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.

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.

os150517 My Golden Eggs: Value your customers because they are gold 

 Beginning to survey and update his database to connect with the business plan of Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc., the author reflects on the use of “Golden Eggs” as an expression to describe his patrons and is amazed to discover its use in “Angry Birds.”

Neighborhood of Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc.

When the Seattle Arts and Culture office suggested that art activists in our Uptown Queen Anne collect names of arts and culture groups and artists’ names and the square-footage that they devote to their art and culture, several things happened. I contacted the one who is in charge of tracking artists’ space in Seattle last year when I was surveying likely sites for the Seattle Printmakers Center, and our meeting had a domino effect.

At first, I thought the SPC should not be centralized, but that it should be dispersed in areas of Seattle. Or, it might be centralized, but its outreach programs would go all over—from the Pike Place Market (where Ethan Lind was helping me start up the Buskeresque Etcher) to my neighborhood Mini Art Gallery and beyond.

When I discovered that an apartment building was going up next door to the Mini Art Gallery with 105-units and about the same square-footage for living as I planned at the SPC (69,000 sq. ft. compared to my 60,000 sq. ft. SPC “Media House” plan), it changed my thinking. The ground level would be a place where the Seattle Printmakers Center “visible” activities could be situated.

The Arts and Culture contact encouraged me to meet the architect and anyone else associated with it. The administrative architect pointed me to the developer, owner of the property. It is where Silver Platters used to have its store, next to the parking lot. The entire half-block would become one building, with an plaza inside. It happens that, next door, another apartment building with street-level shops would be built, too, by a different developer.

This is the background to the Golden Eggs in the title. I became aware that I needed to meet more neighborhood people who might give their support and advice as I move forward to create the SPC. Through the architect, I got the dates of the Design Commission meetings where the building plan would be evaluated and, next, the Uptown Alliance Design Framework planners.

At the first Uptown Alliance meeting I attended (after many years’ absence) we were shown an APP called “SeattleInProgress” that laid construction sites over Google Maps. Each construction site was marked with the familiar yellow pointer. I thought of the language in the Seattle Arts and Culture survey, “Golden Eggs” as it referred to the gooses, i.e., the artists who are the ones who lay the golden eggs, arts and cultural benefits in the community. I pictured little golden eggs dotting the Uptown neighborhood, each one indicating an arts and culture resource.

Business plan

At the stage I am in of writing the business plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc., I now come the section that comes really hard for me: the financials. As I plunged into the task of writing profit and loss statements based on past performance, financial projections under the new plan, and financial analyses of all types, I came again to realize that, if I am one of the geese that lay the golden eggs in Uptown, then it is my patrons who are the “golden eggs.” Because, without my art patrons and people who bought my original presses, then I would be just another goose.

sp150501 Printmakers win under Obama Administration  

Seattle Printmakers Center starts up in 2016 

The author thinks that, despite people loving prints, printmaking and printmakers are not necessarily among those who feel good about the Obama years, printmakers worldwide are about to find out about a good thing that happened during Barack Obama’s watch.

Caveat

The reader may not think there is a connection between President Barack Obama and printmaking, and writing about printmaking in the context of a political theme is outside the art. Actually, printmaking history shows many instances of political crossovers—so numerous that volumes have been written about it. Benjamin Franklin was a printer and an advocate of universal education, and Walter Benjamin wrote an essay on the theme of art itself having changed from a cultural value to a political practice because of mechanical reproduction.

Now, a new experience is opening up, thanks to laws passed in congress with bipartisan approval—the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) act. As a student of Benjamin Franklin, Walter Benjamin, and dozens of writers, artists and technology for fifty years, I am starting the Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc. and in so doing I will demonstrate how the law passed during the Obama Administration, and which will take full effect by the end of 2015, will benefit people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers worldwide.

Printmaking, politics and economics are bound together by their historic record, and one aspect cannot be considered without considering the others. Few, if any, art forms can make this claim; in fact, almost nothing would be known about the arts of the world were it not for printmaking, which is the ancestor of all technologies known to humankind.

Printmakers win under Obama

Despite that you might not among those who feel good about the Obama years, printmakers are about to learn about a good thing that happened on Obama’s watch. The Federal Government enacted the JOBS act in 2010 and, in 2016, printmakers worldwide will find their lives improved—some in small, unnoticed ways, others in big ways.

