Blog
Settle Into Mystery
An everyday creative person celebrates, honors, and lives with mystery. When you create you lose yourself in mystery. Unfortunately most people hate the idea that they’ve been dropped into a mystery that requires unraveling. They want simple answers and unequivocal...
Do the Tiniest Thing
What tiny things does an everyday creative person do in support of her creativity? When she has an idea, she writes it down. When something catches her eye, she sketches it. When she walks down the street and something catches her attention, she is not embarrassed to...
Igniting Your Morning Creativity Practice
How do you get started on a creative project? One way is to wait until inspiration arrives. But who knows when that flash will come? A better way is to get into the habit of working! Carve out a little time each day, maybe bright and early before your “real” day...
Picking Your Stopping Point
Active stints of creating last for just a certain amount of time. Creators work and then they come to a stopping point—and how they choose that stopping point may prove the most important decision they make all day! Some creators like to stop “in the middle of things”...
Do You Take Creative Escapes?
A creative escape is a little time-out-of-time that you carve from your schedule to devote to running away TO your art! A creative escape is like getting away for a romantic weekend with your lover—except in this case your lover is your creative nature. It’s the...
What Do You Call Your Art?
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...
New Year’s Self-Forgiveness
It is amazing how fast January slips by. At such times, when our new year’s resolutions begin to fade and life seems busier and drearier than ever, what may be required is a little “self-forgiveness”: we had so many intentions and life keeps zipping along! Without...
Are you a “depressed” or “anxious” artist?
As a working artist you probably don’t have a lot of time to think about the current state of mental health services or the nature of (and problems with) the dominant mental health paradigm of “diagnosing and treating mental disorders.” You’re probably a little too...
Getting Organized for the New Year
Ready to start planning for the upcoming year? To begin with, here are five straightforward elements of a daily plan: 1. Start each day with a simple, eloquent plan like “I am painting today.” 2. Create a daily mantra that you use to keep yourself on track. It might...
Ten New Year’s Resolutions for Artists
1. I will create every day in 2016. Or almost every day! 2. I will market every day in 2016. Or at least on lots of days! 3. I will make some new, excellent connections in 2016. And not just Facebook friends and twitter followers! 4. I will find at least one person...
