I was told, very seriously, that I could “scale” my portrait work.
Automate inquiries. Optimize the funnel. Turn visitors into clients in three clicks.

On a PowerPoint slide, it looks brilliant.
In real life, it mostly looks like an attempt to industrialize something that, by definition, shouldn’t be industrialized: human connection, art and craft.

It’s not the first time this logic lands on my desk.
In my professional work, I’ve already devoted an entire article/newsletter to funnels applied to care, support and “personal development” professions – how coaches, therapists and helpers are pushed to treat human vulnerability like a “customer journey” to optimize. (If you’re curious, it’s here: The Sales Funnel That Hates Humans)

Here, I’m talking about another variation of the same problem:
the one that sneaks into symbolic gestures – a portrait, a tribute, a gift for someone who still matters.

The language of “scaling” applied to humans

In that little world, we don’t talk about people anymore.
We talk about “leads”, “conversions”, “nurturing”, “segments”.

You’re told, very seriously, that you should:

• “save time” on conversations
• “optimize” your process
• “boost your funnel” to sell more custom portraits

At the same time, you see ads proudly announcing that “the future is conversational” – to sell you an AI chatbot that “talks like a human” in your place.

In short: outsource the conversation, put it between your business and people, and call that connection.

Clients talk to a machine, convinced they’re being listened to.

I call this finalizing the cut: finishing what started long ago between us and others, and between us and ourselves.

Talking to an AI to pretend we’re having a conversation, while behind the screen we turn into an empty shell letting a system answer in our place.

And in the middle of all this, if you say you don’t want to pretend to chat with avatars while your “AI agent” handles your leads, you’re politely labeled “antisocial”.

Ironic, isn’t it?

No one really asks what we’re actually saving time on.

Because you can’t “save time” on the death of a loved one, on a complicated relationship, on a bond you’re trying to save, on someone you don’t dare call.

If we save time on the relationship itself, what’s left at the end?

A clean Excel sheet stuck to the fridge door, and a carefully optimized emptiness.

The kind of “simplicity” that complicates everything

The promise is always the same: “make your life easier”.

More technology, more tools, more automation.

The result: you spend your days maintaining systems that are supposed to set you free.

You become a technician of your own alienation:

• you set up scenarios
• you monitor stats
• you talk to a “list” of thousands of people you know nothing about, hoping to suck a few of them in along the way

Everything is more “fluid”, supposedly.

Except that you no longer really know who you’re talking to, or why.

When symbolic gestures turn into “use cases”

In funnel language, a portrait becomes just another “personalized product”:

• same type of page
• same “simple, fast, efficient” promise
• same “original gift” checkbox in a long list of options

Just one more box to tick.

The problem isn’t paying for something.
The problem is when the industrial frame crushes the intention.

You want to tell someone “I love you”,
and you end up filling out a payment form with an express delivery option.

Somewhere along the way, the whole meaning of the human gesture gets lost.

The funnel pulls. The portrait looks back.

In a funnel, there is always a vertical movement:
someone pulls, someone is pulled.

The goal is not the encounter.
The goal is to move someone from one box to the next.

In a portrait (as in my professional work), the logic is the opposite:

• there’s no predator and no prey
• there are two people looking at each other

One agrees to be seen, with everything that comes with it: nakedness, memory, contradictions.
The other agrees to take that gaze seriously, not to turn it into “content”.

You can try to “scale” that if you want.

But quite quickly you realize that what you’re optimizing is not the quality of the bond:
it’s your ability not to feel it anymore.

Why I don’t want to “scale” my portraits

I don’t make portraits to flatter an ego or to feed a LinkedIn profile.
I’m not here to fill a spreadsheet of prospects, but to meet stories.

Yes, I make a living from this.
Yes, I charge.
No, I’m not going to pretend I do everything “for the love of art”.

But that doesn’t justify turning people into KPIs.

This is not an anti‑marketing crusade. It’s simply a refusal to sacrifice the relationship on the altar of optimization.

I don’t want to:

• churn out 10,000 portraits with the help of an “AI agent”
• promise “express portrait delivered in 24h” like a Prime parcel
• multiply orders just so I can post “results” and “client testimonials” every week

Not because I’m pure, but because I know the quality of what I do would collapse – and with it, everything that still makes my life somewhat bearable: the respect I have for the people who trust me with something, and the respect I have for myself.

What I protect by working “badly” (according to the market)

By refusing optimized funnels, I lose:

• quick “just want something nice” requests
• people who want “cheap work with 10 versions”
• numbers that shoot up – at least, that’s the promise

In reality, it’s a lot of time spent producing, posting, “being everywhere”, paying for ads… for wildly inconsistent results.

Content cancels itself out: same promises, same structures, same arguments.

And especially the same buzzwords everywhere – including “scale”, which now shows up just as much in SaaS as in care and emotional support offers.

But I gain something else:

• the right to say no when a request feels hollow
• the time to have a real exchange, even a short one
• the possibility for someone to arrive with their gaps, awkwardness, silences

Without being pushed to a FAQ, a chatbot, or worse: nothing at all, just a “pay” button with no way to ask a question.

I write emails by hand, for every single commission.
Yes, by hand. Every time.

Today, talking to clients individually almost sounds unbelievable.
And yet, it still exists.

What shocks me most, in this already not‑very‑shiny world, is that in the end a large part of the “pros” don’t even notice the existence of the person they’re selling to.

Their passage leaves nothing but a few data points in an Analytics table.

No real contact, just a well‑oiled tunnel designed to move a target from an ad to a “pay” button, without ever speaking to them as a human being.

Is that what we now call normality, evolution, progress?

Life as a spreadsheet: friendship turned into KPIs, spouses into ROI, clients into numbers.
Treating humans like rows in a spreadsheet doesn’t exactly lead to the best outcomes, in business or anywhere else.
Just look around.

I’d rather work with fewer people, but in conditions where what I do still makes sense.
It’s not a moral pose, though maybe there’s a bit of that.
Mostly, it’s a way to protect my mental health and the quality of what I offer.

What I actually do

A portrait, for me, is not “a product”.
It’s a way to hold a bond, to make a gesture for someone, to give shape to something you don’t know how to say otherwise.

In practice:

• someone writes to me
• we talk about the person, the context, what is at stake
• I say whether I feel able to do it or not
• we agree on a format, a timeframe, a price
• I work, then I deliver

No chatbot pretending to have a conversation.
No automated email sequence “to move you closer to the purchase”.
No “add to cart” button.

What I sell is not a quick image.
It’s time and attention.

My kind of clarity

My goal is not to fill a tank of anonymous clients.
My goal is to create objects that last, for people I’ve taken the time to understand at least a little.

If you’re looking for an optimized, automated process with checkboxes and impossible deadlines, you’ll have no trouble finding it.
The market is full of options – and of chatbots happy to talk to you.

If you’re looking for something more sincere, a little slower (then again… China is pretty far), a little less “scalable”, we can talk.

And if you want to see what this “we can talk” looks like in practice, you’ll find the details here:
→ Portraits