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.”

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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.