This old man, he plays . . .

There is a song, the words of which say, “This old man, he plays one . . .” and those lyrics popped into my head while I was working on the stamps for the printmaking game, “WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press.” I thought about Confucius’ advice that said, “Better to play games than do nothing at all.” That was advice in reference to what a person can do in their old age.

As I try to think of ways to restore my lost career as a teacher—what I had become when I was at the University of Washington School Of Art—I find that career is probably lost forever. In a country where teachers—and especially professors—are as much maligned as they are valued, how can it be otherwise?

I watched a video on TED talks, of Kiran Sethi, titled “Kids Take Charge,” and it brought tears of joy to my eyes to see this teacher, who started Riverside School in India doing so well with so little. Her talk is part of a series of inspiring lectures from around the world, assembled by Pearl Arrendondo.

After I watched this ten-minute video, I turned back to my project—adding words to 51 images taken from my video of assembling a WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press. I am making them into stamp images, which I will print out and . . . and . . . I don’t know what will be the next step. It is, after all, only a game.

When Lynda, my wife, plays solitaire on her tablet, she doesn’t think about being productive or that the result of her game will add up to anything. Although the programmers for this digital game have added a few bells and whistles such as keeping score, these are not important to her. Whoever wrote down the length of time it took to win a game of Solitaire using real cards, on a piece of real paper? People play games for the fun of it, to pass the time doing something; better to play games than do nothing at all.

Yet, the contrast between what people like Pearl Arrendondo and Kiran Sethi are attempting and achieving and what I am about is too great for me to ignore. What can I do about it? I think about it all the time. The skill to make these stamps, if you trace back the steps that have been required to get to this point, and the desire to make a game out of Rembrandt’s achievements has taken me fifty years.

Surely, it must amount to something. If I could transport myself to Riverside School, and show Kiran Sethi our mini etching presses, and ask if it would be possible to make presses like this for 1% the 2 hundred million children in India, and grow a profitable company from this and put money back into education, would she say yes? She would turn to one of the children in her school, and that child would say, “I can.”

Can I not do this in the USA? Is it my impression, or is it true, that our children would not be able to reply in the same way as Ms. Sethi’s students. Why is it my impression that in order to grow a company to make presses and related products for kids I have to spend hours at my computer designing a game, or taking time to make a DVD for the Brooklyn Art Museum, or autograph and package gifts for my associates in the Halfwood Press venture?

In the design of the presses and the theories about learning printmaking—and justification for that learning—there is a gift, given to me by hundreds of people I met in the course of my fifty years in art and teaching. My fear is that I will be the cause of the loss of this gift; it would take someone five years to do what I have done in 50 years if they would study what I am doing at the moment and, like an engineer, reverse the process to get at the essence and value of what it is that I have achieved.

If I find this person, or a coven of people, who could see the value of my work, then I would win Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life.