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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...

Maybe your artwork is piling up and you just know that you have to make some connections in the art marketplace. Still, you feel paralyzed. Let’s consider the following six obstacles to marketplace relating that may be stopping you—and what you can do to handle them....

Over the past two weeks we’ve looked at ten rules for effective marketplace relating. Below are five more—that completes the list! 11. Negotiate. It is part of our repertoire of relationship skills to negotiate but we tend not to use that skill with marketplace...

Last week we looked at five sensible rules for effective marketplace relating. Below are five more. Next week we’ll finish up with an additional five. 6. Expect people to come with shadows. Everybody you’ll be dealing with is a human being who comes with all of the...

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...

Last week we chatted about the special challenges that artists face with regard to the issue of boredom. This week: what to do! We have a billion videos to watch to fill up our spare time, a trillion blog posts to read, and a zillion tweets to send and receive. We...

Boredom is a serious psychological and existential problem for many people and an especially serious problem for creatives in recovery. If you’re creative, you’re likely to find boredom unbearable. That dreadful feeling is a trigger for using drugs or alcohol or...

Below are twenty-five challenges, vulnerabilities, risks, and needs in an artist’s life. Each of these can cause an artist to want to soothe himself with a substance or a behavior—and over time that soothing can result in an addiction. 1. Biological Risks. These are...