I made a website!

Snowy, white, wet, cold— in Massachusetts!

Hello,

Testing, testing— this is John Mark, writing from my laptop on a dark February evening. This is new for me; I’m writing a blog! Or a newsletter. Or some kind of epistle that’s tied to my creative practice. My art. (Pronounced dripping with blood) my brand.

I’ve thought a lot about how I want to share my creative work with the world and with my community. I came to decide on making my own website for various reasons, and this post will stand to address some of them. As for the blog, I like the idea of keeping people up to date on all sides of the work and practicing my writing in a more or less routine way. So to kick off this entry, first—welcome! Thank you for reading this, sincerely. Second, let me give some context about why I wanted my own website and personal platform for my art. Third, I’d love to just complain about Instagram for a few paragraphs.

When I really began my creative work in 2020, actually putting together my first portfolio, I started thinking about networking or marketing and all the other invisible factors at play for working artists. And I did what most people do right away: I started a social media handle and made an Etsy shop.

This worked in a pinch, and it definitely helped me get started thinking about myself as an artist, and as a working artist. But pretty soon I came to find myself engaging more and more with the gamification of these mediums, their algorithms, their structural manipulation. How do I find followers? Who sees my posts, and why? What tags do I use? How often do I post? What kind of strategy should I use to find favor with the apps? I had to spend a lot of time thinking about all of these dynamics, all of which were expressly designed to get me addicted to them.

It also seemed to me that Instagram rewarded artists who reliably posted material that was visually or stylistically succinct. Like if you posted floral paintings you would be rewarded with more engagement or more views if you posted more floral paintings, or if you kept within a consistent, stylized color scheme. I had never had any training as an artist and was definitely too new to the work to have any strong ideas of what my prevailing style should be, and in any case there was (and still is) so much for me to explore and study through trial and error to grow as an artist.

I felt the conflict between social media’s interests and my own. Instagram wanted me to create free content for them on a steady basis so they could ramp up views that keep people on the app, (and so I would stay on it too,) all so they could get our attention fixed on the advertisements they host on their platform and sell our personal data. I wanted to make art and share it with people.

Over time, and especially as I started embracing more queer art, I was confronted with more structural and ethical questions. Many of my favorite artists on Instagram were consistently posting about their issues with censorship on the app. Folks who make nude or sexually explicit drawings or sex-positive art are routinely flagged on Instagram and their posts are removed; I would follow and re-follow accounts who kept losing access to their handles. I remember in particular a drawing of a figure with clearly visible top scars that had been reported and taken down— alongside dozens of similar drawings of cis subjects. The prudishness of Instagram ‘no-no’ing art that I found genuinely exciting, engaging, and proudly queer and sex positive— well it didn’t sit well with me.

Then the all out war on Palestine started and I began to really understand the scope of censorship and propaganda, both in the corporate media and on apps like Facebook and Instagram. Here and now in 2025, all of the largest social media platforms available in the US, as well as every organ for ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ news and reporting are all owned by the same clutch of ultra-rich oligarchs. And every one of them has made it clear that they’re on board to do the fascism.

So at the end of all these reflections and considering the ethical morasse of it all the smoke was coming out white for me to just create my own platform. As of this writing it seems promising and I’m definitely proud of the work I’ve put in to getting it started.

Thank you for being here. As these newsletters continue I hope to include more visual notes, sketches, ideas, projects, and all manner of reflections both on art and my own life. I’d be delighted to have you join me.

In the interim, much love.

Paix,

John Mark