This week we held the 63^rd conversation for my bi-monthly Blue Stocking Art Salon’s via the smARTist conference line.

Besides my lovely host, and even lovelier artist, Lori Wolfson, we were joined by 7 other artists—all curious to find out more from themselves, and each other, what it means to have a relationship with the art they make.

At first blush, the idea of “having a relationship” with your art may seem like a non-starter. Of course we have a relationship with whatever we do, so what’s the big deal?

My thought was that, for many artists, their relationship has been ongoing long enough that it is taken for granted, hardly given a second thought much less a second glance.

But since that relationship to your art is the entire foundation for your art career, I decided it was time to 

I’ve been holding a lot of one-on-one, in depth conversations with artists who know they have hit a mud flat and are spinning their wheels.

Within the first hour of our conversation, something clicks into place – an insight they didn’t have before.

Suddenly, a light is shining on what had been in shadows before our call, and the artist can feel something opening up inside, expanding into the pathways for the dream, which they have always longed for, to be realized.

At this point, artists usually ask how much the mentoring /coaching service is going to cost.

And for some of these artists, often the ones who are hurting the most, the value of what they have just experienced, and know they will continue to experience if they work with me, gets strangled in the net of price.

In one moment, the precious, incalculable value of their insights become tangled up in lines of scarcity and fear, and then falls over a cliff, disappearing from view.

Sometimes artists can grab a hold of the lifeline I throw them, so they climb back up and see the vista that is always there, waiting for them.

Other times, the conditioning and hooks around money sink the dream—as it has for these artists from time immemorial.

What, you may wonder – as I have – has really happened here?

I’ve often felt that paradox is the highest level of human intelligence, at least at this point in our evolution.

It’s certainly one of the hallmarks of creative behavior, also known as Janusian Thinking (Janus being the Greek god with two heads facing in opposite directions).

When you can hold opposite perspectives, ideas, or feelings simultaneously, you free your mind from automatic, familiar patterns of thinking and behavior.

You open the door for more possibilities.

Robert Fritz, one of the keynote speakers at a smARTist Telesummit, has another take on paradox and how it supports your creativity.

Check it out and let me know you think…

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The Paradoxical Flow of Creativity

by Robert Fritz

When we create, we do two things that are apparently opposite.

We actively focus the creative process toward the full manifestation of our vision, while at the same time allowing ourselves to be aimless and non-directive.

We are narrow and wide, active and

I have come to the startling conclusion that marketing is passé for visual fine artists.

That the whole concept of marketing in the art world has spiraled into a paint-by-numbers campaign with everyone trying to figure out the right formula.

There’s one set of rules for the 1% of the art world – the snob-filled, high-end world of auction houses and galleries where price lists are taboo – and another set of rules for the 99% of the art world – the artists who fill up the thousands and thousands of private galleries, art fairs, and museums sprinkled all around the globe.

The 1% crowd has no need for being approached through marketing. Their collectors are already captivated by their own lust for status, and catered to through strategies reserved for luxury and an overflowing bank account.

That leaves the 99% wondering how to sell their art while secretly yearning