Blog

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...

As a smart, sensitive, creative person, you likely believe in both self-expression and self-awareness. I’m guessing that both matter to you. Which means that you likely journal, as journaling allows you to express yourself and learn important lessons from yourself. If...

Completing projects is a problem for lots of artists. To learn lots of techniques for completing your art, take a look at my most recent book The Coach’s Guide to Completing Creative Work. It’s filled with tips and strategies that will help! In a recent post, I...