The important thing, to me, is that education will benefit because printmaking, in the arts, crafts and design, is loaded with educational value. In fact, I think the sum of the educational parts of learning printmaking—its history, art, craft and design—is greater than the parts of art education in general.

Now, thanks the JOBS acts Titles I, II, and III, the Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc. will open for business in 2016, and it will establish a new level of printmaking products and services worldwide.

ri150420 Social Purpose Corporation 

A hybrid approach to the Seattle Printmakers Center 

Somewhat by chance the author finds what may be the best approach to structuring the Seattle Printmakers Center. Not a nonprofit umbrella under which the nineteen units are sheltered, nor a C-corp, which could utilize his assets for financing, nor an LLC. 

Imagining the future of SPC, SPC

On Sunday, April 19, I started learning about Social Purpose Corporations (SPC), which is a new kind of corporation in Washington State. It is a hybrid of non-profit and for profit corporations. The SPC may sell shares. That goes along with my financing proposal which I outlined in my booklet, Ghost Investor.

Also, profits are shared with its members, or stakeholders. As I began studying how to start an SPC, the lessons I learned from REI, PSC locally (and the Mondragon Cooperatives globally) came back to me.

As I explained in my booklet, developing the Seattle Printmakers Center may be based on my family’s intellectual and tangible property as a “stock basis.” I remember the interest in “intellectual capital” in books by that title in the nineties.

The Seattle Printmakers Center (SPC) is to help individual artists, crafts people and designers survive and thrive. Specifically, the SPC is for people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers. Not only in Seattle, but worldwide; because, now, printmaking lives in the age of digital reproduction.

In a marketing sense, starting the Seattle Printmakers Center as an SPC does not change its goals and mission; however, setting up as an SPC and communicating what the social purpose is of the SPC is a good way to keep its founders and participants accountable to fulfilling a social purpose and drive the nineteen businesses to success and sustainability.

An alternative is to make the Ritchie family proprietorship, Emeralda Works, the SPC in name instead of making the Seattle Printmakers Center the SPC in name, and then continue pursuance of the Seattle Printmakers Center under the guidance of Emeralda Works; in other words, a project of Emeralda Works.

Emeralda Works has been a research and development business, and the SPC is one of the outcomes of the research and, now, may be taken forward. This alternative must be considered, as mentioned below in the second of the seven reasons to be an SPC.

Since I think that customers of Emeralda Works sometimes want our products and services for more reasons than just what our products and services do for them as individuals, then it follows that it will be easier to explain how, as an SPC, we stand for global good. Under an SPC structure, we can voice this better than as a proprietorship, LLC, or C-Corp.

I embedded my EarthSafe 2022 principle and Declaration of Interdependence in my business plans since 1992. Changing at this time to an SPC will help ensure that I achieve business goals and personal ones: Fulfillment of my life’s teaching, research, practice and services purpose.

Whether as Emeralda, SPC or Seattle Printmakers Center, SPC, this corporate structure has definable metrics (like sales from etching presses, publishing, and investors involved and jobs created). Creative artistic printmaking, the original basis that defines our mission, is based on the intangible joys of live printmaking; but I am determined to throw my net over a wide scope of other products and services that are both real and virtual, measurable, and sustainable over the long term.

If and when I say “we,” I refer to the hundreds of owners of Halfwood Presses, of owners of my artworks, and my associates who, since 2004, have participated in the many themes and variations of the Halfwood Press projects. The results so far are measurable because we exchange tangibles: money for products.

For the period 2014-2023, I will make the Seattle Printmakers Center my focus, and today I think that the business structure, Social Purpose Corporation is the best way to succeed.

Lucky that I live in Washington State, with is “Benefit Corporation” laws in place, concomitant with it Crowd Equity funding instruments—not to mention being a leader among the technology centers of the world.

Seven arguments favoring an SPC

One, as an SPC, Emeralda Works (or the Seattle Printmakers Center) can sell shares, as outlined in my book, Ghost Investor, and thus take advance of Washington State’s new crowd equity funding law.

Two, if it means keeping the name Emeralda Works, then it is not only good for easy transitioning (Websites, mailing addresses, etc.) from the proprietorship, but the name itself has value as intellectual property.

Three, financial benefits—profits—can be shared with stakeholders. In retrospect, for example, consider the years of support given by people since the year Emeralda was formed.

Four, an exit plan for myself is more readily validated.

Five, remuneration for my family is simplified under a SPC.

