Stuart Bailey Speaks Up
Speak Up: What brings you to New York from Amsterdam?
Stuart Bailey:The impetus was essentially negative, more about wanting to leave Amsterdam rather than live in New York; leaving a small city (or one that had shrunk after five years) for a big one, for the physical surroundings and atmosphere rather than work or community%u2014though of course the reasons are always changing. Being typically English I never really made any headway with the Dutch language, and so was always on the surface of things, back and forwards between there and London or Warsaw, which is typical of the Netherlands as much as my laziness, because I don%u2019t think it%u2019s a very deep place. It%u2019s a surface society, and as such not a very satisfying place. The international community I know live with a sense of passing through: it%u2019s ephemeral. That was certainly true in my case and I just got tired of living in that frame of mind. The new place could have equally been London or Warsaw as far as I was concerned, but New York suddenly made a lot of sense as I already have a certain circle here%u2014a lot of writers for Dot Dot Dot, generally ex-students of Paul Elliman at Yale. And most of all because the designer and writer David Reinfurt was incredibly generous and happy for me to work with and from his midtown studio O-R-G, like some guardian angel.
dot dot dot
[tags]graphic design, visual culture, immigration, independent publishing, writing, magazine[/tags]
