SeattlePrintmakersCenter

vi150611 Identity Crisis:  Confessions of a longtime sufferer  

It is shameless self-indulgence to say so, he confesses, to think about oneself and one’s identity but he sets forth to describe his problem when he’s planning to make another public appeal for investors to buy his plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center.

Productivity

I’m sitting at my computer looking at a digital form I am supposed to fill out so that an event which I will attend next week will have correct information and improve chances to start up the Seattle Printmakers Center.

The first blank spot on the form has me stumped—like a kid filling out a college application who can’t think why he wants to go or what to major in, like a lot of young people at points in their lives and uncertainty looms large.

What is the official name of my company? the form asks.

What name did I use when I signed up? I paid my $160 for a table at the SURF (Start-Up-Real-Fast) Expo. That’s an annual event put on by the SURF Incubator in downtown Seattle. I signed up as Bill Ritchie. I’m not a company, but I am half-owner of Emerald Works—an R&D company developing software and equipment for the printmaking and media arts.

Who am I?

White male, 73 years old, Married, US Citizen. All I can add to this of any gravity is “former professor, UW.” In the real world some kind of title, like CEO or Vice President, etc. is helpful. What qualifies a person, in other words, to command attention from anyone?

I have led a privileged and fortunate life, the highlight of which was landing a plum job teaching at the University of Washington. The odds of my getting this, at age 25, were zero; but politics intervened. A paranoid, middle-aged art professor was looking for a protégé, a new hire he could shape and prepare to maintain his campaign in that tiny sector of the academic art world called printmaking.

I was chosen because I was enough to get high marks in a cow-town college art department, good enough to pass the GRE (graduate school exam), finish an MA (but probably not good enough to get an MFA), and good enough to get the recommendations of my faculty—some of whom were former students and colleagues of my sponsor! My hiring was fixed, but I didn’t know it.

I thought that I was hired because I was good enough to beat out the other contenders, willing to take a low salary and follow the orders of my betters. I went to work with a vengeance, despite the warnings from my new fellow teachers—most of them recently hired, like me—that my real mission was to topple the guy who hired me because they thought he was a tyrant. Actually, he was my hero until I got to know him better.

Long story short

So long ago this was that I doubt if anyone remembers. It was the highlight of my life; it reminds me of the short story about a guy on his deathbed who recalls his only moment of glory—making touchdown against all odds.

I’m not anywhere near dying, but my past keeps coming back, dogging my attempt to invent myself. Not re-invent. I never did invent myself. I responded to what I thought was expected of me: Be an artist, for example. Art was the only thing I was good at doing.

When people said I was good at art I said, “Shoot, I have good hand-eye coordination—that’s all.” Now, in my mature years, add, “A good imagination but also a kind of mental illness by social standards. Great minds have written that creativity, imagination, inventiveness, and discovery are virtues of an adventure-seeker, a developer, a statesman, rocket scientist and, yes, an artist.

Society needs these misfits, the great minds say. The trouble is, sometimes the formula doesn’t work. The worst that humanity has experienced is when madmen have their moments of success and bring about grievous results for humanity. How much better off would we be if, in the young Hitler’s, his interest in art and architecture had been encouraged?

Is life a crap game?

Back to my on-screen form: if I put “Emeralda Works” in the space, as it is truly my official company name, it is the bona fide truth. We have a business license and we file a Form C with our income tax.

If I put Seattle Printmakers Center, it’s not official. I have yet to file for the status of a corporation—the official papers are still waiting and $180 filing fee; and the business plan is incomplete. Is it ever going to be? I wonder.

My plan is that the Seattle Printmakers Center will be like the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, or a local example, Teatro ZinZanni—a consortium of a number of companies with certain shared costs. In what I call my business plan, there are nineteen parts to the consortium.

One of them, the Halfwood Press line, has a demonstrated market value, a tangible, profitable product. The work of this member of the consortium I call the Factory School of Printmaking Arts is to produce small designer etching presses for the lifestyle sector. I estimate its gross annual potential at $8M in 3-5 years. A share of the profits would go to sustain the Center’s overall activities.

Chances for success?

My identity is that of a farm kid with zero chance of becoming a full professor of art. Yet, dumb luck and handy at art (plus enough mechanical ability to attain reasonable technological skills) got me to the point where I can start a high culture, high-tech incubator with a low-tech etching press. I can ask for capital to Jump-start Our Small Businesses, as in JOBS Act, title II, of the Obama administration.

Today, it’s all about productivity, after all. Therefore, in this light, my identity crisis is not a crisis at all. My identity is tied to the product, which in turn resulted from my passion for printmaking and everything, and everybody, associated with it. Including that madman who hired me in 1966 and saved me from the draft and Vietnam; also my best friends and former students, and the hundreds of people who bought my art and press designs.

Crisis over

I did not mention my passion for writing which, if you have read this far, you noticed. I learned in college about the lasting power of writing, especially fiction. Alongside design and production of presses, I think writing is the art of influence—the “butter” in the economist’s formula of guns and butter. Or, in my story, etching presses and software.

If I am the genius that my psyche major college roommate Bob Biersner declared that I am, then my genius is expressed in the melding of etching press and new technology that are intertwined (as in Martin Buber’s definition of entertainment).

So, fill in the blank with Emeralda Works, for it is the official name of my entity and sponsor of the Seattle Printmakers Center, of which I hope to be the founder and artistic director—like Norman Langill is to the Teatro ZinZanni.