vi171222 Pressing issue: Printmaking VR 

It is the future and I have lived into it. As a boy I read about the future, saw pictures of what was to be, and most of it was science fiction. Much of it still is still to be realized—into infinity, I suppose. My boy’s imagination may have been smaller or greater than the multifaceted reality which has turned out to be, but I didn’t write it down when I was a boy, so I don’t know for sure.

In a day or so I will have lived all of 76 years, so the end of my story is nigh, as they say. Yet I am fortunate to have learned some ways to use the devices of this future that were the stuff of fiction sixty years ago. In living those years I narrowed my focus to the arts in many forms—crafts and design and the so-called fine arts. At some point I got stuck with the notion of learning for its own sake.

It seemed like a good idea. I figured that when all the industries of mankind had been figured out, education would continue to be the key to continuance of the human species.

Now is the time to take stock, for the end is nigh (as they say) because my resources are dwindling and the Earth’s ability to sustain humanity is dwindling, too. Scientists predicted twenty-five years ago that humanity will be done for by 2022 unless we made dramatic changes.

But humanity—or effective parts of humanity—didn’t heed the scientists’ warning.

In my years of teaching, research, production and service, my accumulation of stock is considerable. That is, my stock is capable of being considered as having value. I learned from an attorney who specializes in the legal aspects of art valuation that back story is a consideration in valuation of art. The same is true of intellectual capital.

Therefore, if I have achieved anything in my years, then my achievements, although puny in the larger scale of things, may be subjected to the same rules as those of any artist or intellectual. I consider myself a creative artist and creative intellectual, therefore it is timely to take stock, creatively.

Taking stock also means concurrently liquidating stock. Our family collection is our stock. Marketing is more than standing by the roadside, as I have written before, with boxes of apples hoping someone will stop and buy. You must go from your fruit stand and put up signs, giving your customers a chance to think and slow down and stop to buy.

Sales comes next, price point, benefits and continuing customer service.

What presses on my mind—364 days into my 76^th year—is the untried notion of converting our family’s collection into scripophily. Creating the VR PrintmakingWorld is the forefront of all my good intentions. Our collection are like the signs leading up to the sale of shares in my next (perhaps my last) adventure, leading to the sale of the fruits of my labor.

It occurs to me that Carl Chew could design the artistscrip certificate border, his art adding considerably to its value. He has perhaps the most ability of anyone for this task as he knows me perhaps better than anyone outside my family. In fact, he knows me as a cohort in the arts and education, which is more than I can say for my family because I understand that my family members have their own unique lives.

My problem is that Carl told me many years ago that I lack nerve. He may be right. A few days ago he took me to lunch and I didn’t have the nerve to bring up the subject of scripophily. Well, I think I remember that I once did, but nothing about scripophily seemed to interest him at that time. Unlike me, as an artist, he is already disposing of his work the easy way—by giving it away for free or recycling it.

True, I am using the landfill-image as my last resort to provide for my family—posting an advertisement for rubbish removal on the wall of our gallery as the “emergency number” to call if I die with a gallery full of art. Into the dumpster it goes in order that my survivors can rent or sell the space as commercial real estate.

But there is a better way! It is the stuff both of science fiction and the stuff of fantasy, a kind of science fiction that few artists have attempted; because conventional, less creative artists have had little or no interest in education and are oblivious to the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Warning to Humanity of 1992 which had a profound effect on my actions for the past quarter-century.

Tomorrow is my birthday, a good time to seal my plan for the next five years: Produce scripophily of the kind that is consistent with my artistic philosophy and principled intentions. Emeralda Works, my “games for the gifts of life” (as I call it) will focus on one project, the hybrid method for teaching printmaking online with virtual reality being its distinctive feature.

The business plan entails using my established patron base to determine and test the market value of teaching printmaking VR, and then use my artworks as the stock basis to proceed with prototypes, test the idea as a minimal viable product to share printmaking experiences with people worldwide.

