What Innovation?  

Listing my innovations for fun 

Reading a tome of a book titled, “Diffusion of Innovations” by Everett M. Rogers, this artist/teacher must pause and ask himself, “What, if anything, did I innovate?” and, then, “Why was any one of these adopted and diffused?” The question bears thinking. 

It started with a trip to Europe

If I “innovated” in any pursuit, it probably started with the trip Lynda, my wife and I, took in 1969 to work in Europe with Rolf Nesch in Norway, and some follow-up visits to Stanley Hayter and others on the continent.

My pursuit was an unanswered question: “What was it like before WWII when it appeared that printmaking innovation was diffused?” Such diffusion of the inventive printmaking that Nesch and Hayter—to name only two renowned artists who helped make printmaking a fine art form in its own right—is an example of “Diffusion of Innovations” which Everett M. Rogers wrote about in his book of that title.

At 72—the same age that Rolf Nesch was when I went to work with him and see his technique he called, “material grafiks,”—I look back almost every day and wonder why my innovations were not diffused. Or, the most important ones to me, the innovations in printmaking as the art is taught in college.

Rogers’ book is helping me understand why my innovations weren’t adopted in college art and why I continue to see my innovations slow to be diffused to the degree that I wish they would.

A current example is my proposal for a Seattle Printmakers Center—I find very few people interested. Rogers might tell me why. Thus far his book has taught me the truth that even though an innovation might be a good thing for many people, not many people will take it up.

Those who do are called “early adopters” of the innovation. Their number is small at first, but it grows over time and then it soars—providing the circumstances are right for it.

What did I do?

This morning, as part of my research, I thought it would be instructive to list what I think are my innovations—the ones that have not been diffused. Uncertain whether to start at the top—the Seattle Printmakers Center—or at the early innovations of my career, it’s hard to choose.

The old innovations are easier to understand—starting in 1969 in other words. My innovation that year was that printmaking shares with painting, drawing and sculpture certain creative processes. I was steeped in creativity theories, not only in art, but in science, mathematics and music. What is the creative process, anyway? Whatever it was, it seemed to be the key to success for artists. Whether it is innate or if creativity can be taught—these are the questions that motivated me to go to Europe in 1969.

And the question was specifically grounded in printmaking, because printmaking is not a creative process itself, but a repetitive, mechanical process that lent itself to non-human production. If printmaking were to be valuable in the humanities, or if printmaking were to be justified as material for higher education, then creativity might be the only question to study.

Creativity in printmaking was the only thing that interested me after that epiphany, and might save me from a long, dull career in teaching college. If I could share with other university teachers a kind of research, worthy of the name, then it would be to find the keys to creativity in this otherwise mechanical reproduction process called printmaking.

Creativity denied

I learned there are many people in secure positions, socio-economically speaking, who deny there is any such thing as creativity—that there is nothing new under the sun. When Glen Alps, whose innovation was the collagraph name twenty years before I came to the UW School of Art, began his push for diffusion of the process, it took ten years for him to enjoy the recognition of having named it.

It was what Rolf Nesch called “metal grafik” or “material grafik” but the name collagraph (collage graphic, and also collograph, with an “o” referring to gluing) was more popular in the United States printmaking nomenclature. It was an innovation, but to me it was not important that a person used one technique over another to make a work of art that had something about it that was creative and important.

Technique can be learned by machines. I was looking for the human element that must be part of the experience. Besides books on creativity, I also read books like, “Mechanization takes Command,” “Prints and People,” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Paralleling this literature I read books on education; one that sticks in my mind is “Art on Campus,” because it is here that I learned the history of art becoming a topic worthy of university-level study, research, production and services.

My first innovation

That must be my first innovation—that the four cornerstones of university work are teaching, research, production and services. Not really an innovation when you realize that these are the basis of all great universities for hundreds of years, actually, but my adoption of this as my mantra (signified by the acronym, TRPS) was innovation enough to keep me on course for fifty years.

