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.