Rev. 10/16/05

October, 2005

    I want to thank you again for the time, and quite a generous amount of time, you spent on the phone with me last Thursday. It really meant a lot to me that at your level of success, you would take such time to help me out as a beginner. The information you gave me about finishing steel was very helpful. You also gave me the encouragement to just experiment and let the metal tell me how it's working. It's obvious to me that not only are you a fantastic artist, but a very generous, kind, and caring soul. You took the time to caution me about health risks involved with metal sculpting and provided me details of how to be preventive and safe. You even shared your knowledge of some other subjects that affect each and every one of us on this earth, and this information was both important and enlightening.
    I wish you continued great successes. Students are fortunate that you are out there. I plan to contact you to purchase your marketing videos before the year's end.
    Espavo!
— Caren

June, 2005

Thank you, Zak, for a wonderful workshop!  I especially liked your stories from your experiences, the spiritual reflections and advice, and the gentle encouragement which we artists crave to hear — follow your heart, be true to yourself, etc.  Seeing a successful artist connect art with spirtuality reconfirms my belief that artists have a special responsibility and are healers in a sense.
— Jeanine

April, 2005

     I went to the most amazing seminar/workshop yesterday by Zak Zaikine. I had originally missed the one seminar I desperately wanted to go to, "Selling Your Art and Not Your Soul" (sounds apt, eh?), but after some correspondence with him in email he invited me to come to this seminar on publishing your own book that touched on many of the same subjects. I'm still floored at his generosity, both in inviting me to come to a $90 seminar for free and for selling me the tapes to the seminar I had truly wanted to go to at a discounted price. It's just dumbfounding, because one very rarely sees, much less expects, such generosity these days. Any days. I'm babbling, now, aren't I? He even had a real publisher there to talk with us about the business and take questions for a goodly long time!
     Either way, it was an incredibly inspiring class on not only the ins and outs of the printing, publishing, and distributing business, but about the frame of mind one needs to achieve in order to be successful and what approaches you can take with your own manner and bearing in order to attain the best results. Much of it centered on needing to sell yourself as much as your book -- to catch the attention of those you're talking to with your own enthusiasm and interest in your book, in order to get them interested as well. And that it's all right to pursue dreams of being an artist or writer, despite what anyone may say about the need to pursue a more conventional job instead. You had to have been there -- it was just that inspiring.
     If you're ever in the Northern California area at a time when he's holding another of his workshops and are even vaguely interested in breaking free of the mould of your humdrum life in order to wade into the uncertain waters of a self-propelled career, I'd highly recommend going to one. Really. If I'd had the $90 to give him, after sitting through the seminar and class and seeing how amazing they were, I would've given it to him even though he had already waived it for me. If you know me, you know I try and pinch pennies at every corner and opportunity in order to get by, so it takes a lot for me to say this. It's just such a very worthy use of your time to simply hear him talk, hear his stories and advice, about how to take your life forward and actually do what you enjoy for a living.
— Mary

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