Custom Work Now and Then  

Comparison of printing and coding  

Fifty years ago he was introduced to art as serving people who like fine art prints according to tradition and innovation in printmaking, which is his domain of expertise. Service changed as the art form evolved to include digital in addition to material.

Prints and people

“Prints and People” is the title of a book published in 1971 about the social and cultural aspects of printmaking. A. Hyatt Mayor, the author, points out the effects of prints on literacy, commerce, science, fashions, religion and political power. I must have read it soon after it was published, because the early 1970's marks a turning point in my career. Or, you might call it a time when I came to a fork in the road and I took it—famously advised by Yogi Berra.

My life up until then had been okay. I had a wonderful wife (still do), a house, a car, two daughters and, to keep this good life going, a pretty good job. The job was being an art teacher at the University of Washington School Of Art. This job required that you keep studying art, practicing the art you were hired to teach, be a good teacher and stay out of trouble with the bosses.

I was good at the first three requirements, but not so good at staying out of trouble—but that’s another story. Those first three things—keeping on studying, practicing and teaching—were harmonious. The catch was, however, that the better you became at these, the harder it was to keep out of trouble. But, as I said, that’s another story.

The benefit was that I kept my job for nineteen years and it was because I learned there was a fourth requirement—one that people did not talk about very much. It is service. So teaching, research, practice and service became my magic formula for success.

At the university, for example, the professors are regarded as experts by the people outside the university—the people in the community. This is a global pattern. We—my family and I—traveled around the world one year and everywhere we went I found people willing to help us in part because I had my professor’s credentials. Doors opened, even on short notice, and people showed us things and gave us things and hospitality which, I suppose, were given because of my title—Professor of Art.

It follows, then, that when community people right around the university or from abroad wanted expert opinion, they called me sometimes. Not only that, but when my students needed extra service—such as giving advice on subjects that were not taught in college at the time—they came to me. I learned, as Yogi Berra said about taking the fork in the road, referred to a major life decision. If the road forks, it’s like coming to an opportunity to take a new and better direction. The first fork I came to was when we got back to Seattle after studying in Europe for a few months—should I keep doing what I was doing in printmaking, or take up video art?

It was risky. I was making a good salary, my art was selling, and I was getting into art shows and winning prizes. It was recursive, because the better I was at my art, the bosses gave me promotions and grants to keep doing what I was doing. The road had been going along like a freeway and then I came to electronic media—and I took it up. My stay in Europe had exposed me to old men—artists—who had come to forks decades before me and made similar choices. Their art was printmaking, like mine, and what I took for granted in my early days was new when they were young artists. In fact, they invented printmaking as a form of fine art.

Digital art

The expression “digital art” is commonly used today to refer to works on paper or canvas that were made all or in part by computer-data driven printers, cutters, laser-burners, etc. In printmaking, digital prints are accepted as being the same thing as etchings, woodcut prints, lithographs and screen prints. As A. Hyatt Mayor suggested in his book, “Prints and People,” the evolution of the effects of printing continue and art teachers are teaching, researching and producing digital printmaking the same way as they had been taught.

One thing I think that is under served, is service itself. This came to mind today as I was updating a web page on one of my websites. This one shows most of the people who own my work—usually known as art patrons. It occurred to me that in the 1970s I spent as much time making a print as it took me to update a web page today. Let’s say it was 15 minutes. In those fifteen minutes I could have been printing an etching or block print or I could have been working on a plate to print tomorrow.

I might, in time, sell the print to someone and then they would become another patron. I have about four-hundred names of people and institutions who own my work. In the past ten years, about 150 of those names are of people who do not own my art but who own one of the presses (and in a few instances, two presses) I designed. They sometimes call my presses, “Works of art.”

