for checking out another edition of Stay Sketchy. Catch you next week! ✌️

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