"If there is one essential survival skill that you must learn, it is how to sustain yourself and your work over the years. There is really only one way to do this, and that is by loving what you do, being fascinated by your work, and by being obsessed by making art. You will get in trouble if you need the approval of others to keep your work moving forward. After all these years, the one essential element in my practive, the one thing I am sure of is that I need to be interested in and happy about what I am doing in the studio.

So many of the concerns you bring up in your letter, these worries of yours - the Seduction of Commerce, the Cost of Studio space, the Need to Develop a Sense of Self - they all sound like the topics for think pieces in the Sunday Times, and they have the same slighly banal gravitas. We have fatter fish to fry, you and I, some really important issues to ponder, like the mysteries of space and light and colour and form.

The rest is just living, and your problems there, my friend, are the same as everyone else's. There's nothing special about the world part of the art world though we like to pretend there is.

Lets get back to work."

Thomas Nozkowski from Letters to a Young Artist