It calls to mind that I am doing a kind of service for my art patrons by spending a quarter-hour updating their page on my website. The page is dedicated to them, but it also has links in the page’s content. These may be in the form of a YouTube video, or there might be links to their Website if they have one. Some have links to the pages on my website of other people who own a similar work of mine—such as one of the edition of the prints like the one they own, or another press like the one that I made.

New market for artists

The college where I taught was pretty good at teaching art students how to produce works of art; and in a few cases, they also taught art students how to teach either by intention through art education classes or by chance. There was not much emphasis on research outside of the art history classes, and almost no science or technology. As for service, it was never mentioned that I know of.

And yet, in today’s world, service may be the only viable—that is, sustainable—activity for artists. That was the choice I made—albeit unconsciously—in the early 1970's. The road less traveled, as Whitman said, was the electronic arts, and for me it has made all the difference.

What Next? 

Cleaning out the gallery 

Synergy is when two-plus-two-equals-five, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The author has fifty years accumulation of intellectual and tangible property valued in the art world and, more specifically, the printmaking world. What is next?  

Cleaning out the gallery the best way

Shall we begin? In the 1980s, Norie Sato proposed a funding program to solve the problem of artists’ unsold assets—their works of art which, for lack of a market, were piling up in storage. She said, “Announce that the work would be place on a conveyor leading into a garbage truck, and anyone who wanted to could save the artwork and give it a home, could take it off the conveyor and pay for having it.”

I have thought of this proposal many times, but the organization of the event is daunting, not to mention the desperation of it and the perversion of what the art meant at the outset. Lately, however, two recurring themes concern me:

One, I’m getting along okay, but every time I do something to sell a press or an artwork (the former which is many times over the occurrence of the latter) I see myself depriving a Millennial of a meaningful, remunerative task.

Second, the huge inventory of unsold work is going to be junked if I don’t do something with it soon.

If I am creative and deserving the title of “artist” then I should be able to use these themes in a creative way to move forward—solving two problems at the same time and realizing the benefits of a group-funding event, when two-plus-two-equals-five.

Growth Tip 

Finding your way in difficult times 

A dream, a nightmare, makes him think about his role, or his job, in today’s world in which it appears that crises and gloom besets many Americans and the world’s peoples. What can he do to help? A senior artist is not someone people think of as a leader. 

Arms too weak—a dream analysis 

In a dream I was in a wilderness, but there were trails and a road, a bridge crossing a river. I saw a man in the river, and he swam ashore and I gave him a hand getting out. He said he often went swimming in this river, but it was especially turbulent these days—maybe he shouldn't risk it.

The scene changed, and I was in a queue with many people, and I couldn't find my place in the line; I mistakenly took a place and I was shoved out for having crowded in. then I was again in a wilderness—and now on a mission like a guerrilla task. We had to cross a stream and, on the other side, climb a steep cliff and through a small hole.

There were others behind me, and when I was able to get up to a hole which we had to crawl through and I realized I didn't have the strength to pull myself up. At 72, I could no longer pull my weight in this kind of warfare. The hole was partly blocked by a flat stone, and I was able to push the stone aside and make the passage a little easier for others.

That was the most I could do, however; and even after I made the passage a little larger, I could not lift myself up to go through. As I was blocking the way of the others, they would have to go around. I was stuck. I could not help in the mission. I woke up, thinking, “growth tip.”

Growth tip

In college I took botany as a science requirement. What stuck with me about plant life was that the tip of a stem or branch had the effect of leading the way in the plan for the plant’s growth. After that, whenever I see some greenery that has poked itself through a crack in a sidewalk or a little tree that has broken through stone, I thought about the growth tip.

The growth tip must have a combination of plant-cellular intelligence, strength, fortitude and persistence to manage breaking through. From a seed in soft, moist, accommodating soil, the achievement of easily sending out its first root or stem and sprout in two directions—one toward the sun, the other toward the deeper regions for water and nutrients.

