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.