It's Never Too Late To Start with Artist Lisa Congdon
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
As we begin a new year, we’re revisiting one of our most encouraging conversations on I Like Your Work—my interview with artist, author, and educator Lisa Congdon. Lisa’s story is a powerful reminder that there is no single timeline for becoming an artist. She didn’t begin pursuing art seriously until later in life, and her career unfolded through persistence, curiosity, and a deep commitment to learning. In this episode, Lisa shares what it was like to start later, how she built confidence in her work, and how she navigated the fears and doubts that often accompany a...
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Applying to Artist Residencies: CVA Insights & Practical Application Tips
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
Artist residencies play an important role in supporting creative development, professional growth, and sustained studio practice. This episode offers insight into artist residencies through the lens of Chautauqua Visual Arts, alongside practical guidance for artists preparing strong, thoughtful applications. Chautauqua Visual Arts offers two distinct residency experiences, each designed to support artists at different stages and working styles. The Faculty-Led Six-Week Residency is designed for emerging/student artists seeking an immersive, structured experience. The program...
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Keep Painting: John Walker on a Life in the Studio
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
We’re revisiting one of my favorite conversations from the archive with painter John Walker, an episode that feels just as relevant now as when it first aired. In this conversation, John reflects on what it means to stay with the work over decades, how a painting practice evolves over time, and the quiet discipline required to keep showing up to the studio. We talk about the deeply meaningful realities of a life devoted to making art. As we move into a new year, this episode feels like the perfect reminder that sustainable creative lives aren’t built overnight they’re...
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Doing the Next Thing in Your Art Practice: Following What Lights You Up in the New Year
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
In this New Year episode of I Like Your Work, I talk about doing the next thing in your art practice by following what genuinely lights you up — even when it means making a change. I share why I chose to refocus my energy on teaching, creating courses, and building spaces for artists, and how that clarity led me to an exciting move to Patreon. This shift makes it easier for more artists to access professional practice support, classes, and conversations in a way that’s flexible, affordable, and rooted in real studio life. I Like Your Work Links: ...
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Do It Afraid — Creative Planning for Artists Starting the Year Strong
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
In this mini episode of I Like Your Work, I talk about why waiting to feel “ready” or confident keeps so many artists stuck and how planning your artistic year while feeling afraid can actually be the most honest place to start. This episode is for artists who: Feel overwhelmed when thinking about the year ahead Struggle with creative fear, doubt, or perfectionism Want to plan their art practice without burning out Are ready to make work even when clarity hasn’t arrived yet You don’t need to eliminate fear to move forward. You can do it afraid. I share simple,...
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Sculptor Lydia Musco on Finding Clarity in Your Studio Practice
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
Lydia Jenkins Musco’s work has been exhibited in galleries and public spaces throughout the United States. With an MFA from Boston University and a BA from Bennington College, her artistic practice has been shaped by international experiences, including stone carving studies in Italy and participation in art symposia in Norway, South Korea, and China. Musco’s work has earned recognition through awards including two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, and an Edward F. Albee Residency Fellowship, among others. Her work has been featured in exhibitions...
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What’s Happening at Miami Art Week 2025: Artist Takeaways from Art Basel, NADA, Untitled & SCOPE
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
If you’ve been watching the Miami energy from afar and wondering what it all means for your studio practice, this episode gives you the trends, themes, and takeaways that actually matter for artists.In this episode, Erika covers: • The big-picture trends shaping Miami Art Week 2025: – Institutional validation and residencies becoming more influential – The shift toward sustainable careers and long-term practice – Experiential installations dominating many fairs – Latin American and Caribbean artists in the spotlight – The ongoing market...
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Italian Journey: Corot, Goethe & the Self We Discover
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
In this episode, Erika explores how observation, travel, and memory shape artistic practice, inspired by her upcoming class in Italy, The Symbolic Landscape. Drawing from Corot’s plein air studies and Goethe’s Italian Journey, she reflects on how artists discover themselves through what they see—whether in a distant landscape or a simple daily moment. The episode invites listeners to make space for beauty and reflection, wherever they are, and to see art as both a return to the world and a way to transcend it. Dates: May 10 - May 24 Early Registration Discount: A 20%...
