Blog

Many children of authoritarian parents try very hard to do what their parents say, meet their parents’ expectations, make their parents proud, and excel at everything they try. When this doesn’t get them what they crave—love, a kind word, recognition—their inner world...

[Learn about journal coaching. A new journal coach training begins in November. Learn more here! At the time we began working together, Anne was hiding out in Provence, licking her wounds after an unsuccessful show of her paintings at a prestigious Parisian gallery....

As a young man, I spent all of 1974 traveling through Europe. Iceland, Ireland, England, the Netherlands, France, Hungary … all the usual and unusual suspects. During my six weeks in Ireland, I acquired a girlfriend—that was lovely. I was pulled off the night train,...

[If you’d like to meet some of your fellow travelers, please come join my new Eric Maisel Community.] In talking about certain of her desert paintings, Georgia O’Keeffe once remarked, “Slits in nothingness are not very easy to paint.” Indeed. Being on the...

What can community mean to a lone wolf? There is the story of a farmer who attended an auction where a painting of his farm was being sold. When the bidding was over and the painting had sold for a hefty price, the farmer exclaimed, “But he could have had the whole...

Some books haunt me a little. Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s 1956 novel about a young man in Paris, is one of those. I read it when I was very young, probably not yet a teenager, at a time when I was reading just about anything and everything, from Eric Ambler spy...

Get my “Top Challenges of the Visual Artist” webinar FREE when you join the Eric Maisel Community Are you a painter, sculptor, printmaker, pastel artist, watercolor artist, collage artist, graphic designer, computer-assisted artist, weaver, potter, photographer, or...

I'm creating a community and one feature of that community is that twice a month we'll gather (virtually) to do our real work together: writers will write, singer/songwriters will compose, painters will paint, coaches will build their coaching programs, actors will...

[To submit a question to be answered, please drop me an email to ericmaisel@hotmail.com] ** Hello, Dr. Maisel: I’m a painter and I live in a small town in Greece, very far from the action. I have it easy here, because I live at home and my parents support me. But I...

The revised and updated version of Why Smart People Hurt will be coming out in August. The new edition is called Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt: A Toolkit for Thriving in a Chaotic World and you can preorder it now. The new edition has a foreword...