141216 Economics and the Seattle Printmakers Center 

All my life I have directed my resources to being a teacher, and my domain of expertise is art, specifically the fine art printmaking field. As a teacher, I believe printmaking is not only a way to produce works of art on all levels—from activities of entertainment and play, amateur art and crafts projects to fully professional and commercial production business and industry.

As a teacher, I see several ways to use the art, crafts and design of printmaking for economic development for the greater Seattle area. Printmaking is set apart from other arts because it is a blend of art, technology and performance. That is why it has potential for economic development whereas other fine arts, such as painting and drawing, sculpting and ceramics for example, have less potential for economic development.

On the other hand, over the past two generations, all the arts have proved to be beneficial to economic development in the Pacific Northwest. For example, Dale Chihuly sparked the glass art industry here, which has led to significant economic developments in the tourism and arts sector. Dozens of arts-oriented institutions—profit and non-profit—have contributed to the economy.

Some of these institutions—the Pratt Center for the Arts for example—seem to already be Seattle’s printmaking centers. However, my concept is different because I also saw significant economic factors in the housing sector, with such developments as the Schack Art Center in Everett, the Tashiro-Kaplan, Artspace Mount Baker and Hiawatha Lofts, the Old Rainier Brewery, and 12^th Avenue Arts, where housing, production, workshops and retail venues are combined under one roof.

It would seem to most people that a teacher cares mostly about teaching, and most people have a history with schools and teaching institutions. Much has changed over the past fifty years and I have seen it all, I think—from the conventions of my high school and college years to the outbreak of Massively Online Open Courses, Wikipedia, home school and other kinds of innovations.

Teachers change, too, if they are innovative, just as any worker in any industry might change if he or she looks around the workplace and wants to exercise an innovative urge. What I think is hard for people who might know me is to see me as anything other than an old artist and former art professor. I imagine that is my profile, and I don’t try to change that.

When it comes to the Seattle Printmakers Center, however, I do try to change that. I want people to see it is not just another art center, like a museum or even like the Schack Center up in Everett, or any of the four newest Seattle combination housing and live/work spaces for artists.

Surely there are useful comparisons you might call analogies or metaphors to help shape the Center as to planning and costs; but it is economics that I think about. Economics are more important to think about than art, in my opinion, when planning the Seattle Printmakers Center. Throughout the conception of the Seattle Printmakers Center, which took most of the year 2014, economics has been at the center of my thinking.

For example, Ethan Lind came along and showed me the need for putting into action my idea that printmaking is close to the performing arts. He is a bluegrass musician. He is the second bluegrass musician to show a keen interest in etching and in using the Mini Halfwood Press like an instrument instead of a machine. The housing aspect of the Seattle Printmakers Center is interesting to Ethan, but also the performance tradition—busking in a busy place, for example, and then he became a vendor at the Pike Place Market.

This opened my eyes to the importance of tourism, as millions of people each year pass through the Pike Place Market, and they come from all over the world by planes and ships. Ethan has a fairly comfortable home, but he aspires to ownership—and my weekly contact with him has given me to think about this as part of the Seattle Printmakers Center. It is economics that is important, and I think it’s true of many artists who would make prints—locally and globally.

ri141117 Estate Planning: Preparing an innovator’s will 

While drafting his last will and testament, the innovative artist reviews his account of the matter of artists’ asset management and legacy transfer methods and then contrasts it with the innovative artist’s and teacher’s Intellectual Property management. 

Preface

After a few years at sea, so to speak—having launched myself off the shores of the island-like University of Washington School Of Art to search for my Perfect Studios—I took my boxed set of paperbacks, the Perfect Studios Trilogy, to a lawyer. He and I had been discussing online education and teachers’ Intellectual Property with the idea of publishing IP on a CD/ROM. The boxed set of books I call the Perfect Studios Trilogy was a kind of stock basis—perhaps bankable.

He showed up for our meeting in a coffee shop with one of the firm’s partners, which surprised me. Even more surprising was their response, which was positive and encouraging. They said, “If your idea as a computer program for artists’ assets management actually functions, then this idea would be worth a lot of money because there would be a good market for this sort of thing.”

They thought it could be monetized, in other words because they knew that artists’ families usually have a big problem with their artist members’ legacy when he or she passes on. There is no systematic way to assess the value of the legacy except in cases where the artist is famous and has a deep and wide following among wealthy art collectors.

If the artist is not famous, or if he or she has somehow not shown up on the art world’s radar screen, then their lifetime of work is disposed of willy-nilly, destroyed, given away. If the family knows the ropes, then the art might be consigned to an auction house where, in all likelihood, it will molder away in a storage unit until it is forgotten.[1]

Perfect Studios

In 1984 I conceived of the Perfect Studios as being a place, under one roof so to speak, which art could be taught, researched, practiced and be a source of community services. The teaching hospital was my model because the UW Hospital is a teaching hospital, and the four functions—teaching, research, practice and service (TRPS)—are the basis for it work.

All these functions are carried on at the same time, “under one roof,” as it were, or concurrently. Interchange among these functions should lead to a viable company if it were translated into an arts institution, and I wanted the UW Art School to be like the UW Hospital in that regard. My plan didn’t fly, although I had 19 good years to test out my method.

What the attorneys saw that day was my way of putting the idea into words. In three books I wrote the basics: monetizing assets (The Art of Selling Art), new technologies (Reinventing Arts Studios), and innovation (Ghosts in the New Machine). I was satisfied with the first book because it met the field-testing of ways artists can learn about marketing and sales in keeping with their artistic bent.

I drafted the second and third books, but technology changes outpaced my ability. It was a moving target. As for the third, it was two generations of ahead of the times and, like the technological changes that were propelling the “new machines,” my grasp of the future exceeded my reach. Half-dozen years later, the Internet was accessible and it meant that mechanization and digital communication had taken over the artist’s studio and the artists’ intellectual properties.

Last will and testament

Writing wills, for example, has been automated. Those attorneys I talked with in the 1980s moved to issues which are not as easy to automate as such things as personal and real properties. Intellectual property became a specialization when industry added the value of workers’ creative brains put to work writing code for industrial software, games, entertainment, and banking. Thus, today, lawyers specializing in IP are numerous; they may outnumber estate planning lawyers or, I hope, work in concert with them.

I hope so, because I have, in effect, erected a “virtual” mansion over the past fifty years, all devoted to art education, with a specialty in media arts with its roots in the old-fashioned printmaking crafts. When the UW turned down my offer to transform the printmaking division to suit the coming age of digital communication, I took the idea into my little boat and rowed away, and I netted a huge asset base, most of it in digital formats for graphics, text, spreadsheets, multimedia and databases.

If there were an institution around Seattle to which I could will this lode, I could sure use it now. If it is not available, I will build one and I will call it the Seattle Printmakers Center, and my IP will be the “stock basis” for this enterprise.

---

[1] In Seattle, for example, the Pacific Galleries and Auction House www.pacgal.com has many artworks on consignment, and a review of their online auctions will show well-known and lesser-known Northwest Artists whose work is cycled through the auctions periodically, hoping for a buyer.

