Blog

Summer is upon us! Here are ten inspirational quotes for this sultry season: 1. "I have gone into roses and have over a thousand planted. There is nothing like making pictures with real things."-- Mary Cassatt 2. "Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I...

Here are the thoughts of one artist raised in Europe and living in Asia about her experience of culture. Ingrid explained: "I have been living in cultures other than my own for the last ten years, in Canada, in Europe and now in Asia. Living in Singapore and creating...

Last week I chatted about the very mixed experiences that artists often have when they attend juried shows, trade shows, or art conventions and see excellent work that can cause them to doubt their own efforts and abilities. What ought an artist to do in such...

If you’re an artist, you may sometimes find yourself in one of the following situations. Maybe you enter a juried competition, one of your paintings is accepted for the competition, and, although you discover that you haven’t won a coveted ribbon, you nevertheless...

Family life, the creative life, and just plain human life all present their challenges. Do they ever! Today I wanted to invite you to take a look at my new book, Overcoming Your Difficult Family, which can help you a lot with the challenges that come with family life:...

Creating depends on you having a mind quiet enough to allow ideas to bubble up. Your emotional health also depends on your ability to get and keep a grip on your mind: on your ability to extinguish negative self-talk, foster productive obsessions while minimizing...

As we discuss anxiety and anxiety management, we also want to take a look at the thing commonly called “mania.” Mania can hit anyone, since it can be induced by street drugs and by other causes as well as by the dynamics of one’s own racing, needy brain. But I want to...

Most people who know that they are anxious do not make a sufficient effort to improve their anxiety-management skills and, by improving them, becoming less anxious. Instead they opt to “white knuckle” life or medicate themselves with anti-anxiety medication. Your core...

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...

This week we start a five-week series looking at artistic anxiety. 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...