Maybe that’s why I took to the tree as my guide when I was in graduate school and required to state my Master’s Thesis project. The requirement was to help graduate students in art to focus our energy and our minds similarly as to what the students in engineering or science. Trees became my obsession, which was an obvious choice because I had already started on trees as symbols of life itself when I was an undergraduate.

Wake up

I thought about the growth tip the instant I woke up from the nightmare and feeling I can’t pull my weight because my muscles have gone soft, thus useless in guerrilla warfare. But I removed a small obstacle in the pathway. I was of some use, after all. At 72 year of age, are there not things that I possess that will help the young people on a mission we share?

My personal history in art and education suggests that I am a kind of growth tip, having broken through impasses in my work as an artist, designer, and teacher. While I am not a politician or military scientist, my having solved problems that I met in education were good solutions. I continually to offer ideas for better ways to teach, research, practice and give service through the arts to young people in America and all nations.

Times have changed, and the problems I met and solved over fifty years are not necessarily problems that are worth anyone’s time to address now. I seem to be getting nowhere in my ten-year plan for the Seattle Printmaking Center, for example, and maybe it’s a concept not appropriate to the 21^st Century.

Yet, I can still be the growth tip and find a tiny hole or a crack in the rocky ceiling of indifference and confusion about the place of art, design and education. What stops me from doing what I hope to do? I have to ask myself this question every morning. There is light out there, somewhere, and, underneath me like a foundation, the enrichment of my past. It is my basis for believing it is possible to save Earth’s human life sustainability through education of the world’s young people.

In corporate language, such a foundation is called the “stock basis.”

Dependent

There is no mistake in believing that our lives—those of my wife and mine—depend on an educated, trained and cooperating population of young people, for it is the wages that they will earn if they are qualified to get salaried jobs that will, through our Social Security, Medicare and Pension systems, sustain us. Therefore it is incumbent on all “growth-tippers” to mobilize the wisdom to know how to edit and apply our years of experience in our domains-of-expertise.

Killing off the young - 

An old-timer’s disease 

He takes the word “disease” and reads it as “dis-ease,” or lack of ease, of discomfort, of a feeling that with every little task he executes in his handwork as an entrepreneur, he is killing off the employment prospects of a younger generation of artists.

Disease 

Someone said that the word disease really means dis-ease, a lack of ease, a feeling of discomfort and pain. I don’t know if that’s etymologically correct, but it fits the feeling that I get when I see before me a variety of routine tasks that bring me financial and creative satisfaction.

For example, I must complete the packaging of two WeeWoodie Rembrandt Presses and mail them to buyer in Seattle and Saudi Arabia. Also I must pack a Galleon Press to send to Carolina, and a Mini Etching Press for a buyer in Taiwan.

Almost anyone from the younger generations could do this, and be paid from the proceeds of these sales—the gross amount of which is $3,950, and a net of about $1,750. This pencils out to about 40% net income, which I will portion out to pay down my debts and reinvest in new projects.

The dis-ease comes from the feeling in my head that any one of the tasks I will undertake, from the miniscule to the heavy lifting, could be done by a younger person with some training and education. Therein lies the rub—there is no plan for training and education in my scheme.

There is a wish—the teacher’s wish which I have had since I was a boy; I always wanted to be a teacher.

The curse 

I am cursed with a genetically and conditioned view that I can take care of the immediate tasks to satisfy buyers of presses well enough to get me by without training someone else to do them. This is complicated further by the fact that I can’t guarantee that my training of someone younger (or older) will get them the rewards they need immediately and also be sustainable for a long term.

For example, I lack two pieces of plastic material to complete the contents of the to WeeWoodie Rembrandt presses—one for Seattle and for Saudi Arabia. I plan to walk downtown and find this plastic material—maybe at Bed, Bath & Beyond. How can someone else do it?

To get the attention of a younger person, explain the need, show them the purpose of the plastic, discuss alternatives if that material can’t be found at BB&B, etc. and also give them the money to purchase it—all this is overwhelming to me, distracting and unnecessary since I think I can do it all myself in less time.