141115 A lesson from technology  

I read the following in the book by Christensen, “The Innovator’s Dilemma”: “The popular slogan ‘Stay close to your customers’ appears not always to be robust advice. One instead might expect customers to lead their suppliers toward sustaining innovations and provide no leadership—or explicitly mislead—in instances of disruptive technology change.”

This is after reading about the example of disc drives, their history and the changes from huge-size to small size and then to flash memory. I am tempted to make a comparison between this and my experience with art and teaching over the past fifty years, and I can do this because I happened, in 1966, to get myself into the Pacific Northwest where leading technological innovation was abundant.

Invention and creative problem solving were abundant throughout the ‘sixties all through the ‘eighties, and I saw some of it firsthand even though I was in the School Of Art at the University of Washington—not technology. The students in my art classes were affected by the atmosphere of discovery and innovation, too, and bolstered by the history of modern art—with its own kind of innovation history.

As an insider faculty member, I also saw the resistance to innovation that students met coming from the established faculty; but as I was closer to the age, in years, to the students, I was inspired to take their innovations seriously and I followed, encouraged, and in turn was inspired by their experimental ways. Consequently, I became a closet outsider and consequently I lost my job.

As I read Christensen’s book, trying to understand what happened and how things might have been different if I had known how to effect innovation in teaching, I think there is a parallel between the history of the disc drive history and my domain-of-expertise. Teaching printmaking can be seen as different from other art courses because painting and drawing, for example, are visual by nature. Printmaking is not only more technical than the simpler visual arts but also is a time-based art more so than, say, drawing.

Not only does it take longer to make a lithograph or a screen print, once the master is ready, then the printing takes additional time because it has to be repeated in order to make the edition which, traditionally, is the whole point of publishing.

There is another element besides the temporal distinction, time; which is the interdependence, community, or social aspect of printmaking. Due to the complexity and costs associated with many of the printmaking studios, it is necessary to share the costs with other people. Dialog ensues and social networks develop around production, yet individuals can maintain their expertise.

This pool of social interchange goes beyond the fact that an artist makes multiples and thus works of art are available to a larger part of society; the artist becomes, as it were, involved in a technology where innovation, similar to engineering feats, may happen.

Printmaking thus becomes subject to analysis in the same way that Christensen analyzed the disc drive industry to make his point about the innovator’s dilemma. If I learn, for example, that soy sauce can be used to degrease my metal plates, I have been given a “disruptive technology” to the old, established way, which was to use whiting and vinegar or cleansers as taught by established and encouraged by institutionalized art school printmakers.

Taking this a step further, I make a videotape of the process, disrupting, again, the old, established way that master printmakers imparted their expertise. It is another disruptive technology—such as I invested in when I began using videotapes to teach printmaking in the ‘seventies.

Coming back, now, to the comment, “Stay close to your customers,” can be interpreted in my story to fallacious in the same sense that Christensen outlined the failures of established disc drive makers to adopt disruptive technologies which, in the end, meant the end of their dominance in their markets.

If I “stay close to my customers” for my art, the etching presses I designed, and so forth, they would, in turn, prevent me from adopting new, disruptive ideas. Like the frustrated engineers of the past who left the established disc drive makers so that they could develop their new ideas—the disruptive technologies—I left the UW to try my new ideas about art and teaching printmaking.

Christensen said these startups had to find new customers who were not enamored and married to the sustaining, old technologies. Again, my experience was similar; I found among the art school students those who were outsiders to the normal art students’ aims. It was a time of protest, the ‘seventies, so it was not hard to find students who wanted to take a different route instead of staying in the line of the mainstream.

Outsiders, who happened to teach briefly at the UW, encouraged them more than I could. Jan Van Der Marck, for example, instantly approved the students wildest notions coming as he did with a global, contemporary and disruptive point of view. This was when I was making a case for “video art” and Jan and his wife’s encouragement sustained my work with the students.

Where does this bring me now? I want to spend the next decade developing the Seattle Printmakers Center, which is to be a showcase of the disruptive technologies related to printmaking. Do I listen to the established market I enjoyed for fifty years, or must I seek new markets? If so, who comprises this new market? That is the question.

141114 Why read the Innovator’s Dilemma?  

The title of Clayton Christensen’s book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” was magnetic for me. Personally, it described my dilemma as I moved printmaking from its position in the schools of art I grew up with and which sustained me for a generation.

By reading this book, which took as an example the history of the computer disc drive over thirty years’ time, I can draw a parallel between the engineers’ dilemma as they invented better disc drives and my dilemma as I invented a better reason for having printmaking in art schools.

In the book, the author used the term “disruptive technology” to describe the innovator’s introduction of new ideas. The parallel with this and art education is, for example, to say that printmaking is a time-based art and this—not a visual art base—is a viable alternative to the standard art school curriculum for printmaking.

By considering time in the equation of printmaking in addition to visual communication, the artist is invited to consider the terms of motion pictures, theater, music—a spectrum of art forms which diverge from the terms of painting and drawing.

Most importantly, the artist is invited to enter the world of collaboration and community because time makes things complicated. Compared to painting and drawing, that are mediums an individual can control without outside help, making an etching is feasible if the studio for it is shared with other people and if experts from other disciplines are engaged.

The time-honored tradition of printmaking is publishing, and as such has always been tied to economics and politics. In his famed essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin went so far as to say that the work of art itself changed to be a political practice more so than a cultural practice.

Therefore, it lands in the domain of the printmaker to understand the true meaning of printmaking and its roots in time-based arts, craft and design. I think it is more difficult, because the printmaker, who may be an artist inclined toward solitary invention and innovation using mechanical and electronic mediums, has to engage a diverse society.

I am an example. My dilemma was, when I was in the University, that I had an innovative idea—that printmaking is a time-based art and therefore the students who studied printmaking should also study new technologies. Like the examples in Christensen’s book that describe the big companies’ inability to make use of innovators’ new engineering concepts, the University had a known market and standards that were un-movable.

In my effort, I established that there was potential in bringing video art and computer graphics into the art school curriculum via printmaking, but it was not acceptable to the establishment so, of course, I had to plant my unorthodox idea in the larger community.

141104 Afterwords to “Putting my stamps on the Seattle Printmakers Center”  

Appended to a 24-page photobook on the properties on Bill Ritchie's concept of the Seattle Printmakers Center

While I worked on this book, I thought about money for the Seattle Printmakers Center. Mainly it was because I had the idea of putting my artistamp collection in the book, since I have no pictures of the Seattle Printmakers Center yet.

I thought about how you go around a place like the Pike Place Market and you see, at your feet, four-inch square tiles with peoples’ names on them. These testify as to the fact that these people and organizations gave money to see to the preservation of the Pike Place Market, this city’s treasure.

What is the equal to a tile in the digital age? When a real-time and real-space experience exists with a counterpart in virtual time and space, worldwide, what is the equivalent of a physical thing, such as a tile with your name or your child’s artwork, or the name of your organization upon it?

In this case, the reward for giving your support and your money to a project is in this physical thing, a tile or bronze cast. This has been the way of recognizing contributions. In the digital age, with the internet, video games, apps and not yet invented experiences that may defy time and space, what is the equivalent to a bronze plaque or floor tile?