171206 Me gusta una prensa para imprimir  

In Duolingo, I learn a little Spanish. I like to stimulate my brain with tiny shots of dopamine when I get something correct. I like the surprise when I surmise correctly the meaning of a Spanish word. I like being able to go to Google Translate to double-check my guess as to how to say a phrase, such as “Me gusta una prensa para imprimir.”

I like the press for printmaking, so I would like to enjoy looking at it in VR, but I would want to look at it for a surprising detail, such as finding an Easter egg in it. I would like to have a press to hold and find, in its structure somewhere, like Pokemon Go, a surprise, a ghost of a famous printmaker. I would like to find a different story in various parts of the press, a journey perhaps, such as a VR visit to Rembrandtshus if I had a miniature of the press he used.

Of course, I built a miniature Rembrandt’s Press, a toy, designed for printing cards. Thirty people bought them—several in foreign countries: Argentina, Saudi Arabia, England, Italy and Germany. The press won an award in an Italian design competition.

I would like to have a deck of cards. I would like to print on the press and then register it on Proximates and find “friends” (if not friends, then PrintMates) I never knew I had.

Out of these connections—when I hit fifty such PrintMates I would like a collection of postcards, like the ones of Native American carvings on the new Halfwood Press we are calling the Canoe.

Just as I found a “friend” with whom to talk about printmaking in the context of major real estate development, housing, tourism and international trade—focusing for the moment on virtual reality (as her son is working in this field), I would like to find more friends like her.

I am grateful for the friends I have.

For example, a PrintMate in Chile will write about how her little etching press I sent to her on permanent loan is useful in her efforts to teach children. Another woman in Colombia also wants to, and she wants a press (or possibly a Google Cardboard) to make this work. In both cases it presents me with meaning to learn Spanish—one of my long-held wishes—and cultivate friendships in South America.

But I want to do more. So much more.

171202 Printmaking World branded 

 Looking back in time, at 76 and with 50 of those years giving time to printmaking I live in two worlds—the past and the future. At the moment I am using what is in-between the two. As a philosopher said, neither that, nor this, but in between. It is a state of suspension.

That is to say, suspenseful. What fun! Like going to a movie, or hearing a story, or dipping in a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get next.

For example, “Will I write something now of importance?”

Or, “If I put this on the Internet via my blog, will anyone read it?”

One of my favorite movies is "Planet of the Apes," from the beginning my career as a printmaker and professor in earnest. Many are the reasons—the scenes I used in my prints and the computer graphics that came from it—I remember it.

One is the scene and dialog when the spaceship captain gives the order to send one last signal to Earth, “. . . in case they find us!”

So it is when I tap out my “signal” to Earth . . . in case someone reads this, gets it, and finds me.

Like those survivors from the spaceship crash, about to search for means of survival on what those survivors of the spaceship crash thought was an alien planet, I live between two worlds—the past and the present.

The past of printmaking was when all that mattered was a supply of materials and a few tools to make prints, for fun and, sometimes, for showing and selling.

The future is unknown, like a good story to tell—a printmaking world no longer tethered to supplies and tools but, like one’s imagination, free to fall on whatever pathway is open.

The future of printmaking is to be seen in a multifaceted lens—some viewpoints showing this, others showing that, all aspects of printmaking through a variegated lens. History, technique, value as well as the people and places where the art, craft and design of printmaking is now, was, and will be.

In my printmaking world—my brand—anything is possible, like a story unfolding, like a movie being made, having been made, and will be made. As movies and leading edge technologies are all descendants of one ancestor, printing, so they are concomitant in one that is at front: Virtual reality and augmented reality.

171128 The big disillusion 

 Margaret Prescott and eight partners are starting Phant, a social network. Margaret is concerned about human issues, seen from the perspective of sociologist and artist who studies art as therapy. Her rationale is as follows:

“Humans want real connection and engagement — it’s good for us! — and thanks to the Internet and social media, we’re connecting more than ever. However, research links higher rates of time spent online with increased levels of unhappiness and loneliness. Isolation has become a health crisis—resulting in physical, mental, and emotional problems including shorter life expectancy, depression, and increased levels of stress (via the New York Times). It seems that, while technology has provided us with greater access to other people, for many, it has hurt our ability to form and foster deep bonds with others.”

