I just read a fascinating article in the NY Times about Budd Schulberg, a writer with a stunning career of screen credits, the most famous being the classic, On The Waterfront (Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint).

During the Joseph McCarthy era of Communist witch hunting, Schulberg named names of his colleagues to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and to his dying day defended his behavior. Good people lost jobs, lost reputations. He literally destroyed families because of his testimony.

The question posed in this article is simple: Do we boycott good, even great art because the artist’s behavior falls below our standards of a “good” person?

I know Picasso was famous for being difficult, but did he destroy people’s lives?

I have a personal connection to this idea coming from my childhood days with…

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I’ve been talking to a lot of artists lately in a series of strategy sessions, and I’m watching a pattern replicate itself like an out-of-control virus.

I’ve come to call it the Business Bitters–that mouth puckering contrast to the sweet taste of creative flow.

The story is simple and timeless: artist paints or sculpts or weaves or throws or composes, experiencing a kind of…

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It’s easy to deride Artist Statements. I’ve done it myself countless times when they are pompous, self-congratulatory, or badly written and trite, trite, trite.

But like the About section of any website, where we click in the hopes of connecting with the human being behind the virtual page, an artist statement has only one purpose…

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After the tangible evidence of your art itself, and the quality of your unique artist’s voice, the three most important pillars of success are choices made, confidence radiated, and contrast illuminated.

Choice supports growth, responsibility, and self-validation

Making choices (and giving ourselves permission to make mistakes because we’ve made a choice) is the single, strongest pillar of growth.

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Henri Matisse "Blue Nude"

Too often, creativity is equated with the wide open prairies of freedom where we’ve been conditioned to believe that unlimited roaming is what calls forth our creative impulses.

It reminds me of liberal parenting, that knee jerk reaction to authoritarian parenting where children were seen and not heard, and you spared the rod only to…

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In the old days it was location, location, location.

Now, it’s attitude, attitude, attitude.

We know this is true, especially as social media marketing takes over the traditional way of doing business.

I mean, it’s always been true that our attitude…

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In Motion by Lori Wolfson

It’s been great fun being here and sharing this wonderful blog, but it’s time for me to move on.  My work here is done. The canvas calls me and I must attend.

Have a wonderful time all you artists and good luck in all you do.  Until we meet again…

And thank you, Ariane, for the opportunity to spend this valuable and rewarding time here with you.  You are one of a kind and, as an artist, I can’t tell you how much your support and work out there in the world for us all means to me!

Abstract 1/3 by Lori Wolfson

All is tumbling down.  How to proceed safely?  Where to step when everything is shifting?  Like Alice, falling, falling, I wonder at the strangeness of my surroundings as I sink.  What is this sudden hurtling rush of events and circumstances, and what am I to make of them?

Like the midpoint in a painting, when you’re far enough away from the beginning to…

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What many people outside the arts don’t understand, is that succeeding in this gig takes as much discipline as it does for the CEO, Athlete, Lawyer, Doctor.

In many cases it takes more, especially if you also have a day job. Because, your “night job” is a calling that we almost never feel equal to, in which we regularly disappoint ourselves, and from which the check is normally late-possibley by a decade or two. 

Sticking with something, for which you may never get paid, and doing it with full-blown passion for years on end-takes…

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Grace Cathedral, New York City by Lori Wolfson

I used to look at writing a blog like being one of those people who get on the subway and tell their story to their briefly held captive audience.  Like when you’re on the train in New York and it stops, and people get off and people get on, and the doors close.  And then the train starts to move again.

And sometimes an unusual-looking person emerges from the dulled anonymity and proceeds to…

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I’ve been feeling the crunch of time lately; chewing away at emails, tasting the flavor of helping clients, swallowing whole chunks of I’m-not-getting-to-what-I-want-to-do.

And now that smARTist 2009 is over, one of the consistent messages I hear from artists is, How can I do it all?

Given the vast range of art career information that smARTISTs encounter over the 7 days of the conference, I’m not surprised that suddenly they have even more on their plates than before.

So I thought the perfect remedy, for all of us, would be Waverly Fitzgerald, our Slow Time Lady expert from the smARTist Telesummit 2008

This post is one in a series of her time-tested ideas about helping time work for you!

She has a unique take on time, and our relationship to it. Instead of the more traditional ”management” approach to all things hourly, daily, and monthly, Waverly advocates a sense of…

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what about you?

Why do you make art?

Blue Cat by Lori Wolfson

I mean, if all the outside rewards and possibilities of recognition and praise and money were removed from the picture, what would be left?

Do you ever think about what is at the core – the heart – of this need we have to make pictures?

Do you ever wonder?

To me it’s quite mysterious; I wonder all the time.

But, what about you?  What moves your hand and eye?

After spending the last five months figuring out this Social Media thing, getting set up on Facebook, finding an expert for smARTist Telesummit 2009, and encouraging artists to jump into this vast and ever expanding ocean, the predictably unpredictable  world of all things online has thrown me, and you, not just a curve ball, but…

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Contrary to a commonly held notion, we artists do not suffer more than other people.  There is so much unspeakable suffering in the world-from famine, war, and rampant disease-that many of us in the industrialized nations don’t even know the meaning of true suffering, including me.  I’m not saying that artists don’t have it…

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I’m so excited by what just happened on the First Day of smARTist 2009 that I simply have to share some of it with you.

The five panel members…

as far afield from each other as Molly Gordon in Seattle, Guillermo Cuellar in New England, Nancy Marmalejo and Lucia Cappacionne in Southern California, and artist Shirley Williams in Ontario, Canada…

…seemed to be flowing from an interconnected river of knowledge as they responded to the questions that came straight from this year’s smARTist participants. 

I found the panel’s answers to be practical in their collective wisdom, that only when we…

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