Blog

Because artists tend to have fertile imaginations, lots of brainpower, and also plenty of anxieties and challenges, they are prone to unproductive obsessions where their mind gets stuck thinking repetitively about worrisome things. However, this same penchant for...

The creative process, the creative personality, and living the artist’s life all generate a substantial amount of anxiety. The sources of all this anxiety are many: the need to go into the unknown to create, a chronic lack of self-confidence, the difficulty of...

We have to break our habit of routinely and reflexively turning to one of our “distraction addictions” to while away our free minutes. As a matter of routine, and without thinking about it, people nowadays check their email, browse the news online, turn to Facebook,...

Addiction is a grave problem for many creatives. Can they still create while addicted? Many do. Countless creatives have managed to unleash their creative potential while in the throes of an addiction. Just visit any jazz club, rock-and-roll venue, after hours actors’...

The following vignette is from my creativity coaching practice. ** Jack worked in grays. His skies were gray; his fields were gray; everything he did felt like a dark day in winter. Clouds hanging low, a storm coming … his paintings made you want to turn up the heat...

Who doesn’t procrastinate? It’s a natural human tendency, given that the thing we need to do may be making us anxious, may feel too difficult to accomplish, may come with risks (like the risk of failure or the risk of exposure), may involve us stretching in...

Some quotations you might enjoy on craftsmanship, lifelong learning, and the artistic process: + "Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you from being a genius."--Pierre-Auguste Renoir + "If you can handle three elements, then handle only two. If you can handle ten, then...

I’ll be starting a mania study group in a week and I’d love to have you join it. This is a free group where I’ll guide us through some original ideas about mania. I hope that you’ll learn a lot from me, from yourself, and from one another. To join, drop me an email to...

No, you can’t create your art website in a day. But you can create it sooner rather than later! Don’t get bogged down and throw up your hands, as so many artists do. Follow these ten tips and get going! 1. Don’t worry. You aren’t aiming for a perfect site! You may not...

I was chatting with an artist yesterday who was having trouble figuring out what to call her paintings. She knew the history of art and knew that what she was painting could fit into the categories of narrative painting, classical painting, philosophical painting, and...