Why do I hesitate to give the minimum of $5 to her IndieGoGo funding drive? Even though I like her idea, even the fact that she is working and a B-corp business model, there’s something wrong with her premise. It’s basically that she claims Phant, which is designed to help overcome loneliness and isolation, it has the same inherent technology that causes loneliness and isolation.

That is, physical reality.

Phant, like Facebook and other digital, online systems, is no substitute for face-to-face, physical engagement with people, processes and things.

Why? Because it’s easier. Physical contact is frightening in a world of uncertainty where the illusion of probability has taken over peoples’ brains and minds. From the chemistry of our brain functions to our intellectual reasoning, the path is toward isolation or grouping into shared clustering and power in numbers.

I would venture to say that one of the major dehumanizing forces at work in the world today is the disconnection brought about by the illusion of calculation based on probability, when it is an uncertain world that we really live from day to day.

Like the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane—an invention dating from the 1400’s and Leonardo Da Vinci’s time, today the notion that people feel connected by tapping and sweeping their fingers across a touch-screen is false. It comes from a chemical produced in a part of our brain which spreads to our thinking and rational actions. Not all parts of the human brain (and to some degree in other vertebrates) are impressed by this tiny center, this source of hope, love, anticipation and fulfillment. I think it may be traced to the nucleus accumbens—a coffee-bean shaped pair (one for each hemisphere).

Like psychological nuclear integrative fantasy (NIF), the obsessive and overriding desire to act at a distance, to live in a detached, imaginary world of virtual reality instead of the hard, physical reality is cultivated and encouraged by digital technologies such as social networks and virtual reality experiences.

We make a Facebook page. We buy a VR headset. We lust after virtual and/or augmented reality. I speak (or rather, I write) from experience. I am tapping my keyboard at my desk, it is 7:00 in the morning, I want to teach the world about the joys of printmaking and it appears I must join the mainstream (as Margaret and her associates appear to want to do).

In a keystroke I see today’s article about amazon’s new roll-out of Sumerian, tempting me with the words, I can “begin building immersive, interactive scenes for popular hardware and software (including HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, HoloLens, iOS, and Google Daydream).”

Add to this a Halfwood Etching Press and we’re good to go with a social, artistic and technical network as old as technology itself with printmaking. I have called my proposal, Proximates—a global network of press-users who register their prints by date and location and thus make a virtual print-pal.

We wish we could be rich both in spirt and cash, and having seen billionaires get their wish to do this without hard, physical labor, sweat, tears and pain. As human beings equally endowed, our nuclear accumbens makes this dreaming so.

Other parts of our brain, both left and right hemispheres, obediently take up the task to make our dreams come true and to achieve this without getting dirty or tired. I want to order Sumerian, and choose a platform to go with my etching press. Would I then be happy?

Not unless it includes physical reality—such as working with people right around my neighborhood, like Ethan Lind and Ed Raub, Tom Kughler and of course my daughers, wife, sons-in-law and granddaughter.

Initially I was interested in Cyrus’ Despres’—Margaret Prescott’s husband’s—description of her project. I thought he described it as a story-building platform where people compared notes of a shared process. As he spoke, I thought of my project—an autobiography—and the shared experiences that might make my writing project a success. To think it would be read by the hundreds of people who brought me to the point in my life history and pathway to my goal (NPCI), I secretly wondered if Phant might be a tool to help me.

This project of Margaret’s, or so I thought, I must learn more about. I learned that Margaret is seeking funding, and she was attending some of the same Techstar workshops at the same time that I was. I learned later she is a consultant, therapist, studied at Antioch and is artistic.

However, when I read the premise of Phant—that people will be less lonely and their feelings of disconnectedness if they shared pictures of their dinner plate, vacation or a sunset with one another, I thought Phant looked identical to Facebook. Yet, I believe the so-called “social media” have the opposite effect of bringing people closer and connected.

