Who writes a travel memoir and doesn't include photos? Well, Committed: A Memoir of the Artist's Road is consistent with other literary memoirs in that the burden is on the author to place you in the scene solely via prose. But we all love pictures, right? That's why I was thrilled to be invited to participate …
Continue reading Traveling the Artist’s Road: A Photo Collection
Very few creatives completely support themselves financially through their art. It is those who struggle to find the time and creative energy to produce while managing other work responsibilities that I am thinking about today as those of us in the United States celebrate Labor Day. Take the more than forty creatives I interviewed on …
"Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever. Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole." So said Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing of creativity. The author of The Golden Notebook, who passed away recently at the age of 94, said this five years ago when describing …
My tour of a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) grade school in Akron, Ohio, serves as my launching point for a look at arts education--and the effort to add an A for arts to make STEAM--in a guest post I wrote for Artist Think. This thought-provoking blog is produced by visual artist, writer, and …
God-given. Gifted. Blessed. These are adjectives and nouns we use when referring to someone as talented. We are suggesting that talent was a gift the individual received before he or she was even born. So if a creative produces a breathtaking work of art, and she is talented, why would we complement her by suggesting …
It is one of my greatest fears. I have abandoned my creativity before; this blog is my chronicle of returning to an art-committed life and working to stay there. That is also a central theme of the travel memoir I am in the process of polishing to final. But it is so easy to drift away …
Continue reading 3 Steps Off the Path of an Art-Committed Life
I savor the comments readers leave on this blog. But often they are apologetic in tone, along the lines of "I'm not really a writer," or "I aspire to be a writer." In the technical sense of the word "writer," at least as I see it, these statements are a lie. They "wrote" a comment, …
Every artist on some level understands that the actions of an artist are dictated by technology. Before Gutenberg invented the printing press, writers were far more limited in page count with wound codexes. The sound amplification technology provided by a piano allowed compositions intended for far larger audiences than a harpsichord. We focus on Kindles …
For the last decade I have repeatedly emphasized a correlation between the encouragement of creativity in childhood and professional, personal and economic success later in life. I have done so here on this blog, and previously as a think tank senior fellow and artist's rights advocate. I have not been alone in this belief. I …
The Artist's Road is, at its heart, a conversation with its readers. It draws its strength from the quality and depth of its comments, left by thoughtful, reflective commenters. I am continually amazed at the wisdom left there; I love that my blog posts allow me to learn from my readers. So I'd like to …
Continue reading Kudos to the Artist’s Road Commenters of 2012
The Artist's Road 