The artistamp (stamp collectors call these by another name--Cinderella) is a creative way individuals mimic true, government-issue postage stamps produced by national financing for mail systems. It is a tradition that stamps indicate authenticity, such as on passports or they represent taxes paid, collectors’ provenance, etcetera.

While I worked on this book, I wondered: “How can a photobook such as this one, with its 54 stamp images placed among the text, lead toward funding or other kinds of support? Are the collectible? Is the book collectible?”

We know that collectability is important in the arts as collectors are concerned, and it will require wealth from many contributions—both in cash and effort—to build the Seattle Printmakers Center. It seems to me that, in Seattle’s art history, printmaking has not been a favorite (with the exception of Virginia Wright who, in the ‘60s, was a strong advocate of prints, printmakers and printmaking).

This sad truth (for me and many printmakers in the Seattle area) may be because printmaking is a peoples’ art, a social art, and a performance art and for long has been a middle-class art. Also it is because mainstream technology of which printing is a part brings difficulties in appreciating prints, encumbered as some prints are by special look and the feel of industrial sources.

The visual and tactile qualities confuse as much as they please the viewer who may be accustomed to separating the two worlds of fine art and popular, peoples’ art.
My aim is to stamp the Seattle Printmakers Center with the uniqueness of Seattle Printmaking since the 1950s.

This “stamp” is the transformation of printmaking from its being taught and promoted as a visual art form, like painting, to the realization that printmaking is the artifact of performances, social networks and technologies. Printmaking is the ancestor of all technologies, and, hence, of the modern world.

Over the days that I have been working on my first photobook for the Seattle Printmakers Center I wondered about the Pike Place Market and how its history might be analogous to the Seattle Printmakers Center yet to be.

The challenge for me is figuring out if having my artistamps—and perhaps the artistamps of other Seattle artists—can move the project forward.

141102 A marriage of good art and good business 

The good art is what I have in my gallery, front to back. 

The good business is the aggregated startups. 

Marriage of these is an agreement that gives its equity to the other, and vice-versa. 

Case study

For example, an artist stopped by the other day because she saw, through the windows of our family art gallery, a small art object that reminded her of one of her own, and she mentioned that she still has an print I made in 1966, and which she and her husband bought. “We recently downsized, but I kept your art and it’s hanging in our condo.”

To say I was complemented would put it mildly. But there was more to this encounter than that. What she told me about her work as an early developer of the Schack Art Center in Everett was a clue toward solving the question, “How do I develop the Seattle Printmakers Center, with success anything like the Schack Art Center?”

In an email to her a few days later, I stated, “. . . the Seattle Printmakers Center as slightly different inasmuch my concept is that the development is planned around self-sustaining small businesses. One list I made has twenty of them! The business’ profits go to support the operating costs of the center’s non-profit sectors. So I visualized not only artists work/living units, but also what “work” went on in those units, i.e., the work of the twenty small businesses.”

I picture the working/living spaces as being designed to be work spaces for the worker/owners of the twenty small businesses. Visualize, for example, one of the worker/owners as being in charge of producing the medallions that go on the Halfwood Line of presses. His or her home has the space and furniture of a medallion-maker—resembling a metal designer or jeweler’s workshop. They produce hundreds or thousands of the decorative accouterments of the Halfwood line—everything from the “badges” affixed to the presses to printmakers’ specialty jewelry that are sold in the on-site Printmakers Store.

As for the marriage, above, the artist who stopped in to the gallery has a 1966 print I made, and in my gallery (and in our family collection), there are a few remaining impressions which can be used to finance the planning and completion of the Seattle Printmakers Center.

In the days and hours since meeting with her, I have been riffling through the many potential ways the entire contents of our art gallery (and condo storage room) can be liquidated over the period of a year or two and put to supporting the Seattle Printmakers Center.

In my riffling, my eyes settled on a small envelope I made for the Rembrandt & Wine concept, and in my imagination I saw myself producing a dozen of these envelopes, by hand, as special invitations to people who would like to partake of a sip and print experience as part of the promotion for the Seattle Printmakers Center.

141031 Innovator’s Dilemma  

In 1969 I began asking the two questions that would eventually help shape the Seattle Printmakers Center.

First, “Why is an artist’s success so difficult to sustain?”

And second, “Is artistic innovation really as unpredictable as people think?”

I was three years into a plum job teaching printmaking at the University of Washington School Of Art, and my art career looked bright. But neither my teaching career path nor my art had fully answered those two questions that were always bothering me.

So, at twenty-eight, with the support of my wife and six months before our first child was born, we went to Europe to try to find out with the result that those two questions became my life’s work.

Two of the oldest artists that I could meet—Rolf Nesch, 72, and Stanley William Hayter, 68—showed me you can sustain success, but it’s tough. Whether their creativity was predictable remained impossible to say at the time. Both had survived the Great Depression and two World Wars. By comparison, I had it easy.

Today, I think a lot about Nesch and Hayter because I am now 72. These two showed me you can live a long life and be creative in your golden years—maybe more creative than before. A dozen years later I met another printmaking pioneer, Signora Maria Guaita, 71, in Florence at her graphics school, Il Bisonte.

I have had three decades to think about those two questions: “Why is an artist’s success so difficult to sustain?” and “Is artistic innovation really as unpredictable as people think?” and I saw, in those thirty years, printmaking transformed from the worlds that these three Europeans knew.

They—and hundreds of other artists, publishers, collectors, professors and museums—gave printmaking its designation as “fine art.” I honor them, and they would be offended, were they still alive, if I did not make something out of the lessons I learned from them.

The difficulty of sustaining artistic success is different for every artist who, in the eyes of their followers, “fail.” The failure might be only in the eyes and heart of the artist, in fact, while their supporters think not. How do you measure success in art? Is artistic success measured in terms of money? Or is it many things. Sustaining success is still another matter.

Maybe there is no answer. In an age when money seems to be the measure of success for so many people, it is difficult. As for me, I will measure my success by the success of those who create the Seattle Printmakers Center—whether it is a building or a thing of virtual reality.

Its success will be a matter of answering the second question, “Is artistic innovation really as unpredictable as people think?” For printmaking is not like painting, drawing and sculpture, even though it shares many features with these sister arts.

For one thing, every printmaking technique that is taught and experienced as an “art” began its life not as art at all, but as a performance and a technique which was almost accidental. When cave dwellers were painting and scoring the walls of caves, there were also people printing their hands. They managed to make handprints either by stamping or making silhouettes with sprayed pigments.

The handprint was a kind of fast art compared to the difficult task of painting. I like to think it was a joke art, or that it came about spontaneously in an inspired moment of unpredicted innovation. Is innovation measurable? Can you predict innovation?

When I was a college student, books on creativity were required reading—not only in art but in research science, mathematics, fashion and dance. I don’t know if such books are still required of art students, but they helped me think about human creativity and problem-solving.

My problem now is, given that I am closer to answering the two questions that bothered me in the ‘Sixties, what is the next, best step to take to help progress toward the Seattle Printmakers Center?

If there is a good idea out there, I could sure use it now.

141028 Seven reasons why the Seattle Printmakers Center cannot fail 

The Seattle Printmakers Center cannot fail because: 

- it pays its own way, 

Only a small part of its operating expenses are paid for by public money and grants, with almost all its operating expenses paid for by profits of the small businesses that are part of the Seattle Printmakers Center. These small businesses are carefully planned according to the best practices of startups and address both local and global needs.