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Understanding Your Experience with Painter Gail Spaien
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
Gail Spaien (b. 1958, Hartford, Connecticut) is an American artist and educator based in Maine. Her studio practice centers around the idea that a painting is a site of connection; an object that transmits emotion from one person to another. She is of a lineage of artists who think craft and beauty shape and build a more relational world. Spaien has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Ucross Foundation (2024), Varda Artist Residency Program, Djerassi Foundation Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture....
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Most Overlooked Area in Open Calls
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
In this episode, I'm diving into open calls including what jurors look for when reviewing applications, and why the description box is crucial for providing context about your artwork. I'm also sharing practical tips on how artists can use detailed descriptions to make their submissions stand out and highlighting resources for artists to improve their application process. I Like Your Work Links: Thank you to our sponsor, Sunlight Tax. Apply for our Winter Exhibition: Deadline is November 15: ...
info_outlineIn this episode, I touch on mystery in art—the space between knowing and not knowing that drives us to create and share Philip Guston’s essay “Faith, Hope, and Impossibility”.
Faith, Hope, and Impossibility- Philip Guston
“There are so many things in the world—in the cities—so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make. To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish. (What a sympathy is demanded of the viewer! He is asked to “see” the future links.)
For me the most relevant question and perhaps the only one is, “When are you finished?” When do you stop? Or rather, why stop at all? But you have to rest somewhere. Of course you can stay on one surface all your life, like Balzac’s Frenhofer. And all your life’s work can be seen as one picture—but that is merely “true.” There are places where you pause.Thus it might be argued that when a painting is “finished,” it is a compromise. But the conditions under which the compromise is made are what matters. Decisions to settle anywhere are intolerable. But you feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all—or is not even possible.
The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance: it is too primitive or hopeful, or mere notions, or simply startling, or just another means to make life bearable.
You cannot settle out of court. You are faced with what seems like an impossibility—fixing an image which you can tolerate. What can be Where? Erasures and destructions, criticisms and judgments of one’s acts, even as they force change in oneself, are still preparations merely reflecting the mind’s will and movement. There is a burden here, and it is the weight of the familiar. Yet this is the material of a working which from time to time needs to see itself; even though it is reluctant to appear.
To will a new form is inacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else—a condition somewhat unclear, but which in retrospect becomes a very precise act. This “thing” is recognized only as it comes into existence. It resists analysis—and probably this is as it should be. Possibly the moral is that art cannot and should not be made.
All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art—with their need and contempt for one another. Of necessity, to create is a temporary state and cannot be possessed, because you learn and relearn that it is the lie and mask of Art and, too, its mortification, which promise a continuity.
There are twenty crucial minutes in the evolution of each of my paintings. The closer I get to that time—those twenty minutes—the more intensely subjective I become—but the more objective, too. Your eye gets sharper; you become continuously more and more critical.There is no measure I can hold on to except this scant half-hour of making.
One of the great mysteries about the past is that such masters as Mantegna were able to sustain this emotion for a year.
The problem, of course, is far more complex that mere duration of “inspiration.” There were pre-images in the fifteenth century, foreknowledge of what was going to be brought into existence. Maybe my pre-image is unknown to me, but today it is impossible to act as if pre-imaging is possible.
Many works of the past (and of the present) complete what they announce they are going to do, to our increasing boredom. Certain others plague me because I cannot follow their intentions. I can tell at a glance what Fabritius is doing, but I am spending my life trying to find out what Rembrandt was up to.
I have a studio in the country—in the woods—but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day. Everyone destroys marvelous paintings. Five years ago you wiped out what you are about to start tomorrow.
Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.
Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing.Two artists always fascinate me—Piero della Francesca and Rembrandt. I am fixed on those two and their insoluble opposition. Piero is the ideal painter: he pursued abstraction, some kind of fantastic, metaphysical , perfect organism. In Rembrandt, the plane of art is removed. It is not a painting, but a real person—a substitute, a golem. He is really the only painter in the world!
Certain artists do something and new emotion is brought into the world; its real meaning lies outside of history and the chains of causality.
Human consciousness moves, but it is not a leap: it is one inch. One inch is a small jump, but that jump is everything. You go way out and then you have to come back—to see if you can move that inch.
I do not think of modern art as Modern Art. The problem started long ago, and the question is: Can there be any art at all?
Maybe this is the content of modern art.”
Philip Guston Originally published in Art News Annual XXXI, 1966.å Adapted from notes for a lecture at the New York Studio School in May 1965.
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