ps160508 Departure:  Charting the alternative courses  

His main purpose in life for the past two years has been the founding of a printmaking center in Seattle, one which embraces all that is an expression of the vision he held for generations. Both a dreamer plus realist in one person, he’s at the end point.

Out of money, out of time

Money is not the main reason I must stop my work on the Northwest Print Center Incubators, it is the only reason. Money is what it would have taken for the next step—which would probably have been to take a place at the Seattle Gift Show. An amount of $750 or $2,000, plus printing and labor costs.

Time, too, to get ready for the anticipated orders that would come from the show; then, after the show, continuing investments in production and fulfillment.

This step would finally prove the level of interest in the etching press line—both the Halfwood Etching Presses and the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Presses. The press-making element was to be the “cash cow” and reason-for-being for many of the elements of the Northwest Print Center Incubators.

By that I mean, for example, the development of the factory to manufacture the presses, in which printmaking-savvy people would have a new income stream for themselves plus be interacting with other components of the Center. Videos, for one thing, and web maintenance.

In other words, all the elements that I currently take care of by myself with occasional help from my wife and daughter.

I am not forgetting the help I get from my “strategic partners” such as Tom and Margie, Ethan, and Ric. Obviously, they have their own concerns; the print center is not part of their life-plans, not a priority.

Many others have listened to my pitch with interest, and I appreciate their attention. They were—and are—encouraging as far as they have time to be. Most recently, Max, Cory, Keenoy—they all have expressed that there are elements in my plan that are noteworthy.

Yet, when it comes to writing a check for the gift show, I have to realize the truth—I can’t handle it. It is the same as when I planned to go to the Portland show with the Carrack, lay out a similar amount of money—or more—and it meant going deeper in debt with small likelihood that we would do as well as we did in San Francisco, i.e., break-even on costs only, over a span of one year following the event.

The labor was lost—I never earned a cent. I called it an investment in the long term. Three years have passed, and I see no progress, really, except for more brochures, more essays, more small achievements and snapshots. Nothing, however, to indicate that I am going to find those two other people required to make progress toward the printmaking center of my vision.

ri160509  Killer details: Devil in the details  

- Reflecting upon why he must terminate his work toward the Northwest Print Center Incubators, the author points to little things that mean a lot—moments of tiny indicators that he is not the one who will build and realize his dream of a great print center.  

Devil is in the details

What does it mean? Wikipedia: “The idiom ‘the devil is in the detail’ refers to a catch or mysterious element hidden in the details, and derives from the earlier phrase ‘God is in the detail’ expressing the idea that whatever one does should be done thoroughly; i.e. details are important.”

A catch or a mysterious element for me, given the wisdom that has come with age (I’m 74) is the somewhat paradoxical notice of little things that would undermine my role of founder of the Northwest Print Center Incubators.

The Northwest Print Center Incubators is a great notion—a world-class center for art and technology, sustained mostly by sales of Halfwood Presses and businesses spun off the presses—businesses like Sip ‘N Print, Young Printmakers, and Seniors Experience Printmaking.

But little things indicate that, while there may be a center like this someday, it will not develop with me. Not in my present state.

They say youth has great knowledge, but age brings not only knowledge but wisdom. Wisdom is a double-edged sword. For example, I may have the knowledge and wisdom to form the Northwest Print Center Incubators, but not the time. My time is running out and—although I may live another 20 or even 30 years—little indicators must be noticed and respected.

For example, as I booted up this computer this morning, I had to pause to ask myself, “Do I enter a-n-d in this, or the special character for and, the ampersand? A full three seconds passed; and I took a chance. I got it right, but those three seconds delay are a sign of age—short term memory loss.

For the man who would be CEO of the Northwest Print Center Incubators, three seconds could indicate the beginning of the end of the center. I love to take movies as lessons: Forever Young, for example, with Mel Gibson playing the cryogenic man, lost his capacities to fly a B-47 all of a sudden and a kid had to land it safely.

Remember the scene in the film, Is Anybody There? when the old man, Clarence (played by Michael Caine) in a magic act cut off a man’s finger with a toy guillotine when he forgot, in a split second, which way to toggle the hidden switch on the machine?

Say what you like about forgiveness for old-age memory loss, in the running of a large business like the Northwest Print Center Incubators of my vision, it could be fatal.

Besides this, there is plain ignorance that stands in my way—like the times I didn’t anticipate the rough handling of shippers and presses arrived broken. If large numbers of presses are to be shipped, someone like me must not be in charge of package design.

It’s true that expert packing and shipping methods come at a price, but I believe the volume of presses that would be shipped would justify the cost. The intent of the NPCI is to create jobs, after all, and companies like Daniel Smith, Inc. proved that jobs rise out of art materials and supplies—shipping included.

How best to apply wisdom?