- it is part of a trend, 

Around the world there is a trend among arts centers to focus on the cultural and educational needs of their locale and, at the same time, find positions in global markets that can be reached on the Internet—markets that can pay for operations.

- it has a solid foundation, 

The roots of the Seattle Printmakers Center became established long ago—fifty years or more—when printmaking faculty at the University of Washington and Cornish College explored the connections among traditional art and craft of printmaking, new technologies that were growing around the greater Seattle area, and the performing arts.

- there is a need, 

Despite that there is an array of choices where people can learn college-level crafts of printmaking, there is much more that can be done. Thanks to the Seattle Printmakers Center’s embracing of new technologies, nowhere else is there as open or promotional resource for sustaining the combination of old and new.

- it has a market, 

People are ready for something new that balances local and global needs, particularly in education, technology and entertainment that the Seattle Printmakers Center will offer.

- Seattle is “in”, 

Around the world, Seattle is regarded as a hotbed of new developments on many fronts, particularly in technology; and it is well-established that printing is the ancestor of all technologies—which is fundamental to the Seattle Printmakers Center both in fact and philosophy.

- it complements existing institutions, 

Other cultural and educational institutions will have a resource for their programs which they do not have at present, such as study collections, open channels of communications and forums where old and new technologies are publicized. 

141027 Unafraid  

The woman of DARPA  

A TED talk featured a woman from DARPA who said great things only come when people are unafraid to take risks. If you ask yourself, “What would I attempt if I knew I could not fail?” This must get at the heart of the creative process artists brag about and sometimes achieve.

Or, in my case, when a person thinks that they cannot fail, it is a sign of being demented due to having an underactive thyroid, i.e., Hashimoto’s disease. For example, look what happened when I tried to transform the printmaking major at the UW School Of Art into a multimedia major. I failed.

Yet, I was so sure that I could not fail in the face of all the indicators pointing to the surefire plan that if you mixed traditional, old-time technologies such as printmaking with new technologies that were becoming useful as artistic tools you’d have a great, sustainable program.

Fail I did. I didn’t take into account all the classical signs of a failing school. Today, there is no printmaking major at all—only a smattering of electives art students can take. If art students want to use new technologies they major in a design field. They can take printmaking as an elective, but it is printmaking of the 1970s and disconnected from video and computer graphics.

I failed at the UW; but the woman from DARPA pointed out that when you fail, it means you over-reached yourself. You went beyond what you were capable of, which often means you are one of those innovative and—and perhaps—courageous people who do great things in the span of a lifetime. It means you’re risk-taker.

During the course of her talk I thought to myself, “If I knew I could not fail, I would continue my plan to start the Seattle Printmakers Center.” And so I will. The DARPA talk also taught that I might fail, so—with the wisdom of years on my side—I must ask, why would I fail? What could possibly be wrong with my idea?

The key to success of the Seattle Printmakers Center is not only the plan itself but also the people who move the project forward. One of the internal goals of the center is to create jobs for people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers. It’s a proposition to connect people in and around the domain of printmaking—old and new—with jobs because there is a market for things that are printmaking-related.

The people are important, and I make a practice of meeting people locally, face-to-face, and around the world via the Internet. For example, locally I go to meetings where I am most likely to find individuals who understand the need to integrate technology in business—including arts, education and culture. A week ago I met several students from the UW Foster School of Business at one of these meetings.

As I thought about them, for some reason I thought of a story about a guy that went to work for General Electric—a new hire taken on for a high position in the company. Despite the title he would have, he was handed a broom the first day on the job, and directed to sweep up around the plant floor. “Starting at the bottom,” you might say, when he was hired for a top position.

That story originated about two or three generations ago and while it’s true that GE is still a great company, word is out that even big companies can fail—like Sears and big banks. The possible reasons are listed in a book titled, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which I started reading the same day I watched the DARPA woman telling me, “Imagine what you would attempt if you knew you could not fail.”

I contacted one of the UW students because I have been signaling the UW Foster School of business for years, hoping to get some help in determining the market size and best strategy for my quest—a quest which will occupy me for the next ten years and is the development of the Seattle Printmakers Center. Given what I see as the ways this center will be self-sustaining within six years, I wonder if the UW students have got what it takes.

Do they consider what they would attempt if they knew they could not fail? Are they risk-takers, sufficiently gutsy that they would come and talk with me for an hour and get at the kernel of the Seattle Printmakers Center, and how the sip-and-print industry ties in its development?

I confess I am skeptical so far. All my efforts at getting help from students and former students from the UW have failed to show meaning. It is as if the failure I experienced back in the 1980s was a sign that it shall always be so that the UW, despite its size and apparent capacity for R&D, teaching and services, is not what it is cracked up to be.

But, I want to give the concept every chance, because while I can’t fail to achieve what I am about to do, I need help.

141017 Innovation + Entrepreneurship = Professional Development  

Innovation is huge.  

Entrepreneurship is huge. 

Add them together you have a formula for professional development. Confucius said words to the effect that a wise person does not have a profession; he or she just does the best they can. To check this, I switch to my database of quotes from books I read over the past fifty years.

Multitasking, I am at once thinking about professional development and my lack of a profession!

Yet, here I am, 72, nimbly working at my keyboard, composing lines with a plan to develop a cohort of people who want to utilize innovation, add it to entrepreneurship, and thus offer society a center for professional development, the Seattle Printmakers Center.

I mention my age—72—because I have kept up with technology and 50 years of change in the profession of college teaching, yet without a formal affiliation with an institution or association such as the Arts Administration Association of Educators—the inspiration for this essay.

Is art a profession? Is there a call for a Seattle Printmakers Center built on this formula—innovation plus entrepreneurship equals professional development?

Industrial art is a profession, to be sure—and numerous artists take home a paycheck, or payments for products delivered on time and at budget for contracts within various industries. Our system of art schools aims to prepare students for income-earning jobs and contracts, no doubt, and the industrial job market calls for trained, productive artists.

Innovation, however, is not expected of them in those jobs; usually the “innovative” work has been done somewhere near the top of the enterprise. Artists trained for industry may be disappointed to find that their creative capacities are hemmed in by consumer expectations. Consumers don’t pay for innovation—they buy products designed the way they like them.

The innovator’s dilemma is described by Clayton Christensen is that doing the right things can lead to failure. Sometimes it is wrong to listen to customers. Entrepreneurship is risk-taking. The two go together like bread and butter and, if artfully prepared, innovation and entrepreneurship can produce a center professional development.

How can this improbable combination of innovation and entrepreneurship be the basis for a center for professional development—the concept behind a Seattle Printmakers Center?

I turn to my personal experience to get an answer.

I am not a professional artist in terms of making consumer products. Otherwise I would not be writing this paper. I suppose a professional artist—and they might be working in a studio nearby—is, at this very moment, plying his or her art and craft, getting ready for the next gallery showing or commission. They may be writing a grant, or communicating with a team of designers of a public art project. She may be flying to meet with engineers, architects, and public art committees or returning from an opening in distant city—and glad to be home.