Plus, I get in a walk, which is necessary to maintain my health—needed to keep in going for the next ten years for my next ten-year plan. My father was beset by the same disorder—practically do the job for his workers in the process of training them because he was a stickler for doing the job right.

To do list 

My dilemma list goes on as I think about what needs to be done: make boxes and get packing material for the Galleon, fill out postage forms for mailing to Saudi Arabia, also Seattle and Carolina, etc. Certain enclosures that go with the Galleon and the Mini Etching Press need to be checked and updated—a task I can do in an hour but which would take many hours of instructions to a younger person.

Writing my to-do list gives me a vague, aching pain because, not only is it a long list and somewhat boring because I’ve done it so many times, it is painful because I know I am killing off a job opportunity for some younger person by doing it all myself.

Lately I have been telling people that, as a pensioner and drawing social security, I need to hone a two-edged sword to ensure mine and my wife’s long-term security as we get older. How will my pension continue if American industries suffer from poor labor force? How will our Social Security system sustain if young people are not trained and educated and cannot hold down jobs?

Solutions and cures for the disease

I think the solution is a factory school of printmaking arts.

How do I begin?

Have I already begun?

Is anyone reading this?

A’Design Award Winners 2014

Inspire a Seattle Printmaking Center

Eying the future of creative arts

With pleasure, this Seattleite viewed almost 800 images of winning entries in the 2014 edition of the A’Design Award and Competition. I found inspiration! Pictures piqued my interest; some resonated with a vision of a Seattle Printmaking Center.

Having won for a second time with a miniature printing press in the A’Design Award and Competition—originating in Milan and offered every year—I know this is a way for people to share the best creations in many diverse design fields. From more than 12,500 entries, jurors awarded over 700 prizes.

Scanning the winners’ works, seeing the photographs, reading the designers’ articles time-traveled me back to my college days. As a young art student I had a big appetite for designer magazines for inspiration. I especially liked magazines from foreign countries. Designers in 78 countries entered the A'Design Award and competition in 2014.

Visit the A’Design Award website and you will find that it facilitates browsing in some ways that are superior to paper-based magazine of the past century. This website is a design masterpiece and good software engineering in itself. You can find everything on the site, http://www.designaward.com. 

Here in Seattle—with team-mates in England, Canada and Japan—we won the Silver Award in 2013 for the miniaturized etching press, a Pram Halfwood in the Unexpected Design category; this year, we won the Silver Award for the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press in the Toy, Games and Hobby Products category.

Next year, we will enter the design of the Seattle Printmaking Center; therefore, the most attractive winners of 2014 that I looked at and include below connect not only with our primary mission of providing smart artist’s instruments to professionals and educators but also for our 2015 entry, the Center.

It is early in the planning, but it is certain that our entry will encompass architecture, interior design, exhibition design, hospitality, multimedia device and games. There are almost 100 categories from which to choose in the A'Design Award and Competition!

Looking at the pictures to make a selection of my favorites to share with readers, I felt like an art student all over. Seeing hundreds of masterful design works inspires ways we might show the uniqueness of the Seattle printmaking experience to Seattle’s visitors and also within a virtual printmaking world.

You can see the categories and the awards at http://www.whatisadesignaward.com. And if you and your organization want to, you can take advantage of the cost-saving, early-bird, discounted entry fee deal, at http://www.adesignaward.com/earliest-bird.php.

Following are some of the images that stopped me in my scroll through the hundreds of pictures of winners’ works. I indicated the link to the entry under each picture so you can read the details as “from the horses’ mouths.”

