Blog

“Sell you cleverness and buy bewilderment”—Rumi An everyday creative person makes an effort to embrace bewilderment, even though she dislikes the feeling, because she knows that she has no other good choice! Every creative journey is marked by patches and even long...

If you’re an artist and one of your chief complaints is that your day rushes by in such a way that it is hard to secure real chunks of time to paint, then you must get very clever at organizing your mind, your equipment, and your life so as to make the best use...

We tend to associate the word “grandeur” with events like royal weddings and sights like the Grand Canyon. Hotels are grand, canals are grand, and cruise ships are grand. But something about that way of thinking prevents us from demanding grandeur from the other stuff...

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 or...

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...

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...

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...

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”...

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...

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...