Creativity Quote by David Milne

Shelter, in David Milne's phrasing, is less a comfort than a quiet confession about scarcity. He frames limited mobility as "fortunate", flipping what most workers would call a constraint into a kind of protection. The line is wry without performing wit: he’s not bragging about a thriving scene, he’s rationalizing a thin one. In a cultural economy, that matters. Artists and art-adjacent labor often live at the mercy of churn; Milne suggests a place where churn is minimal not because conditions are great, but because the exit doors are few.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side, a "sheltered environment" can mean continuity: a studio culture that doesn’t bleed talent, a stable team, fewer market pressures to contort the work into whatever sells elsewhere. On the other, the shelter is an enclosure. "Relatively few companies in Scotland" reads like an indictment of a narrow infrastructure: not enough institutions, patrons, or commercial outlets to reward specialized craft. People stay because the ecosystem can’t absorb them anywhere else.

Contextually, it’s a very Scottish cultural dilemma rendered in managerial language: peripheral regions can incubate distinctive voices precisely because they’re under-networked, then struggle to retain them once ambition meets opportunity. Milne’s intent seems practical - explaining why his circle remains intact - but the sentence carries an uneasy acknowledgment that artistic identity can be shaped as much by a lack of options as by a surplus of vision.