Blog

Relationships in the arts are complicated. You may be very friendly with a fellow painter and also quite envious of her. You may actively dislike a gallery owner or a collector but decide that he is too valuable to cast aside, maybe because he is your only advocate or...

Unless you are impervious to the facts of existence—and no one is—you must learn how to create in the middle of things. You must learn how to create when wars are raging and when your own hormones are raging. You must learn how to create even if you hate your...

To celebrate my more than fifty books, my webmaster and guru designer Ron Wheatley has put together a gorgeous sampling of twelve of my books that we’d like to offer you as a gift. With selections from The Van Gogh Blues, Coaching the Artist Within, Mastering Creative...

The Art Bundle for Good folks do a lovely job of collecting multiple resources for artists and then providing them at one low price. Their current bundle has 111 items in it, including several by me. Mine include Connect with Gallery Owners, Curators, Collectors and...

Last week I chatted about building your list of email addresses. You absolutely want to build your list; but you also want to retain that list! A blog post that strikes the wrong note can lose you 10% of your list overnight. One well-known artist, whose large list...

“Your list” is shorthand for your ability to reach folks. You might reach folks via an electronic newsletter that you send out regularly or intermittently, a physical flyer, a brochure or a postcard that you mail, or an announcement that you make on your blog, via...

I’ve been writing a lot lately about authoritarians: what you can expect from them, how contact with them harms you and wounds you, and what you can do to heal and recover from authoritarian wounding. Artists, who are typically sensitive and who are typically aligned...

Change That Self-Talk! Marketing is hard enough without sabotaging yourself with unhelpful self-talk. You say that you don’t like marketing? Change your self-talk! Last week we looked at five unhelpful thoughts-and-reframes; here are the concluding five. 6. “There are...

Marketing is hard enough without sabotaging yourself with unhelpful self-talk. You say that you don’t like marketing? Change your self-talk! What you say to yourself helps your ability to market your art or hurts your ability to market your art. Even if the thought...

Every day we’re bombarded by small (and sometimes large) threats to our experience of life as meaningful. Maybe you get a painful rejection from a gallery. Suddenly painting (and life itself) may seem that much less meaningful. Or maybe you’ve invested meaning in a...