Many artists who don't go off to art school come to New York. It's about what you learn when you're here.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
New York is a great place to be fed in the arts. The arts in general are a large part of my life. The city was my postgraduate course.
Finding your place as an artist is the hardest thing. You come out of college with what feels like a Mickey Mouse degree that qualifies you for nothing in the real world.
I feel the art world in New York has a stronger following than Britain. If you go to a New York art district on a Saturday morning, it will be so busy with families and openings - art is much more ingrained in the culture.
When you live in New York and are an artist and are interested in people, you meet a lot of people.
When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.
Any excuse to live in New York and do art. Has to be one of the most rewarding experiences in the world.
When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn't be a 'real artist', so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York.
New York is the place that made my and other artists' dreams come true by giving us a chance to realise our ideas and concepts. It was a great place for making a presentation of artistic creation.
When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within.
Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.