Or he may be walking the dog, or sipping coffee, or counting likes on Facebook. I try to imagine all these professionally-developed artists and arts administrators, and I wonder what—in this professionally-developed world—do I have to offer that would be a service our community?

It can only be an innovative concept for a new arts institution for Seattle, an entrepreneurial, risky venture concurrently engaging professional development.

141015 Market for printmaking presses 

Market size is important to Seattle Printmakers Center 

Bill Ritchie: 

For ten years I collected buyers of etching presses as a collaborative venture. I put the art, craft and design before profits. I was rewarded with a list of about 150 people, and almost every one of these buyers (some of whom bought two presses) gave me information about their hopes, their background and preferences.

I was building my customer base one customer at time; I also exchanged emails with them, not only on printmaking and how to use and maintain their press, but on ideas for building businesses that utiilize their printmaking and people skills.

At a point about halfway through the decade (between 2004 and 2014) I made an analysis and the mathematics I used suggested that about a million people in the USA would buy one of my presses if, one, they knew about the halfwood presses and, two, if we could produce the halfwoods in quantity and maintain quality and customer support.

By the end of the decade (this year) I had changed my assumption that a hand printing press is for production. I realized a press is for an experience, and I transformed the meaning of printmaking. Printmaking is as much—or more—about experience than it is about producing prints.

Compare the printmaking experience to a blend of performance art and visual art. I found allies in this philosophy in a handful of musicians. This shift was triggered when these musicians bought my press. Renowned bluegrass artist, Peter Rowan, for example, bought two Mini Halfwood Presses—the well-received Legacy model and the new Pram model. He also bought a printmaker chest.

My work at the university had shown me and some of the students that the sharing by a group of a single piece of equipment—whether a printing press, table saw or a video camera—sometimes leads to creative collaborations. Also, live performers are aware that they need an audience; printmakers are used to making multiples to have enough art to go around, something like having a live audience. The painter, on the other hand, has an audience of one owner of his or her painting.

Therefore, the market size for the halfwood presses—these presses being one of the main sources of sustained operating costs for the Seattle Printmakers Center programs—can be examined from both the production side and the experience/performance side.

vi141009 Determining market size 

Twelve niche markets can’t lose 

Planning the Seattle Printmakers Center is a pleasurable task when it comes to determining the market size for the development. In this essay, one leader accounts for his past experience determining the market size for one component to sustain the Center. 

A dozen reasons that the Seattle Printmakers Center will be self-sustaining 

When you listen to the fundraising campaigns of the local NPR affiliate, KUOW, I frequently hear the phrase, “self sustaining,” and I smile inwardly because it’s an oxymoron. If the station were self-sustaining as they say, then why are they urging listener to send money?

In the fourth year of my project making Halfwood Presses, I wrote a book titled, “Halfwood Press, the story.” In it I wanted to document what happened to bring about this design and I wanted to tell the story in terms of the first thirty people who bought the presses. I wanted to tell my story, too and I tried to make it complete in the style of an interview.

About midway through the story, I wove in an account of my attempt to estimate the size of the market for the presses. I was thinking that maybe the press could be a real business; I could make a salary! Or, in the best of all worlds, grow the business until I could sell it and retire to my Big Project. How I determined the size of the market was according to the demographics represented by those thirty owners of the presses—what gender, what age spectrum, educational background, income level, etc.

My conclusion was, in 2008, that 400,000 people would buy the Halfwood Press line if they knew about it. If I were a real company, with a sales staff, a marketing machine, and all the back-office support it takes a small business to grow and sustain itself and the people who worked there, then those 400,000 potential customers would, indeed, know about and want one of the Halfwood Presses. Even more than presses, in fact, I have ideas for accessorizing the press—even to the point of products designed for niche markets within the arts and education industry.

This analysis and my book never took me anywhere. Although I attended startup meetings, workshops, and MeetUps where I hoped to find a co-founder with a business mind, the number, 400,000 customers in the United States alone, had no impact (and, ever hopeful, I continue to go to these meetings). As a designer and innovator in my field, I hold my own, but as a promoter of business development and growth, I can’t seem to cut it.

Yet, I am still taking the approach I took in 2008 as I now work on determining the market size for the Halfwood Press line and apply the method to Seattle Printmakers Center. In statistical analysis, as this work is known, a person takes a perspective, somewhat like an artist decides on a point of view. You can apply this to almost any kind of art—story telling, photography, screen writing, etc. My point of view is that of an educator. Education has the driver’s seat when it comes to art in my world. Like a carpenter sees every tool as a potential hammer, every business—to a teacher—takes on an aspect like an educational experience.

Therefore, I took my experience as a college teacher as my point of view in arriving at the 400,000 number for potential press purchasers. In other words, in the 19 years I taught, I asked, “To how many students did I teach printmaking? How many colleges were there across the country during those 19 years, with teachers like me and students like the ones at the University of Washington?”

The thirty people who bought the Halfwood Presses had, generally speaking, some education in printmaking, and they liked printmaking—particularly intaglio printmaking—well enough to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars to purchase and, in other countries, pay the taxes and shipping costs half way around the world. It worked for thirty people.

Another generation of students had continued to go to college after I left campus in 1985, so at the time I did my market analysis in 2008, therefore the number of students who took printmaking and liked it about doubled over what it had been in my limited experience. That’s how I concluded my exercise and came up with 400,000.

It has been six years since my 2008 arithmetic. I wonder what it is today, in 2014?

It makes me think, but I prefer not to do the arithmetic again. It was sufficient for me, in 2008, to be encouraged and go on for another six year despite that I got nowhere with business acquaintances, trying to get the attention of a co-founder who has a business mind and who is as passionate about education and technology in the arts as I am.

Rather, I will bundle the market analysis of the Halfwood Press line with the niche markets that go along with printmaking. For example, there will be the business of publishing in and about prints, printmaking and printmakers—similar to the two European legacy magazines on paper and the one in the US, the Journal of the Print World. The publishing niche will be another one of the dozen income streams that will sustain the Seattle Printmakers Center.

(Can you speculate on what enterprise will be the biggest advertising customer in the publications—both in paper and a digital, online magazine—that come out of the Seattle Printmakers Center publishing component?)

Therefore, I submit that with a development team made up of people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers—and from the perspective of education—the Seattle Printmakers Center will truly be self-sustaining as it is fed by a dozen income streams from the components comprising the Center. We, at the center, will not have annual fundraising drives and claim that we are self-sustaining. Our customers will sustain us for producing good products and services.

ps141006 Arts Leadership 

State of the art 

Aware of a trend in institutions which claim to prepare people for arts leadership, the author considers how to configure this trend into the context of his planned formation of an arts organization devoted to fine art printmaking, history and technology.  

Studio work

When I was in college (for 25 years, between 1960-85) there was a soft dividing line between studio arts and art history. By “soft” I mean that art history majors did not ordinarily take my classes in printmaking—but they could elect and few did take printmaking. Also, a few of the students got an undergraduate degree in printmaking and then went on to get advanced degrees in art history.

