If No One Saw It
There’s a strange paradox in the age of social media: if no one saw it, did it really happen? We share dinners, sunsets, outfits, and smiles—often less to hold onto the moment itself and more to prove it happened at all. Visibility has become its own kind of evidence. And I don’t say this with judgment—I’ve done it too. Sometimes the impulse to be seen feels stronger than the moment itself.
This painting was born in spring of 2024, just as winter finally loosened its grip. After months of muted skies and grey streets, I found myself craving color—craving proof of life again. So I painted almost compulsively, reaching for terracotta, ochre, rust, and soft pinks as if pigments could trick the world into warming up. Looking back, I realize the act of painting was my rebellion against the dullness of winter: if I couldn’t find color outside, I’d flood my canvas with it.
The figures here live in that space between performance and presence. The central one holds up a phone like a mask, the others lean in—whispering, curating, arranging themselves for an unseen audience. Flowers bloom and bend around them, both framing and consuming, like the endless scroll of images we get lost
I’ve always believed that the people who try hardest to show the perfect side of life are the ones hiding the most. The obsession with curation often masks a deep unrest. Because if your life truly felt whole, would you need so desperately for strangers to see it?
And here’s where it gets complicated: I sometimes dream of quitting social media altogether. To vanish. To return to a quieter rhythm of creating without the constant background noise of likes, views, and invisible metrics. The endless noise, the pressure to be visible, the cheapening of real moments into content—it wears me down.
At the same time, I’ve been very selective with what I post online. Most of it is tied to my work—business purposes, things that support my brand. And in a way, I’m grateful for that discipline, because it keeps me from oversharing or turning my life into a performance. But it also limits me. I once wanted to show more of my quirky self, the messy, odd details that make me who I am. Yet the internet feels too polished now, too curated. Even “authenticity” has become a staged aesthetic. So what was meant to be playful or genuine risks being misunderstood as yet another performance.
Still, I stay. Because it’s not just a distraction, it’s a bridge. Because it’s the way my art travels further than I ever could on my own. Without it, some of you would never have found my work at all. That’s the contradiction I’ve learned to live with: wanting to protect my inner life, while also needing to share enough for my art to breathe beyond me.
If no one saw it, would it still matter to you?
For me, the answer is yes. The act of painting always mattered first. It was never for the algorithm. It was for survival, for joy, for the need to make sense of things that can’t be spoken. But sharing it matters too. Not in the way performance does, but in the way connection does. When my paintings leave me and find their way into your hands, your homes, your eyes—that’s when the cycle completes itself.
Maybe the challenge isn’t to abandon visibility altogether, but to redefine it. To post less like proof and more like offering. To treat each share not as evidence that I exist, but as an open hand extended to whoever needs to see it.
Because in the end, the work matters even if no one saw it. But the beauty of being alive now—messy, performative, contradictory as it is—is that sometimes, someone does. #Mira
