Your job as an artist is to live in a way that makes you proud of yourself. Tell the universe where you stand, then take action.
...Of course, there are so many other roadbumps, & Eric Maisel deals with them all -- the facts of existence, our ego & narcissism, our anxieties, our relationships -- and sorts them out.
You'll get depressed, because you've opted to matter. Read this book thoroughly & understand that you need to restore meaning each time it takes a blow. Creative troubles may be complicated, but the solutions here are simple. This one's a true treasure!!
Maisel argues that creatives become depressed when they lack meaning in their lives. Drugs? A review of the past? Possibly helpful but, for most creatives, depression will be alleviated when people learn to find meaning in what they do. Given the rejections and setbacks of the creative life, Maisel's message is, "Find meaning in what you create, regardless of whether you find a buyer....
And the book is realistic: some people have to come to terms with creating art as a sideline, not a main source of income. We could have learned much more about this difficult topic.
As other reviewers have noted, this book is considerably stronger on insight than on guidance. We get page after page of notes from other "creativity coaches," presumably trained by Maisel. I found myself skipping those accounts after awhile, which left a fairly thin book. After all, we buy a book to gain the author's expertise -- not a series of anecdotes by those who have not traveled as far on the knowledge highway.
The author urges us to come up with a mission statement for ourselves along with a series of "core operating principles." In practice, I have found this prescription difficult to follow for myself and my own clients. A life purpose tends to evolve out of one's own experience and I believe we gain purpose from serendipitous discovery, not from sitting down to set guidelines.
Despite these concerns, I recommend this book for the gems that can be found, especially in the first part of the book. Understanding the source of creative depression is a good first step. Unfortunately, it is only the first step, and we could use a lot more follow-up.
I also can't help noticing that Van Gogh Blues communicates nearly the same message as The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, just packaged differently. The message of "show up" and "it takes less energy to do the work than to resist" appears in both sources.
A blocked creative -- the target of Cameron's work -- seems to resemble the depressed creative that Maisel writes about. Some readers will undoubtedly prefer one approach to the other.