The evidence is in the current position of the USA in its relations to many other nations in the world—some of which view our country as the worst and most dangerous on Earth. It is the disconnect between what we say we believe in—racial equity comes to mind after my time with Ed Raub yesterday—that is killing us and ruining the future of Earth’s human life sustainability.

The US has more prisons than universities, yet the founders of this nation said only an educated population can sustain its ideals. It will be for another country to realize the dream of a better world. My plan is combine reality—hands-on printmaking on real presses and virtual presses which lead to face-to-face interaction no matter how uncertain the results may be.

171123 Dream a big dream 

Joke: Question: “Which is closer, the moon or Florida?”

Answer: “Duh? Can you see Florida?”

From the top of Queen Ann hill in Seattle can be seen the high-rising towers in Bellevue. Nearer, where I live, the Uptown neighborhood, we have no towers. They are not allowed, partly because much of Uptown is in the flight path of an airport. Pontoon planes land in Lake Union.

My name is Bill Ritchie, and I am an artist. Artists typically neither live in nor do they like towering buildings. Yet when artists are attracted to city living, as in New York, for example, they accept the conditions that they need patrons. Innovative artists, in particular, need one patron for every one-hundred people in their viewing locale because innovative artists do not make consumer goods.

Much of what is called art is a form of a consumer good—something attractive to the eye and mind of the consumer. An ugly thing, like a stuffed goat with a tire around its middle, is not a consumer good. It’s suitable for the one-percent who see more in this weird combination than meets the eye.

Monogram, combine by Robert Rauschenberg

However, in a city like New York, it’s a perfect thing for that one-percent and only one-percent is needed to not only house the object and keep it safe, but also provide a living for the artist and his heirs. Chris Rauschenberg may not need his father’s estate (he’s a successful artist in his own right), but Robert Rauschenberg’s legacy is a help.

That is, while Monogram was made in New York, the Museum of Modern Art declined the offer of it by its purchaser, so this signature piece of American art history is in Sweden at the Moderna Muséet, Stockholm. Stockholm is farther away than Bellevue. It’s farther than Florida, too. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, I can “experience” the elements of this artwork with a few keystrokes. I can read about it. I can use it to illustrate my Big Dream and how it relates to a yet-unbuilt Northwest Print Center Incubators.

Rauschenberg and the New York school of art of the 1950’s produced more than consumer goods. Of the thousands of artists at work who produced immediately likeable and beautiful objects of art, crafts and design in those days, few are remembered for their art because the handful of artists who turned a corner in the art world those days were thinkers besides makers of consumer goods.

I was born just in time and in the right conditions to learn the lessons of the New York artists—in addition to the artists who were working at the same time in the Pacific Northwest. Here we had our Northwest School of Painting—Mark Tobey and the others. In the years I shaped my art philosophy I had to give up being any kind of artist of influence and taste-making because of the fog of war.

Either teach or be part of the Vietnam conflict. Summing up, it made all the difference in the way I view the Bellevue high-rise projects I am learning about today.

171113 How shares in Emeralda differ 

The image is my painting, Voyage of the Emeralda, Emeralda being the name of a mythical ship to which I am applying the name of a platform for investing in the Northwest Print Center Incubators.

