SeattlePrintmakersCenter

pp150816  Kickstart the Northwest Print Center and Cultural Arts Technology Incubator  

Kids in Riga and Amsterdam - Why not in Seattle?  

The two photographs below are “Kids-with-presses” a photo album of young people in Latvia and The Netherlands. They are kids having printing experiences.

If kids in Riga and Amsterdam can have a printing experience, why can’t kids in Seattle? These two images combined Seattle inventions. Seattle’s team invented the mini press, left, for Riga’s kids, inspired partly by the one on the right at Het Rembrandtsuis.

I seek people in Northwest industries who support building the Northwest Print Center and Cultural Arts Technology Incubator.  Seattle and Amsterdam have much in common, but Seattle has no center to showcase printmaking leadership as does Amsterdam. Printmaking is not only a visual art. It is an art that can address the mind as well as the eye, giving the thinking person intellectual opportunities plus eye candy.

A child traces around his splayed fingers with crayon and experiences the manual template. Handprints evolved through 300 centuries of mechanical innovations—from handprints on cave walls to the Internet. It is seemingly endless tale of inventors’ quests to replicating human thought and expression.

Northwest industries lead the way

Seattle is a region of leading industries for information technology. Northwest companies are known worldwide for computer operating systems (Microsoft), online marketing and sales (Amazon), search engines (Google), digital graphics (Adobe) and concurrent engineering and manufacture (The Boeing Company).

All these technologies descended from a single ancestor—printing. Printing combines ink and a template, and a template is like an algorithm. Algorithms stand as abstract art stands compared to realistic art. It took about 300 centuries to come from handprints on cave walls to what we have now for global communication.

As all technologies descended from a single ancestor, printmaking is the ancestor of all our Northwest technologies. We, in the Northwest, cannot let the arts and crafts of printmaking be locked in 19^th Century, visual art frames.

Everywhere, printmaking arts and crafts are taught and practiced as though printmaking is merely a branch of visual art, suitable for commercial purposes and art stardom. Printmaking is much more than a visual art. As the root stem of new technologies that gives the Northwest region economic stability, it should be wholly experienced and taught holistically.

This needs a center which reflects Northwest technologies—not only visual arts.

Who can say how a mechanical template—a tracing around the hand—figures in writing code? Is there a connection between mechanical principles a young person accumulates in early life which, later, becomes the means of abstraction suitable for problem-solving? Replication allows sharing of ideas via technology—whether by shared digital snapshots, video, music, or the whole spectrum of multimedia.

The Northwest Print Center will clarify and strengthen the deeper meanings of printmaking. Not only an art form akin to painting, drawing, sculpture and the crafts, printmaking is a powerful union of mechanical and intellectual development in the human psyche.

We may start with children’s participation in the printing experience. The experience can extend to plate making, and reach toward new technologies—the digital systems that make 3D-printing and laser engraving, social networks and community building possible. The Cultural Arts Technology Incubator will be a starting point for businesses and education services to develop from the richness of what our region offers in its deep well of experience.