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33672

Artist habitat, in the title of this prize-winner, reminds me how the Seattle Printmaking Center will have housing for creative people who contribute to Center programming and visiting artists will have an apartment for their stay.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33425

Thinking about a printmaking board game in which printmaking, prints, and printmakers are the parts that make up the game turns me on. Add collectible playing cards, a printmaking fantasy land, sci-fi and time travel and you have products selling at the Seattle Printmaking Center. Not only home-grown, indigenous games but games produced by printmakers all over the world.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=28777

The idea of convertible, detachable and trans-formal games and detachable devices makes me think of re-tachable devices such as our Halfwood Press, an etching press with a brain. The apps depicted on the screen in this picture would be printmaking apps and online printmaking games and magazines, graphic novels and more. They can be produced in the Seattle Printmaking Center.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=31913

How is a Roman Warrior helmet like a Do-it-yourself printing press? The former is not utilitarian; the latter is useful; and they send a different message. But they share one thing—and that important thing for transferable skills is the maker aspect. Kids grow when they put things together and can put them together again.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=34381

Ireland’s Google headquarters has interior design that reflects the industry and I’m inspired by the several designs built for Google around the world. No doubt our Seattle Printmaking Center will attract a diverse group of hi-tech underwriters because Seattle artists are hi-tech, hi-touch printmakers.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=32871This is called “Any 202 Tablet for K-12 Education,” entered by Portugal’s Jp-Inspiring Knowledge. I would like to connect with a company making K-12 tablets like this, as any company that is interested in printmaking arts for K-12 people (and their grown-up friends and parents, too).

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=34296

There will be a Seattle Printmaking Center website focused on learning printmaking and a user interface. In this example, instead of college graduates the resources will be open to almost anyone, anywhere, anytime in Persistent Online Open Courses originated in Seattle with Seattle’s unique blend of old and new technologies. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=30548

An “iLoop” might be a better way to relate mobile devices to smart presses and give printmaking students access to their virtual printmaking teachers. These would be for sale at the Seattle Printmaking Center Store online where content providers develop for printmaking education 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33459

An online digital printmaking magazine will originate at the Seattle Printmaking Center, and this picture of one award-winning online magazine which illustrates it on three platforms. Our online printmaking magazine will be the first to produce an online printmaking magazine in the USA, but it is also an international magazine. As with all the businesses housed in the Center, profits flow toward sustaining the center and its programs for printmakers. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33531

“Mixed use,” the category of this winner, sounds exactly like what the Seattle Printmaking Center would be, like a mini-college with an emphasis on people, printmaking and multimedia education.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=34088

The word, mediatheque reminded me of the word cinematheque, and brought to my mind the all-encompassing nature of the Seattle Printmaking Center vision—bringing prehistoric handprints into the same environment of Seattle’s renowned multimedia technologies.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=30597

The Seattle Printmaking Center is for interpretation. This winner’s museum display system offers kiosks which could tell the story of the evolution of media arts from the time of prehistoric cave handprints to reach today’s new Seattle-area industries.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=27394
Great humor! In items related to printmaking are the conceptual Artists’ Ghosts—a flash memory drive mounted in a likeness of Rembrandt. That’s one example. Another nutty idea is my WallNut—a push pin in a walnut shell. These are little money-makers to support the Seattle Printmaking Center. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=32484

A Chinese graphic design, which could be a poster or a stamp, attracted me to it because the Seattle Printmaking Center will include reproductions of art by Seattle’s designers who are either printmakers, too, or who collaborate with printmakers and performance artists to publish their art, design and crafts. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=29923

Say “education” and my heart goes pitty-pat, and this entry does it. I visualize the images on the screen as being partly related to the history of printmaking with plenty of resources that originated from printmakers around the world and published by experts at the Seattle Printmaking Center.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=28516

Visualize a stone hand, not merely a handprint on stone, and you have the kind of association with the handprints on the stone walls of caves. These inspired the connection between performance and printmaking which connects to the core value of the Seattle Printmaking Center. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=29353

A printmaker studio furniture workshop is part of the Factory School located in the Seattle Printmaking Center concept, and this image reminded me that designers in wood will find plenty of inspiration to produce for the printmaking studio furniture market.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=32723

If there are goddesses of media arts, they will come—I was mindful of this when I read the title of this entry, and I could not leave it out. My muse (her name is Media) insisted!