In the past five years some companies have started up to sell shares in art collections. People enter with small amounts--$13 in one instance—to be part owners of artworks. Another, starting up with over a million dollars in seed capital, calls itself a platform for art investing where people with $10,000 or more can be part owners of entire collections, or blocks, of artworks.
These artworks are purchased with the pool of money thus committed and kept in storage. The premise is that the art will grow in price, so investors can hope for up to 10% growth of their investment. Not only is the profit an incentive, but it’s fun because of the collectible and cultural value of the art objects.
Over the course of several days I read a number of stories and propositions, and the assumption is always the same—big sums of money and the promise of positive ROI and the assurance of the artistic, cultural value of the objects grounded in expert opinion and big data.
My platform for investing in arts and culture takes a different point of view. Profit remains a motive, but a holistic view of art-making and community makes my platform different. To begin with, there is one unique, one-artist collection to invest in: Mine. Thus far, with my wife and daughter’s help we have a database of about 1,500 pieces of artworks spanning a variety of media in different sizes, shapes and descriptions.
My position in the community has made this possible, as I have retained my life’s work instead of selling these objects over my fifty years. However, it’s true I sold some of my art, and I have another database of over 400 people, corporations and institutions who bought it and, for all I know (and hope) still have it.
My mother taught me not to brag. In her memoir she derided people who “amaze themselves” with their own inventions. That may be one reason I still own what I made—a hoarder of amazing things, one might say. I am shy about this as I remember and honor my dear mother’s words.
Still, there is something to be said for things I achieved and the ways in which I have touched peoples’ lives. For example, because I was not compelled to sell off my work to make a living during my most creative years (I had a secure teaching job) I still have much of my art. There is something valuable in this which now, thanks to modern technology, can be mined to start the Northwest Print Center Incubators. It's mine to mine!
In my drive to think outside the box during those halcyon years at the 'Dub, I was involved with projects which, at first, were not considered art nor anything like art. Now, in the instance of video art tapes, they are. They may not be what consumers consider art as yet, but to historians they are something to consider in the context of art history. Thus, I have the largest privately-held video collection of locally-made videos.
This has brought me to a privileged position of having a diverse art collection which I estimate to have a valuation of half a million dollars or more. In today's industry, a half-million is not enough to bring about my great ambition—the Northwest Print Center Incubators—but it’s a start. It gives me hope, every day, that it will be seed capital to get to the bottom rung of the ladder toward construction.
Shares in other, similar investment pitches (Arthena comes to mind) give investors a piece of an art collection which is assumed will grow, and these investment schemes offer perks, besides, such as privileged interviews and exclusive online, insider viewpoints. These are good indicators to show me how to structure a plan for investing in the NPCI.
My plan is not to appeal to consumers—for it is a consumer model upon which Arthena is based: on monetary profits only, but as an investment in the Seattle community or, expanding on this, the creative economy via the experience economy. Art is experience, in my opinion, not only the owning or looking at an artwork. The “work” of art means the action of art, the experience of art and that which can be communicated in today’s global communication and interrelated cultural exchange. Most importantly, it can be part of educational experiences.
My art collection, which consists of thousands of bits and pieces of Northwest printmaking art history stored in our family art gallery and storage area of our condo, reflects the kind of global thinking I was privileged to indulge in during my 19 years as a mollycoddled art professor at the UW. It was my work. I did it for pay.
Now, notwithstanding my family’s rights to this legacy as an income stream, too, I want to give back to my neighborhood, the Uptown Arts and Culture Coalition, a physical building for artists, crafts people and designers’ housing which is sustained in part by cash streams I exploited within my domain-of-expertise—printmaking and other media arts, education and entertainment.

171029 A shared vision 

Yesterday I wrote about the coffee bean-sized nucleus accumbens, a shared characteristic nugget tucked deep inside the brains of 99.99 percent of we humans which, given the right environment, care and feeding of the rest of our bodies, can advance a human being or destroy itself—and even destroy all humanity.

Image from the Web

Today I am feeling the benefits of this little morsel of organic material in the good feeling it both thrives upon and regenerates—the feeling of sharing. Many pleasurable sensations derive from the nucleus accumbens—looking at or making artworks, a beautiful sunset, culturally-attuned music, for example—and for me, sharing experiences, too.

Sharing looking at an artwork is perhaps more pleasurable than experiencing an artwork by myself. Being in a movie theater is better than watching a movie streaming on a home screen by yourself. Streaming a movie with Lynda is better than doing that by myself. I never do it, in fact, unless it’s to examine the exact words of an actor, such as I did not long ago with Proof.

It occurs to me I would like to share those lines with a reader, but I will postpone this and drive toward my point: Sharing in the printmaking experience is more important than making prints alone. The only pleasure I get from making prints alone, by myself with only myself to talk to or sing is the anticipation that someone, someday, will have the print I am making.

