es090405 Dear Former Students: A professor asks his former students to be his board of advisers   

For years I have watched people who used to be art students at the UW as they became good citizens as well as fine artists, craftspeople, designers, teachers and professionals in various important functions in our communities. I need their advice on ELPO.

©2009 Bill Ritchie - 1231 Words - 3 Pages

Dear Former Students,

Writing to you is timely in the sense that I considered doing this for decades, literally. Since the time you were in college, and you made contributions to my life in ways you may never have fully realized, I knew the day would come I would write this letter to you, my former students.

You helped me when I was a professor learning teaching, the arts, technologies and politics of the walled-in institutions of universities, museums and art galleries.

When I left the UW campus, you continued to give support in the ways you played your own tune, making marvelous lives for yourselves based, maybe, on things you picked up in school when I knew you. I might flatter myself and think I taught you some things that you needed for your successes, but I know better.

The truth is we had a community going in college, and the essence of community leaked out into life after the university. I never shut down my community work, and I am writing to you at this time because I have reached a stage in my professional life that’s something like a post-doctoral stage. If there were a university for me, I’d be boning up for my finals.

You, my formers students—having been around the block many more than a few times—would be my examination board. If I pass the next hurdle—in your collective judgement—I think we will experience a great satisfying feeling to add to our lives’ works.

Here is the deal. To reach the goal of a great teacher, I need and want to take my offerings online, in ways and shapes and forms apposite to these times. I will teach printmaking online; and I will do so in a what is called—by academics—blended learning. It’s a mix of distance learning and face-to-face workshops. I’ve been working on it since 1980.

It has been an interesting goal to work toward, and the idea is rooted in our years at the UW. What I need now is a board of advisors—people like yourself who are artists, craftspeople and designers who have proven yourselves in ways surpassing perhaps even your own expectations. I think I need a core of a dozen former students with your experience and insights as professionals, community servants, members of nuclear families and homeowners and—a few of you—parents.

A board of advisors can help me refine factors that teachers and professors need to sort out the right things to bring our following. The arts have important contributions to solve the nation’s and the world’s problems in the name of creativity. Distance learning is creative, and blended learning in higher education is a way to bring arts education to more people.

Looking back, I think we met at a fortunate moment, you and I, when it wasn’t so difficult to have traditional art studio classrooms. We had it all, I think—safe, relatively inexpensive and open-ended learning and productive facilities. I made the most of the freedom and security of my nineteen years at the UW.

Today, when I set foot on campus or hear the stories of art teachers, I feel like Rip Van Winkle, wakening to a world so vastly different they make me go back to sleep. I think, compared to the old days, teaching art is nightmarish.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I don’t think people—at any stage of their lives, whether they are traditional-age college students or people late in their lives—have to give up their jobs, move away or make long commutes, and spend inordinate amounts of time and resources to study and produce in the printmaking domain. And I would try not to teach people to do things that will require sacrifices of money for oversized equipment and unnecessary baggage typical of 20^th Century printmaking.

You can help this enterprise, to make printmaking online real, get it out and on the street as it were. You can help me by examining my plan, advising me, and connecting me with other people and agents of change who want to develop the best parts of what we launched in college and have practiced over the past forty years in our own ways.

You may be wondering, “What do you want?” Have a meeting?

That would be nice, if we can agree that what I am doing justifies taking your time.

What would be the focus of the meeting?

Money, undoubtedly.

Do I want your money? No, you’ve paid enough, I think, but Other Peoples’ Money (OPM) is the goal I have in mind.

What is the money for? Blended learning as a solid, credible offering takes money to shape into ways that fit the expectations of potential learners. The details take time, and specialists who can do the work will be paid in the course of making blended learning printmaking work.

It is with a tinge of guilt and remorse that I have not kept in close contact with you, seldom attending art openings, limiting my social life, and not publishing my work so most former students do not know what I’m up to. I wish you did, but it all takes time; and, for you, school was out decades ago.

Schoolish matters don’t concern you so much, for only a handful of you are teachers, and only a few of you have kids in schools; you are probably more concerned over the high costs and outcomes than being involved in talking higher education or distance learning with your old professor.

Since the year I started teaching—1966—my philosophy has been that education is mankind’s most enduring and—speaking of the language of our times—recession-proof industry. I’m glad I took on that mantra, because I feel like someone just starting out, like a freshman—on a new experience. The Rip Van Winkle effect isn’t so bad, the way I see it. It’s fun, in fact.

I want to share it with you. I want to talk about how, for example, Second Life—the current pop virtual world—might be a way to teach printmaking. If you were on my board of advisors, you could either prove I’m wrong or you could see this idea has something to offer you, personally, and to the community at large.

I’m a hundred words over my limit of writing a thousand a day, so I must end with a request: communicate with me on this subject, blended learning printmaking for the future. How would you proceed, if you were me?

---

About the Author: Professor Bill Ritchie taught printmaking and media arts who took early retirement to start a learning, research and production company. His goal is a teaching studio for the 21^st Century printmaker, blending printmaking and digital arts. Code-named Emeralda: Learn Printmaking Online (ELPO) it is comprised of three elements: A mini-etching press, periodic meetings, and a digital game-based interface.

ap190223 Touching the past, feeling the future  

Recently I was in touch with a former student. I met him in the mid-1970’s and we have seen each other and talked together many times since then. We’re not close friends, but we are close enough that he invites us to his family affairs. I’ve worked in his studio. I’ve even walked in his shoes, literally!

He commented on a Facebook page, referring to his student days with his compliments. His daughter is now an art major – like he was – in the same school, the UW School of Art. I told him about my Mr. Chips syndrome – a feature of my NIF (Nuclear Integrative Fantasy).

