On the value of being a beginner

I see this all the time teaching business to artists and designers, and it applies to everyone. The artists or designers struggle with a business model to describe what they do, and then realize that what they ultimately need is not to be paid to make the things they already know how to make, but to somehow find space inside their financials to pla

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Accessing childlike spirit in our art and our lives is worth aspiring to. It’s simple to do if you haven’t accumulated too many fixed habits and thoughts. If you have, it’s very difficult. Nearly impossible. A child has no set of premises it relies on to make sense of the world. It may serve you to do the same. Any label you assume before sitting d

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My entire philosophy of how I organize myself as a working painter can be summed up by something George Carlin said: “Just keep movin’ straight ahead. Every now and then you find yourself in a different place.”

You hear a lot in art school about how painters must continue to “grow” and “evolve”—but I think those are such bullshit words. There is gre... See more

I think that being an artist ultimately is about searching for a kind of freedom, a freedom of spirit, and a freedom in making. The moment when that is possible comes at different times for different people. You should never give up, because being an artist—there’s no one path to it. It’s not like some other fields. If you’re an artist, you’re alwa... See more

establishing your own personal constraints early on — and codifying those constraints in the tools that you choose to get started with — becomes the earliest seed of originality in what might become an incredibly fruitful hobby or path to skill development.