The view from the stix

As a painter, my primary function, in an ideal world at least, is to paint. I'm building my images from the phenomonalogical world around me and from the world within. So to some extent, the output of my work is informed and infected so to speak with my surroundings. So when I think of artists in NYC and what they have that I don't, the only truthful answer is that they have NYC itself, the self proclaimed center of the art world. People working in this city have the privilege of seeing the new work that has made the grade and is flooding in from all over the world, and then they have the work that is being created there, some of it crap, and most of it, reifications of other art images flying by in an incessant swarm of imagistic ephemera. But the element that makes NYC art consistently relevant and exciting is, of course, the energy of the city, the grandeur, the monumentality of what's done there, and for this reason, NYC's status of world class art market, and international catch-all of people and ideas, I relate to New York.
I used to take trips there every six months or so, and I would spend a few days trudging through Chelsea and then up to the galleries around central park. I've been to Soho when I was working as a preparator and managed to find one good politically oriented exhibition there. At nights with friends I visited the exciting places in the city, new areas of Brooklyn mainly, some trendy and some gritty. But mostly, I walked in New York City, and soaked up the life and the energy of the place, getting lost (Brooklyn mostly, I can't get lost in Manhattan) and discovering whole worlds and communities I didn't know existed in America. There are a great diversity of ethnic neighborhoods in Queens that feel authentic to the cultures they are comprised of, like the Indian neighborhood whose Dhosa King restaurant and Hanuman temple treated me to a divine disorientation of standing on a Bombay street. Or the time I got off the train at the wrong stop in Brooklyn and ended up in the Bedford Styverson neighborhood. There were fifty gallon drums burning on the sidewalks and street vendors all over the ground, selling pungent incense and African fetishes. I definitely felt like a stranger, but I asked people and they told me how to walk back to wherever it was I was staying.
My experience of the art seemed to read more like an expose on the New York art society than a recognition of the greatest art being done in the world. A lot of my looking had to do with galleries that looked right for me, that I felt comfortable in, and work that I related to. Where could I have my big debut in NYC!? And it was exciting to talk with people and get a sense of the very normal human beings behind some of the work.
9/11 changed New York alot and i realize the impact the more I think about the city. I went up in October, 2001 and I haven't been back since. I went off to the West Coast, in search of a sanctuary left coast, fleeing from a floating tyranny across the country and around the world. But San Francisco's art infrastructure can't hold a candle to the relatively welcoming home that New York provides for artists and their creations.