Blog

We’re continually bombarded by minutia—mail soliciting our car insurance and our life insurance dollars, phone calls about changing our phone service or subscribing to the local paper, television coverage of the grosses of the latest hit movies, hundreds of details at...

Have you ever thought about using nostalgia to inform your art? Read more! Nostalgia is a powerful emotion that connects us to the sweet and the bittersweet. We all possess a reservoir of special feelings about the toys and games of youth, the smells and sights, the...

Closing Galleries What if you are lucky enough to find a gallery—and it closes? What then? Read on! Recently many of my artist clients have been sharing with me the news that one or more of their galleries have closed because of poor sales. This is of course quite a...

Most artists experience at least some resistance getting to the canvas, in part because creating can feel risky. This resistance is of course mental – but it is also has a physical part! Always remember the physical part of dealing with resistance, especially if you...

How do you find your artistic voice? Where did it get lost? Read more! Very often a new coaching client will lament the fact that she “hasn’t found her painting style yet” or “hasn’t found her artistic voice yet.” She looks at her paintings and maybe likes them well...

People in the arts often find themselves wanting and needing to collaborate. These collaborations sometimes work beautifully and sometimes bring out the worst in the collaborators. It isn’t so easy when two or more individuals, each of whom has opinions, a vision, ego...

Today someone sent me a link to a website service where you can create a boilerplate artist statement in half-a-minute. You just pick a genre or two and words appear for you to copy. Say you pick “abstraction.” Here in part is what pops up: “By applying abstraction,...

We cause our own distress if we magnify the difficulty of our tasks. Our tasks are already real: there is no need to magnify them. Our language should not make hills into mountains. Making mountains out of hills is a habit to avoid. Refusing to add incendiary language...

This past week I taught a weeklong writing workshop at Esalen (on the Big Sur coast of California). Some of the writers in the room got as much as a quarter of their current book written—because they sat in their chairs and wrote! There is simply no substitute for...

Van Gogh explained, “If we look at a Japanese artist, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise. What does he spend his time doing? Studying a single blade of grass.” It is rare for a busy artist, one who is trying to find time to create and also trying to deal with the...