Six, I am personally uninterested in nonprofits because in my opinion there is an implicit suggestion that grants and donations would be forthcoming, which I doubt.

Seven, for-profit status, as a C-Corp or LLC, does not harmonize with the altruistic aspect of my philosophy, with respect to social, environmental, and educational aspects of my lifework.

ps150419 Emeralda Umbrella 

Nineteen beneficiaries  

A friend, and adviser, suggests that it is best to form a nonprofit for the Seattle Printmakers Center and in a flash the author conceives of his life-game, Emeralda, as the umbrella nonprofit under which the nineteen units of the Center can be developed. 

Good old Carl

I knew he would come through with good advice—Carl Chew is a friend of mine and plays the role of adviser whenever we get together. I have known him always to be the creative one who can, in an instant, conceive of innovations that surprise me. Like the creativity that he puts into his art, his solutions to my problems are novel to say the least.

While Carl may shy away from putting his name on a list of advisers, the suggestion he made this week seems, today, to be the kind of advice that I need to take. Not that he is the first to advise me that I should be going nonprofit with my plan. From the time I thought of a center for innovation based on printmaking—the Seattle Printmakers Center I call it—the suggestions have come from several people that the Center be a nonprofit organization. Carl’s recommendation needs to be taken up now, and I should start.

Emeralda Works to go nonprofit?

Since 1999, our family proprietorship has been Emeralda Works, the purpose of which is software development and design for printmaking education, practice, research and service. Now is the time to move toward making it a nonprofit. This would then allow the nineteen components of the Seattle Printmakers Center to start up—somewhat like Shunpike serves numerous startups that have the potential to be self-supporting.

The difference is that the nineteen components under the Seattle Printmakers Center are planned to be for-profit and self-sustaining, designed to create jobs for people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers, think globally and act locally in this the age of digital reproduction.

es150415 Martha Stewart of Printmaking:
Vision of printmaking TV

He has thought of doing a printmaking show on TV for four decades—ever since he introduced “how-to” videotapes in college teaching. Household names like Julia Childs, Martha Stewart and Bob Ross come to mind as he takes steps to make his vision a reality.

My email to KCTS “Viewer Services”

“We watch Create cooking, woodworking, gardening, travel and other lifestyle shows, and occasionally a special on art on KCTS-9. As I have been a printmaker for 50 years – 19 of those years as a professor at the UW art school – it is understandable that I think a printmaking show on TV is a good idea.

I tell people I want to be the Martha Stewart of printmaking. People tell me that, with over a hundred “how to” videos on YouTube, I should think Broadcast TV is dying, but I disagree – strongly!

Any good teacher should be pursuing broadcast TV if he or she wants to the world a good turn in arts and culture.

That’s why I am looking for production companies that would like to tackle the project of Printmaking TV.

Please connect me with a company, organization or individual whom you, who are reading this, is a possibility.”

I sent this email to Channel 9’s “View Services” after having stopped in at KCTS’ building to deliver a promotion for Arts and Culture in our neighborhood, Uptown. The receptionist gave me the email address after I explained I was also promoting Printmaking on TV, and needed to find contacts—people who could join with me in a search for funding.

Why Martha Stewart?

People ask me, “Why not Bob Ross?” He is famous for “Joy of Painting” and the comparison is a good one insofar he provided a line of painting supplies as well as the lessons for painting. Martha Stewart, however, is my preferred model because in addition to the entrepreneurial element of selling supplies for what she demonstrates on TV, she exploited a range of productions from magazines to lifestyle.

Julie Childs, too, is remarkable for the personality she brought to her shows, and the focus on French Cooking which gave her viewers very specific information. Stewart is all over the place, and Ross—albeit focused on painting—only showed his own style and art philosophy.

The comparison with these stars of the TV how-to genre with what I do—traditional printmaking—is valid because, one, I am a printmaking expert and, two, I have a product line of personal-sized etching presses. Add to that my commitment to a printmaking philosophy of a greater range than usually found in textbooks and YouTube videos, and you have a formula for certain success.

Back story

Add to the three factors above—the fourth factor is the context of the Seattle Printmakers Center concept I work on today. The TV show will be produced in the facilities of the Center, including training in videography that is related to other new technologies such as digital magazines.

It’s a huge idea and it is part of my goal to create jobs for people who love printmaking, prints, and printmakers, and who want to use the power of TV for education and entertainment.