Naomi is a second year Fine Art student at Art Academy Minerva. She moved from Bulgaria to pursue a career as an artist.
'I always drew a lot when I was younger. When I went to pursue language studies in my home country, I completely stopped making art. I felt like the academic environment was a lot of pressure and wasn’t for me and I didn’t feel happy in this environment. My mom pushed me to do art and brought me in contact with an art teacher and I started taking drawing lessons from him. He told me I was supposed to be an artist and motivated me to go the art academy. I guess it’s always been in the back of my head, but I never had the courage to do something with it.'
'Via an agency in my home country I found out about Minerva, and here I’ve been given the opportunity to be an artist and I felt like I could benefit a lot from being here.'
'I think a lot of the classes that we have here are very geared towards us as individual artists. We are studying, after all, to be autonomous artists, which can be challenging cause you’re not being told what to do; you’re your own boss in a way.'
'What I have really learnt is that I didn't really know much about what it's like being an artist until I came here. Here we do have a lot of classes that really focus on getting you out of your comfort zone and they really want to show you what the reality of being an artist is. For example, for the professional practice classes, we did exercises where we had to do networking, interview artists or help artists. Because of this, it made me realise networking is very important for an artist. I'm very active in the art scene now and I feel like I wouldn't have been this active in the art scene if I hadn't done these assignments.'
'There’s also a lot of freedom within the curriculum. For example, we get mixed in the OffCourses and work on diverging projects together with students from the other programmes of Minerva, which in my opinion is a great idea. We get a variety of new teachers, even sometimes alumni.'
'The teachers here are very open and not only understand you for your academical part, but also you as a person. I've had moments when I'm feeling down, or made a painting I’m not happy with and shared this with my teacher. They really appreciate us talking about our feelings, we’re actually encouraged to talk about them as this is also part of the process. Together we then would look at what we can do and they usually are very supportive, inspire me or push me.'
'The community at Minerva is very tight. Sometimes people are working in the main hall and you walk by and you really love the work that they're doing. You can just go up to them and give them a compliment about their work and they get very excited. They start to talk more about their work and you can just see the sparkle in their eyes, lighting up when people show that they're interested. I think this is great. I share a studio with around seven people and sometimes we order pizza and have dinner together, work together and inspire each other.'