A reader may scoff: Just because it took a moment to remember a password does not mean you should give up the Northwest Print Center Incubators. That’s true. I remembered my password sufficiently enough. Or, if I’m checking out in the grocery store and forget my PIN number momentarily, it’s no big deal. I remember it soon enough.

But if you extend this momentary lapse to something larger such as a forgotten, important appointment. For example, or the name of an important customer (and they are all important) or even an important co-worker’s name.

Old days

Today it is a brave notion, the Northwest Print Center Incubators, and bravery must be in great evidence when it comes to gathering co-founders. But if the potential co-founders see a moment of absent-mindedness, even in a trivial matter, their confidence is undermined. They hesitate, put off, and give lowest priority to further engagement with me. They withdraw, they hold back, maybe waiting to see if someone else will step forward.

America is neither the place nor, today, experiencing the time to take risks now. I got most of my courage from the days at the University in the 1970s. That was a decade when America was experiencing the Vietnam conflict. For good reason, youth were outraged. Injustices to black people, assassinations, bigotry, government corruption and failed international understanding built on stacks of bad education policies added up to a towering inferno.

Change was everywhere, and brave encounters were evident even in places unlikeliest of places like the UW art school. I saw students taking matters into their own hands—using their creativity to further their education when the faculty was interested only in their own security. We see how individuals like Dale Chihuly and Daniel Smith started things that have had economic benefits to our region. I was inspired by them.

The students in those days of crisis took risks and they won art careers for themselves. It was at a price, however. It cost me my job because I didn’t know that the fighting spirit on campus was over by 1980. I went on fighting for better education policies, and I lost—big time. My experience is a textbook case of knowledge typical of a young man (I was 38), but not the wisdom of the old men with power over me. They knew how to get rid of uppity young faculty—even if I had tenure.

Close call

By my reckoning, in 1984 I was close to realizing my dream of a world-class printmaking center of some kind. I modeled it on the centers I saw on our trip around the world. I believed Seattle’s version would go further, however, because we had a growing technology base. The art students proved art and technology made a powerful cocktail for artists to shape new careers and replace the old art market with new money.

1984 was a bad year to try, however.

Without the University faculty and administration behind it, there is no confidence in building a print center with art and technology money from the private sector. As for the students, they were mostly cowards, fearful for their degrees if they took my side.

In all my years since 1985, when I left the UW, I have never found a single “university person” who shared my interest in a print center of the global and economic magnitude in my vision. Not in the arts, nor business, have I found anyone. When I describe it, when I publish on the Internet, when I blog about it—people run and hide.

Even the late Larry Sommers (1953-2009), who by all reports had the heart and mind to improve the UW printmaking division, never responded when I wrote to him in 1994 about saving the printmaking major from being cancelled at the UW art school. Not even a simple acknowledgment. I owe it to the politics of the place. Under the thumb of Kurt Labitsky, who appointed head of the printmaking division in 1985 (illegally, I contend).

It’s enough to break an old printmaking teacher’s heart to see the losses I’ve experienced. My joys, however, lie in living and I have much to be grateful for—my wife and family, a space to use as a gallery or for whatever I choose, and an income sufficient to live on for the present and maintain my legacy.

Now it’s time to cut my losses, collect what I have into a work of art of yet another kind (probably a suite of games) and leave the Northwest Print Center Incubators for someone else to build. If anyone trusts me with any portion of the task, I will help.

ps160508 Departure: Charting the alternative courses

  His main purpose in life for the past two years has been the founding of a printmaking center in Seattle, one which embraces all that is an expression of the vision he held for generations. Both a dreamer plus realist in one person, he’s at the end point.

Out of money, out of time

Money is not the main reason I must stop my work on the Northwest Print Center Incubators, it is the only reason. Money is what it would have taken for the next step—which would probably have been to take a place at the Seattle Gift Show. An amount of $750 or $2,000, plus printing and labor costs.

Time, too, to get ready for the anticipated orders that would come from the show; then, after the show, continuing investments in production and fulfillment.

This step would finally prove the level of interest in the etching press line—both the Halfwood Etching Presses and the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Presses. The press-making element was to be the “cash cow” and reason-for-being for many of the elements of the Northwest Print Center Incubators.

By that I mean, for example, the development of the factory to manufacture the presses, in which printmaking-savvy people would have a new income stream for themselves plus be interacting with other components of the Center. Videos, for one thing, and web maintenance.

In other words, all the elements that I currently take care of by myself with occasional help from my wife and daughter.

I am not forgetting the help I get from my “strategic partners” such as Tom and Margie, Ethan, and Ric. Obviously, they have their own concerns; the print center is not part of their life-plans, not a priority.

Many others have listened to my pitch with interest, and I appreciate their attention. They were—and are—encouraging as far as they have time to be. Most recently, Max, Cory, Keenoy—they all have expressed that there are elements in my plan that are noteworthy.

