SeattlePrintmakersCenter

sp150511 Necromancing the press -

Divining the future of the Seattle Printmakers Center 

With the prospect of yet another round of proposals and conjectures about the viability of his plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center, the author is drawn to the sustainability in posing the question to his muse: “Can I pay for the SPC with press money?”

You have to be prescient and persistent

I heard so many stories in the past about people with an idea who met with rejection again and again and yet they continued to try to succeed in convincing other people with money and power to make a dream come true, and finally, they did meet with a person—or people—who believed in the idea and the dream became reality.

These stories are always associated with projects that we regard as milestones in the arts, sciences, technology, and entertainment. In other words, the successful ones. It seems as though the back story is always one of struggle and persistence. I wonder, is there some combination of timing, erudition, design or personality traits that made these?

In one instance, when Negroponte wanted to start a center for researching new technologies at MIT, he used a set of interlocked rings to illustrate what he meant—each ring representing a technology which, when linked to the other two, yielded a sum of technologies greater than the sum of what each one meant. Telephone, computers, and video, for example, might have been what he showed the people whose support he needed.

In the case of Steven Spielberg, he simply took over one of the offices on a movie lot, put his name on the door and pretended that he belonged until, eventually, he got the attention of the people who believed in him. The list of artists who needed other people to team up with him or her to get the job done and found that team is a long one, always it was not without a long time of struggle and repeated proposals.

So it will be with me as I form the Seattle Printmakers Center. I would like for this to happen sooner, because. at my age, I realize that I may lose some key element in my senses—my sense of humor, my creativity, my vision, hearing, etc.—before I get in front of the “right” people or person.

My press, your press

Among those who already have shown their belief in my plan and my design of etching presses—Tom Kughler, Ric Miller, Ron Myhre, Warren Ralls, Ernest Horvers, Ethan Lind and Isaac Miller to name a few—there is no doubt about their sincerity. However, all the spare cash they have would not be enough to launch the Seattle Printmakers Center.

In the second tier are the people who already have bought a press—and this is about 150 people worldwide, a few of whom bought two or more presses in the past ten years. Yet, even with one-hundred seventy presses sold, this is not enough money. These sales represent only about $180,000 in gross income.

The calculations at hand suggest that over 800,000 more people in the US alone would buy the presses if the presses were made and marketed proportionately—a market of about $8M. The uphill climb for me is like the aspiring movie-maker who needs a half-million dollars to get a movie made, and overcome the doubts of the producers that the movie would be profitable.

Necromancy

Necromancy is the dark art of communing with the dead to find out what the future holds. In my novel, “Ghosts in the New Machine,” I used the idea of time travel to go back and ask what it would have been like if my mini halfwood press had made its debut in Rembrandt’s time instead of the year 2004. I only scratched the surface, as I found that in Rembrandt’s situation, it might have made a difference because the old master, down on his luck, could have worked his way out of debt by making playing cards on my mini halfwood press. He might have survived the stress of having been forced to leave his home. His family might have had better living conditions. His wife might not have died, and his son, too, might have lived if their conditions improved because of the mini halfwood press.

In this way I am necromancing the press—pretending to solve my problems of financing the Seattle Printmaking Center by addressing myself to the press as if this inanimate object embodied the ghosts of dead artists. Like a genie in the bottle—or the powers in that plate in the novel that has the power to take one over time—the press suggests that I, too, could make cards on these mini presses, designed to earn me the fortune that it would take to build the Seattle Printmaking Center.