These memories of the blurry dividing line between studio and academics in art school came back to me this morning inspired by two incidents: One, a few days ago I met a woman with a bachelor’s degree in my field—printmaking—who is enrolled for an MFA in Arts Leadership, and, two, my need to install of an upgrade to my video editing software. With these are on my mind, I multitasked: While waiting for the install session to complete and wrote about Arts Leadership in the age of digital reproduction.

A new age is upon art students in the United States today. Whether art students are in studio classes, art history classes, arts management classes at the undergraduate, graduate or post-graduate levels. I consider myself in post-graduate studies; hence, my writing this essay, a requirement and if I upload to a blog, extra credit!

For me, the new age began around the 1980s when I was still part of the UW School Of Art. I left in 1985 as the sea change in art and education grew, and had begun for me in 1970. Like an earthquake somewhere in the ocean floor, thousands of miles distant, whose shock wave results in a tidal wave as the wave reached the shore. The quake in this analogy was technologies that erupted and became universal—ranging from mega early warning missile detection systems down to secret microphones in Richard Nixon’s office.

Technology has been changing everything ever since, constantly altering the course of human events and, also, Earth’s human life sustainability. From my position, where I am at the first stages of creating a new arts institution in Seattle called the Seattle Printmakers Center, I look with interest at the incident mentioned above of meeting a graduate student in arts management (she has a bachelor’s degree in printmaking, like mine 50-years removed).

Next I would like to contrast her curriculum and her cohort of classmates with the work I am doing, that is, forming the Seattle Printmakers Center; because I know the leadership of the Seattle Printmakers Center is very likely to be found among those students who are, today, in institutions learning the ins and outs of leading the Seattle Printmakers Center and its work.

Ivory Tower 

A movie 

The local Redbox video dispenser at a Seven-Eleven offered a surprising movie titled “Ivory Tower,” a documentary (mis-labeled “drama”). The author watched it from beginning to end. It was deja-vu for him and reminded him of his forecasts of 40 years ago.  

Ivory Tower – the movie 

It’s a strange day when you find a movie outside your Seven-Eleven in the Redbox video dispenser. It’s like putting a dollar in a Coke machine and getting a potion that released memories for me. The movie is, “Ivory Tower,” and it is all about higher education in the USA.

Watching the DVD I saw a parade of experts talking about the problems of costly colleges, and how deep in debt people are going by using student loans to pay high costs of college. Occasionally they questioned the value of the college experience—was it worth the money it cost? Was it worth going into a debt you would never be able to pay off?

All the while, I sit miles from the university where I taught for 19 years—the University of Washington—the campus where I forecast what I saw the are the problems the experts today were describing in the film.

By “experts” I am referring to the usual host who are worried—college presidents, students, parents, and the most recent innovators in transmitting knowledge—computer programmers and artificial intelligence experts. In the film they all said what I said forty years ago: “We need to teach our students technology.”

It’s a funny feeling to be watching the president of Harvard and Stanford saying, “We need to teach our students technology.” I think to myself, “Duh.” Those are my words from 1970, and that was the talk I walked from 1970 and, fifteen years later, walked me right off the campus forever.

Today

I suppose that, today, I am still making forecasts based on what I can see right around me. An etching press sits on my workbench, almost ready for its beauty shot (a pair of photos I make of every press I send out to the owners). Alongside it, to “toy” wooden etching presses, too, also going to the owner in California. My domain-of-expertise is printmaking. It’s what I taught in the 60s, 70s, and 80s at the UW. I can see that production and service are what count, and if you can’t produce and you can’t serve, you’re dead.

What I taught in my 19 years at the UW was that printmaking is the ancestor of technologies as we know them—including the Internet and going back through history. Like rewinding history through computer graphics, TV, photography, printing and ending up hand prints on cave walls. I taught it all, and it all came down to production and service.

What was missing in college then was the vision to see what students would be facing after a college education in the arts. The art faculty preferred to keep technology on the back burner or non-existent. Some of my students went along with my forecast and they sampled the media arts; I think it was of some benefit as I see where those students are today because they produced and they served.

In the 1970s I said, “We need to prepare student with technology experience alongside the old-world arts, such as painting and the rest of it. Printmaking was a good launching pad, since it is the ancestor of technology.”

As I watched the movie, “Ivory Tower,” it was deja-vu for me to see a few professors and administrators mouthing the same words I said in 1970. It was disturbing to see, also, that when these experts got around to including technology in the curriculum, they concluded that it meant teaching coding as computer science; but they were teaching people to code—as if coding were to somehow keep them out of debt. It’s comparable to a religion—a few hackers made it big and changed the way we live by coding, so everyone should learn to code.

Coding is an activity that gives you the feeling that you are thinking on your feet when actually you’re sitting on your butt.

Occasionally in the film there was mention of the disasters of the financing scandals of a few years ago, but no mention of what made the disasters happen, namely, computer coding in the hands of people who didn’t want to get their hands dirty.

Where, in my days in college, technology was not included in the curricula of the arts and sciences, today it seems like the only thing; and never mind ethics and humanities and, no mention of Earth’s human life sustainability.

We seem to be living in a time when getting into an institution of higher learning is something like going to heaven without actually dying, but merely believing in a golden stairway. More often you end up with golden handcuffs.

If there are thirty years left to me (then I will be 102 years old) I hope I will see that my present pathway is still the right one, and I will take care that those presses for that woman in California get to her next week.

Dürer’s mistake  

A sea change in printmaking revisited  

It is this professor’s opinion that Albrecht Dürer, regarded by many as the father of printmaking as a fine art (not craft nor technology) made a mistake in adopting the art of drawing and painting as the basis for his development of the “fine art print.”

From A. Hyatt Mayor’s book, Prints and People

The following paragraph from A. Hyatt Mayor’s 1972 book, “Prints and People,” stopped me in my tracks. I am re-reading Mayor’s book because I am working on developing the Seattle Printmakers Center, and in this paragraph I felt I had found the brick wall that stultified my work at the University of Washington many years ago and which, now, necessitates getting back to that work we had started in the 1970s. Here is Mayor’s thought:

“Dürer mastered the techniques of woodcut, engraving, etching, and drypoint, invented modern watercolor, and drew in every medium except red chalk. By being the only artist so versatile, he completed the transformation, begun by Mangtegna and the Housebook Master, of entirely freeing printmaking from its craft origins. After Dürer, printmakers were trained by drawing, not by working in wood or metal, and all the different kinds of prints fused together under the leadership of painters.”

Of course, you need to read more of the printmaking history leading up to Dürer. Mayor mentions elsewhere that Dürer’s style might have been different if he had met with other artists living and working at the same time, such as Leonardo da Vinci. It would be fun to speculate on a fictional meeting among Dürer, da Vinci, and Luca Pacioli—the latter who was a renowned mathematician and, as for da Vinci, a kind of universal man. I’ll leave that fiction for someone else, but it was painters like Bellini and Mantegna—masters of the painterly form—to whom Mayor gives credit for bringing the painter’s knowledge of depicting form to Dürer.

What if . . .

Dürer’s engraving, “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” is dated about 1498—eight years after one of my favorite drawings by da Vinci, “Vitruvian Man” (and I pirated this for my humor print, “The Vitruvian Press”). Also, we know Dürer visited Venice, but it was probably before da Vinci and Luca Pacioli were there.