Yet, when it comes to writing a check for the gift show, I have to realize the truth—I can’t handle it. It is the same as when I planned to go to the Portland show with the Carrack, lay out a similar amount of money—or more—and it meant going deeper in debt with small likelihood that we would do as well as we did in San Francisco, i.e., break-even on costs only, over a span of one year following the event.

The labor was lost—I never earned a cent. I called it an investment in the long term. Three years have passed, and I see no progress, really, except for more brochures, more essays, more small achievements and snapshots. Nothing, however, to indicate that I am going to find those two other people required to make progress toward the printmaking center of my vision.

os160416  How much would it take? Estimating startup costs

  A visitor to the Mini Art Gallery preceding the coffee hour printmaking session asked the question, “How much would it take to start up?” - a general question about the Northwest Print Center Incubators. The author considers his immediate task, an empty space.

How much would it take?

This is the question put to me from a man who stepped into the gallery, listened to me extoll the scale of the market for miniature etching presses. He was a big man, and said that he dreamed of having a huge press at his disposal, powerful, like a locomotive.

I disagree, as my mantra is “small is beautiful,” which I got from a book titled, “Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered,”  . . . a collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase ‘Small Is Beautiful’ came from a phrase by his teacher Leopold Kohr. It is often used to champion small, appropriate technologies that are believed to empower people more, in contrast with phrases such as, ‘bigger is better’.

“First published in 1973, the book brought Schumacher's critiques of Western economics to a wider audience during the 1973 energy crisis and emergence of globalization. The Times Literary Supplement ranked Small Is Beautiful among the 100 most influential books published since World War II. A further edition with commentaries was published in 1999.” (Wikipedia)

The year 1973 was an important year for me because upon my return from my first study abroad, printmaking had a different appeal and meaning. I had visited some of the oldest living printmaking pioneers in Europe, and they conveyed a feeling of discovery and creativity to which our modern printmaking world owes its meaning.

But newness and discovery were no longer so alive in 1969, I felt. In fact, despite that printmaking was on the cusp of becoming a hugely profitable and collectible commodity in the art world, I thought its real potential lay in its being the ancestor of new technologies which, also, were just being explored in Seattle. Video art was the first of these I tackled. With my students we experimented and blended video with our printmaking

Then came computer graphics and by the early 1980s I was—and am—deeply committed to the “small is beautiful” idea. It takes the form of artists’ stamps, for example, and mini etching presses—kinds of appropriate art and technology for our times and for the future. This concept even meshes with the video games industry and, of interest to me as a teacher, MOOCs.

The visitor that day was, of course, unaware of all this history I experienced, and for his personal enjoyment he would like to be running a big press. I could point him to a big press for sale—several in fact—which had served their owners in those halcyon days when it seemed that bigger prints were better prints, and big presses were needed and viewed as a status symbol.

However, the biggest presses ever made to feed this idea have been broken down, shipped to Singapore, Japan, and Australia, and the prints that came from them are in their museums. The owner and developer of those oversized works of art, Ken Tyler, designer of the presses, also, discussed the change and the demise of the era in an article.

How much would it take?

Repeating the question he put to me returns. I answered, “That would depend on which element in the nineteen incubators a person wanted to develop.” Later I told him I was not interested in the press retail business, and my presses were well beyond the prototyping and market test stages. It is in the retail entertainment market that the best prospects lay.

He nodded, and I invited him to today’s Sip ‘N Print coffee session. He came, and we will take up the subject next week. That is, if he shows up. [He never did].

Linear process – the real estate development model

If the question becomes, “How much would it take to empty the space,” I consider it something like facing an undeveloped property. Imagine this: trees and undergrowth cover the grounds, raw, undeveloped land like a site chosen to build a mini mall; but really it’s merely 300 prime real estate in Seattle’s Lower Queen Anne neighborhood (also known as Uptown).

At this time it is crammed with my art, my tools, etching presses, materials and supplies for everything from website maintenance, packing and shipping, display items, computers and furniture. A developer sizing up the space for a daily Sip ‘N Print incubator would first inventory the items worth saving or donating, and then hire a two man crew to clear everything else out, throw it in a dumpster rented for the purpose.

Then an interior designer and fabricator would be called in, along with an attorney to work out the insurance and licensing needs. After three to six months, the spot would be a private Sip ‘N Print serving coffee in the morning and early afternoon, an after-school program in the afternoon, and a wine and beer session in the evening.

It would be the prototype for a franchise, and the period of incubation would be used to tie up all legal aspects (patents, trademarks, etc.) which would engage the usual legal matters of forming a franchise. Following considerable testing and proving the proprietary aspects, a multi-million dollar business would be a fact—not merely a dream of mine.