He’s thinking about a reunion for the benefit of his daughter and her peer group of art students. It would be a get together to talk about the past and how students of the past fifty years have used their education.

Thinking about this, I came to a memory of a book he and his peer group made – a report from a lower-classman seminar. I searched for this book on my shelf and as I did so I had an epiphany. I wanted to touch this book, take it from the shelf, and be reminded of his work and the work of his classmates.

It wasn’t on the shelf, however. It may be in my studio across the street. I may look for it later. The feeling, the epiphany, lingered. It was the same feeling one gets in a museum, seeing artifacts from the past and the mind wandering to these places and times mentally reconstructing what people were thinking and doing then.

There is a kind of distortion, however, a lack of focus. In film special effects, there’s one in which they try to convey this flash back with wavy distortions or soft focus, color shifts and camera angles to simulate time out of time.

My friend is thoroughly in the world of art and the art museum, volunteering his time to do docent and guide work there. He has produced thousands of artworks and traveled back and forth to Russia in pursuit of his art and teaching. His life has been quite amazing, as one can see on the Internet in articles about his work.

Now he’s proposing a reunion, as he believes his work at the UW School of Art was the beginning of it all and, like any parent (myself included) he wants the best for his daughter.

My epiphany lingers long enough for me to begin this essay, but there is more. For one thing, if I were to think his path could be similar to his daughter’s, for one thing there would be no underclass seminar for her.

I don’t have to touch this book to be reminded of the circumstance of that seminar. My mind needs no tactile contact. He has a copy of the same book, in fact, because I gave him an extra around the time his daughter was born almost a generation ago.

What I’m reminded of is what I consider a better student experience than what I think his daughter will experience.

I am making a mistake in thinking so, however, because I see the world partly through that old frame of reference which Einstein warns us is an error in thinking. He made the comment in reference to solving problems.

Are we to think about solving problems?

In the days I created the seminar, the problem was that there were inadequacies in the curriculum. Management, for example – what is called professional practices today – was non-existent. My friend took up the matter of framing art with cost-cutting methods. Another student team took up papermaking.

Are the curricular offerings at the UW School of Art adequate today to prepare his daughter for forty years of living? What is the frame of reference? Is it different today than in 1976?

I think so. A comparative study should include, for example, climate change and socio-political issues and the artist’s relation to them. Consider, for example, money to live on and develop security enough to make art.

I’ve got mine, but what are her chances, at the age of seventy-seven, or, her father’s at age sixty-seven, to be in a position like ours?

Later in the morning I returned to this essay. As it was in he midst of my work – which consisted of updating several files for the Internet. As I worked – moving my cursor over my logic tree, opening and closing directories, updating pages in Dreamweaver – I thought again about her.

Could she follow what I’m doing, if watching over my shoulder? Could my former student? What questions would arise?

It should occur to both that I’m doing something their schooling did not, and is not, preparing them for. I call it Legacy Management.

There is a broken link in the line of education where we hold something in common: The UW School of Art. I was on the path I was on up until 1985. My former students were left behind in some areas but stayed on the path of convention.

I did not fit in, and I do not fit in today. Much as I might like to share in community development where the arts and technology offer his daughter a path she can follow and a path she can trust, it’s not likely.

sp190210 Why Martin’s 3D etching press is not enough

Martin Schneider’s design of a downloadable/upload-able deliverable assemble-able and functional etching press is a breakthrough for sure. Now teachers can have a model to work with, both as an exercise in 3D printing and, taken further, an enabler to make prints using the press.

https://openpressproject.com/

There is more to do, however, to make the design thoroughly effective for people – young and old. It needs a culture of interaction with other people. Printmaking has a unique character which other art forms do not have – social development.

Since its invention, when prints first became a faster, easier way to make one’s mark as a hand print on a stone wall of a cave underground or under an overhanging cliff, it opened human interaction on a massive scale.

The hand-made paintings adjacent to the hand prints in caves were no less important, but the prints hinted at mechanization. They were the first algorithms! The use of a stencil (the hand) or a relief printing method (the hand smeared with pigment) was, like an algorithm, a way to solve a problem. It worked uniformly across the spectrum of humans. It was an innovation.

Unlike the signature paintings of the caves and the famous signature of a Rembrandt, the print made a statement: I am. Anyone could do it. It was a mechanical invention and led eventually to the printing press. The rest is history.

Mechanization takes command, however, when the human interaction is not in the mix. For example, I think of this when I throw out junk mail sent to me. The sender is not a human, thinking, “Bill would like to see this – I’ll send it to him.” The sender is mechanization in a multitude of steps.

When my email includes invitations to sign up for a political movement or buy a new car, it is not human interaction. To me, it’s dehumanized, and fully mechanized media having taken command.

I liked the article in School Arts magazine about Martin’s press, and the teacher’s description of the way the kids made printing plates using 3D printing. But it is not enough because the prints go nowhere. They have no point in creating human interaction of the scale I hope for with my concept of Proximates.

In a more humanistic effort, the prints those kids make would be part of Proximates, registered in an Internet system like a social medium, each moment becoming part of a vast database of times-and-places when and where the prints were made.

I would like American kids to have a personal acquaintance with kids elsewhere and an idea about other kids’ situations – their needs and wants, their hopes for a better world and how their education is preparing them to take part in helping Earth’s human and other life sustainability.

That’s what I mean when I say Martin’s press can only go so far as a valuable teaching and learning experience. For my part I am searching for a cohort to help me achieve my goal of blending the printmaking experiences of people with connecting with other people on a human, enriching manner through time and space.

I want to make the climaxing moment that a print is made as the beginning of a human interaction and understanding all over the whole wide world web of humanity.