There were other pictures that stopped me in my review of the A’Design Award winner showing—interior designs for restaurants and mini-homes, multimedia display designs, games, hi-tech devices and others. In closing I will leave them here with my crib sheet.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=28544

We could have a lot of fun meeting with companies like this.

docking station to connect printmakers with other printmakers worldwide.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=32866

Detachable devices make me think of re-tachable devices.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=29830

The SPC needs a nice restaurant.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=29831

Workspace makes me think of the Live Artists.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=30597

Multimedia, now we’re cooking – this is the arcade of prints.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33372

Cafes are one of the best places for printmakers to meet.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=34007

You have to think about a logo or brand.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=30338

You need to keep high tech and virtual worlds in mind.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy more at A’Design Award and Competition

Ethan Lind, Busker-Etcher on banjo.

See Ethan most Wednesdays and Thursdays at the Pike Place Market, printing copper etchings on a Mini Etching Press. Sorry - the Agitated Strings Band demo disk is not ready to share.

Bluegrass Emeralda

These are songs inspired by my work with Ethan Lind and the Agitated String Band—a bluegrass band in Seattle. Ethan is a painter and etcher, too, besides a banjo player.

Emeralda is a mythical ship I imagined brought the design of the Halfwood Press to me, and after ten years of making these presses it happened that Ethan Lind stopped by my shop. Together we made a plan: If he could get a spot at the Pike Place Market, I would loan him a Halfwood Press so he could get more exposure. In addition, I would give him pointers in the art of etching and printing.

I knew he had a bluegrass band, and this interested me because Peter Rowan, world-renowned bluegrass musician had bought two Halfwood Presses. My secret desire was that I would find musicians to collaborate in the Emeralda songbook. After all, what is a story without music?

The difficulty was that I never thought the bluegrass genre had a connection with the Emeralda story. The first Emeralda, a ship of the frigate type, was made in Spain. It was lost in the failed Spanish Armada. A copy was made a century and half later, which carried the Halfwood Press to our part of the world in the mid-18^th Century. It was bound for China, but was sunk by a giant rogue wave in Puget Sound.

Bluegrass music may have originated in Europe, and it may be related to sea shanties—but that’s only conjecture. Clearly, bluegrass music is no more connected to the elements of the Emeralda myth than, say, hip hop.

However, I noticed that the most recent version of Hunger Games (or was it Game of Thrones?) was going to have a hip hop sound track. Then, maybe bluegrass could serve the Emeralda saga.

I always think the people who have been interest in the Halfwood Press are like “gifts” on my pathway. What they contribute is anybody’s guess. Money, yes, but there are more important things in art—and art is what I find in common Peter Rowan and also Ethan Lind and the Agitated Strings Band.

Practice session – April 8, 2014

Ethan invited me to listen in on a practice session. I recorded on my pocket camera—a very old camcorder with a broken sound system. The next day I made a DVD for it, thinking it would be a useful experience. Also, I want our daughter and son-in-law to consider hiring the Agitated Strings for their Wedding vow renewal, coming up.

I also wanted to continue to solve the riddle, “How could Bluegrass music serve my Emeralda story?” Besides these, which are my personal interests, I have a dream to bring Peter Rowan to Seattle for a fundraising concert to support the Seattle Printmaking Center development, and have Ethan’s band open for him.

Structure

It is common in bluegrass to hear stories of love, heartbreak, and other kinds of personal relationships. Sometimes animals, sometimes old pickups or guns—anything that people love. So maybe there is a clue in this love element. You can love a printing press, can’t you?

You can love a ship – even if it’s a made-up ship like the Emeralda. You can love a vision. Look at what the Gibbs brothers did.

Another element is the hero’s journey—common in books, screenplays and sagas in every kind of artistic creation.