My point is that if Dürer was correct in swaying the practice of printmaking toward the canon of painting and drawing, and loosening the ties of printmaking to the trades of engraving and woodcutting, then we lost, in effect, the root of printmaking, which was not in the manner by which printing plates are made, but the reason we make printing plates in the first place, which is to achieve a method by which we can make identical images that can be carried afar, or, if we choose, to make variations using the printing plate as a kind of tool or instrument.

Printmaking, in effect, was cut off from its roots when it was turned to mimicry of the drawing and painting arts. The roots of printmaking go back to prehistoric handprints on the walls of caves, deliberately made by human innovation, that of spraying pigment around the human hand pressed on the wall, or printed with a palm-full of paint. The handprint is the first human print made intentionally—not by mere incident of, say, stepping on mud and leaving a footprint impression.

The main stem and root of printmaking re-joined

In the 1970s I re-joined printmaking to its prehistoric human innovation for making exactly repeatable images and it changed my career; ended my career, actually, as a college professor in the institutionalized world of academic art practices. In 1968, I re-joined printmaking to its technical innovation roots first with photography—a technology which had not yet been accepted as a valid art form by the faculty of the University of Washington.

My print of that year, “Collection III: Part of the Children’s Game,” was not alone in my use of photo-etching. There were a number of artists using photo silkscreen and lithography processes in launching the Pop Art and Post American Expressionist movements. In printmaking exhibits there was a growing number photo etchings shown.

A few years later, after I had gone to Europe for my first post graduate study abroad, I started working with what became known as video art, and I approached the electronic media the same way I had approached my printmaking—a blend of innovative technologies and improvisations. A key to this experience was that I worked with a group—my students—and people from the music and dance departments of the UW.

Printmakers are sharing kinds of people. That is why, when A. Hyatt Mayor’s book came out about that time, it had the effect of raising my appreciation of printmaking as a social art. The performance nature, a time-based experience, drew the main stem of printmaking back to its roots as an act of innovation in time, using a technical principle, i.e., if you ink and stamp your hand again and again, you will get almost identical results. Small variations reflect the human element and this is something machines cannot do unless the machine (a machine under computer numerical control) is programmed by a human.

Seattle Printmakers Center Rising

Re-reading A. Hyatt Mayor’s book helped me clarify what happened around the turn of the 16^th Century in Europe with Dürer’s influence arising from taking the lead of painters and, according to the author, eschewing the crafts of woodcutting, etching, and engraving. Dürer’s innovations—watercolor, drypoint, etc.—were like the forces of human invention and creativity, but put into commercial service.

It was this atmosphere that I found dominating the UW School Of Art in 1966, and continued throughout my short, happy career at the institution. Painters insisted that printmaking should be an extension of painting—as it was in Dürer’s time—and they used their collective political force to keep it that way. It was obvious to me that severance of printmaking from its roots in human innovation and technology would kill printmaking and students would, as a consequence, miss out on learning how to take advantage of new technologies.

Before I left the UW, I was able to bring about some of the basics of a well-rounded printmaking curriculum by bringing in video and computers within view of the students. Some of the students were influenced by this, and some of them made good use of the principles of printmaking after they graduated.

By principles I mean that printmaking is human innovation, it is a social art and has ties with performance of time-based arts. This includes not only live performance (as when you print a plate over and over, sometimes with an audience on hand) but also mediated performances, such as film, video and multimedia recordings. These are central factors in my claim that the Seattle Printmakers Center will grow out of a unique blend of art, technology and performance that I think characterized that time, in the 1970s, when I re-joined printmaking to its roots and I elected to ignore Dürer’s mistake.

Stop work 

Binding the tasks 

Almost daily the visionary for the Seattle Printmakers Center takes up tasks which he believes could be the core activities of the center if the Seattle Printmakers Center were a reality. He is working on a collaboration with a Brazilian artist—and stops. 

Stop work order 

Walking near home I saw a sign on an unfinished deck the neighbors were building—an orange sign with bold letters, “Stop Work Order.” When you see this sign, it usually means the project started without the necessary permits, and somebody noticed it and, hence, the stop work order. This is like my own case, only I am not building a deck, I am building the Seattle Printmakers Center.

The Seattle Printmakers Center is not as real as that sun deck on our neighbor’s house, but in my mind it is super-real (the art history term is “surreal’). It’s what you might expect from an artist who one journalist described as a surrealist to describe my prints, drawings and sculpture. However, I gave myself a “Stop Work’ order moments ago to write this entry for my collections of ‘Zine essays.

I was working on a collaboration with a Brazilian artist named Cecelia. She has posed a technical question about making printing plates to print on the press I designed for her—called a Frigate Halfwood Press. Cecilia took ownership of this press last year, and since then we have exchanged emails regularly to discuss all kinds of subjects—from printmaking to screenplays.

Currently she asked me to test an image she made, and sent to me, for an Ex Libris print project. Because her day job is that of an engraver for the Brazilian mint, the image is extremely detailed and, if it were to be engraved, would require months of her hand work. She asks me if my laser transfer method might give her the results she wants; she asks me, too, if my theory of using laser engraving blended with old-world etching, can be proved.

At the Seattle Printmakers Center 

This would be a project for one of the groups in the Seattle Printmakers Center. They might themselves a student group or apprentices; they are task-handlers and problem solvers. Because these are mostly young people, technology is interesting to them. Laser engravers, for example, offer possibilities they would like to know more about and have hands-on (and computer graphics) skills in using.

Cecilia poses a real-world, and international, problem to solve, and this kind of project is what might excite a group at the Seattle Printmakers Center. It would involve not only the high-tech issues, such as the question of resolving the differences between an analog image which Cecilia has drawn by hand and a digital image, but also the question of types of silicon-coated transfer paper that would achieve the best results.

Then there would also be the matter of etchants—should we use plain ferric chloride or the kind of etchant called Edinburgh Etch? After several of these options have been explored by the group, then comes the printing.

Because the Seattle Printmakers Center is a multimedia center, while all the above is going on, members of the group with cameras are taking note with both still photos and short videos. These become content for the Center’s newsletter and the online magazine, Printmaking World Online.

In the offices of the Seattle Printmakers Center, such diverse programs as digital publishing, social networking and online social games based on printmaking are happening concurrently with the messy work of getting information to Cecelia in Rio de Janeiro.

Conclusion 

The artist’s way is not a stop and start situation, but it is circular, or recursive. We find ourselves having stopped work, but it is only an illusion. Inside, work is continuing until we find ourselves where we began and, hopefully, we know the place for another time.

es140902 Day Jobs: Accounting for the hours

es140902 

Day jobs  

Accounting for the hours  

Visualizing is what makes us human, someone said. If he visualizes the Seattle Printmakers Center, is this an act of humanity? In his day of a variety of jobs which might have been undertaken at the SPC as if it were already a reality, he makes a listing.  

Imagining 

Twenty-fourteen is the first year that I set out to realize the Seattle Printmakers Center—a dream yet unrealized, but a vision that I have held since I first moved to Seattle so many years ago. Then I was twenty-five, fresh out of school, and starting my first job as a printmaking teacher.

My undergraduate years had exposed me to a bigger world than the one in which I had grown up, and I had a yen to see all of it and, after nineteen years, I had seen the world and how printmaking, which was my domain of expertise, fitted in. The printmaking art world is much smaller than the larger-than-life worldly matters.

Yet the art world is part of life, thanks to printmaking and all the technologies that descended from the beginnings of printing, when people more than thirty-thousand years ago made repeated handprint on walls of caves and set mechanized image-making into action.

Ten years lie ahead of me within which I can work toward the printmakers center, the components of which I cobbled together in my fifty years in art, crafts and design of printmaking—and the technologies that descended from printing as well.

Now my days are filled with these things, giving me a sampler from which I can pick and choose those which seem most important. And what are they? I shall make a list.

Furniture 

I like to do woodwork, but I don’t like to spend money on new materials. I like the idea of recycling, and so when it was necessary to make a rolling cart for the newest Mariner Halfwood Press, I cleaned out my scavenged supply of wood and made a cart. In the process, I also cashed in on my friends’ goodwill and used her wood shop. My supply did not have everything I needed, but my friend happened to be cleaning out her scraps, so I used some of those, plus a few pieces I had to buy—but cheap. Wheels, too, I had to buy. All told, I suppose i spent about sixty dollars, not counting travel and labor time.

As I built this cart, I played scenarios in my imagination, visualizing this same cart as part of the offerings of printmakers furniture available from the Seattle Printmakers Store—a division of the Seattle Printmakers Center. I pictured several people who worked at the Center taking my model, improving on it, embellishing it, and maybe expanding the quality line so that the printmakers cart became fine furniture, approaching the fine woodwork or the Mariner Halfwood Press itself.

Thus, the mundane project of building a cart became an exercise in visualizing one of the products of the Seattle Printmakers Center and which comprises one of the income streams that support the operations. I should mention also that in another part of the SPC there is a media arts group which expands on the design and craft of these carts, plus another segment of the SPC which produces promotional newsletters and an online digital magazine—also income-producing.

International 

On my counter there is a partly finished experiment—the first phase of an experiment, that is—inspired by an artist in Brazil. She is interested in my use of laser prints transferred to copper plates, and having no success finding help in Rio de Janeiro where she lives, she asked me to take it up. I am learning, from her artwork, what limitations there are with my method. I anticipate that I may have to call into play another technique.

All the while I do this, I visualize an experimental section at the Seattle Printmakers Center where this kind of experimentation is carried on and it is particularly interesting if their is a collaborative element mixed in with the technical parts—and that there are people all over the world makes it even better because through this kind of collaboration there is understanding of other cultures, styles, and languages.

The web makes it possible to work with people in ways that were not possible forty years ago when I was halfway through my time at the University. My job at the University made it possible for me to take sabbatical leaves and unpaid leaves-of-absence so that I could travel around the world, meet people face to face, and exchange techniques and ideas with them. These encounters included the new technologies, too, as I believe it is the new technologies which feeds back and inspires artists, crafts people and designers today and provide new tools.

Blogging 

Now must end because this is taking too much of my time (and the reader’s!). I will close with mention of email correspondence with two people in England on the subject of importing a Halfwood Press to Leeds City College, email from a former student who will visit soon, and contacts with a staff member of the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture on the subject of, of course, the Seattle Printmakers Center.

Also, daily updates on the website for the Virtual Seattle Printmakers Center. So much to do! There will be plenty of day jobs when the center is realized.

ap140901 

Plug-in teacher 

Pondering the next class 

Having recently met with new people whom he believes have agreements with the public schools which might include printmaking experiences, this author ponders how such plugged-in experiences in printing makes sense in the scheme of STEAM and STEM programs. 

Background check 

When I mentioned to my wife that I might be helping teach in a public school program, she said, “Well, you can expect to have them do a background check on you.”

Yes, the public schools are responsible for the safety of children attending public school programs. I had to smile, because in the United States, the dangers to kids in school are as great as if the dangers of not going to school at all. We want our children to survive and thrive in the coming years so we want them to be educated, but our society seems to be generating risks faster than they are educated kids.

Thus, it’s necessary to do background checks on everyone who is to come into contact with the kids so that people—such as a potential plug-in teacher like myself—pose no danger to the kids in the class. They mean such risks as child molestation, drug-dealing and firearms.

Secondly, the programs for kids must be in keeping with educational policy, such as the no child left behind mandate developed a generation ago and has, ever since then, been the source innumerable setbacks.

In my brief conversations with one of the organizers of educational programming for the Seattle Public School system, he mentioned at-risk kids, which brings to mind one example of the school’s efforts to achieve the goals of "no child left behind."

How can I—an alien from the printmaking world—be of value in this program? I wonder, because a background check on me might reveal that I was marginalized at the University of Washington for my activism in technology and forced to resign for promoting STEAM-like curricula for college art students. A background check would find the label: Troublemaker and one of my former students famously refused to administer the WASL—a huge setback for him, I’m sorry to say. I feel partly responsible.

STEAM

STEAM has both an educational meaning and an industrial meaning—and I don’t mean steam engines. In educational policy development, STEAM is an acronym which means, “Science & Technology interpreted through Engineering & the Arts, all based in Mathematical elements. It is customizable to individual teaching and learning styles without needing extension lessons to meet, ‘Individual and Differential Educational Plans.’

“STEAM aligns well with many educational theories and instructional strategies already widely accepted such as: Marzano strategies, Bloom’s taxonomy, Constructivism, Multiple Intelligences, Actor Network Theory, and many more. STEAM is useful to learn about for administrators, legislators, educators and students. It is extensively research-based and in proven practice.

“STEAM was developed in 2006 by Georgette Yakman, who then was a master’s graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic and State University’s Integrated Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics Educational program (ISTEMed). Since then she has continued to evolve the concept by including more research and practice on the topic.”

The above is from the Wikipedia entry of www.steamedu.com, but, now, if you do a search based on the word “steam,” you will first be given many listings under the gaming distribution platform developed by a Seattle software company, Valve. Next you will get the mechanical engineering definition and, drilling down further into the listings, on the second page, the educational meaning of STEAM.

Drive through Seattle on Labor Day weekend

The Penny Arcade Expo (70,000 people), the Bumbershoot Festival (100,000), and a Mariner’s game (35,000) and beer all happen on Labor Day Weekend and we saw the crowds on a three-mile ride from our home next to the Seattle Center, through the downtown corridor and to SODO. When we passed the site of Seattle’s newest Maker center, SoDo MakerSpace, I pointed it out to my wife—the warehouse row on Occidental South, behind Krispy Kreme donuts at 1^st Ave. South and Holgate.

Over 200,000 people turned out for the combined events for Indie games, entertainment and sports. As I consider the kids who might be in a printmaking experience with me, I figure, “I am competing for those 200,000 people.”

I don’t care what they say about changing the world one kid at a time—those numbers are, to use the header on makeitlocally.org’s website, “Awesome.”

---

About the Author: Professor Ritchie thinks that artistic printmaking should be taught and learned, practiced, researched and be of community service. He retired in 1985 to be a blender of traditional printmaking, performance, and new digital arts. He designs software for a printmaking teaching method on a printing press platform to be offered worldwide for profits to develop the Seattle Printmakers Center.