They may, at some point in the future, look at the print and derive some pleasure merely by looking at it. They may not know what it is in the sense of its meaning or what I, the artist, was thinking, but the essence of colors, line, texture, etc. may please them—give them pleasure. And I can thank the health of their nucleus accumbens for this.

In a sense, this other person—or people all gathered around the picture in a museum with a docent’s guidance—completes the act of making the art, or what some people call the act of creation. I venture to say we’re sipping dopamine together in a pleasant, nonverbal communication across time and space. The nucleus accumbens is the source of dopamine, an organic chemical produced in humans, animals and plants.

It is the source of art, you might say, and any activity associated with art in all its forms. This includes activities not considered art at all, such as truck driving or weight-lifting, science and deep-sea diving. I am exploring what possibilities there may be in Seattle a person or a group interested in partnering with me to develop my brainchild—offspring of my 50-year printmaking career: the Northwest Print Center Incubators. Perhaps the Uptown Arts & Culture Coalition. Perhaps Artist Trust. Maybe the Seattle Print Arts will change their minds and take up a conversation because they need a central office.

Or, maybe it will never be an existing nonprofit in Seattle which will talk with me and look at my plan. It is true that—as is said in stock investing—past performance is no indication of future performance. I am thinking how my vision has not drawn support in the past encounters with nonprofits in Seattle. They don't answer my calls for help.

I learned these lessons when investing in stocks via an investment club years ago. Now, this morning, as the eastern sky grows slightly lighter, I think of my friends far, far to the east for whom it is already past lunch time and who have a Halfwood Press somewhere in their home. That press has my fingerprints on it! It may be in a closet, but they have not disposed of it like so many mass-produced consumer goods they decided that were no longer of value.

They bought the press, paid dearly for the Halfwood Press (or the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press) due to their nucleus accumbens’ indicating that if they did so, good things would come from it. Or, even if they didn’t use the press, they could admire it. Their friends could admire it, too, or their spouse. Those who gave the press as a gift can know that it was a nice gift to receive, even if hopes for an art career didn’t pan out.

I shall end this speculative essay now, finish my online Spanish lesson (Duolingo) which is my way of stimulating my nucleus accumbens into giving me hope that, in a circuitous way, will lead to the formation of the Northwest Print Center Incubators. For example, my long-held dream is that printmaking will be the nucleus of teaching second languages to kids (and maybe adults).

Ask me about that if you’re interested in your kids or your school’s kids learning Chinese.

171028 A Town without Pity 

Yesterday I did what many people in the art community might consider a strange thing, something out of the ordinary way of doing things in the Seattle Arts Community. It is something I did which many artists would say, “I sure wouldn’t do that!”

It’s typical of me, though, and therein lies the core of my creative soul—the tiny bit of my brain which Elmer Gates studied, the source of dopamine his Collie dogs demonstrated to be the possible key to intelligence and what he called Mind Growing. Today it’s called the nucleus accumbens located in the so-called pleasure centers of my brain and which resembles that of almost everyone.

Image from the Web

What is it that I did? I wrote a blast email to the entire staff of Artists Trust—from the topmost Executive Director to the new Interns. I asked them to consider partnering with me on the development of the Northwest Print Center Incubators.

In a similar vein, I sent a blast email to my colleagues on the Uptown Arts & Culture Coalition. This is a key group whose purpose is to encourage cultural and artistic endeavors in the neighborhood where we live and have our family’s art gallery.

The nucleus accumbens is the source of dopamine, an organic chemical produced in humans, animals and plants. It is the source of art, you might say, and any activity associated with art in all its forms. This includes activities not considered art at all, such as truck driving or weight-lifting, science and deep-sea diving.

My blast email was, and is, part of my deep-sea diving insofar as I am exploring what possibilities there may be in the Artist Trust staff in partnering with me to develop my brainchild, the Northwest Print Center Incubators. The same goes for the Uptown Arts & Culture Coalition. Is there any interest, I wonder? To date (and I am writing less than 24 hours after my email and have not, at 6:30 AM, checked my email).

Past performance is no indication of future performance, I learned, when it comes to investing in stocks. Years ago, I formed an investment club to learn about investing—one of my many exercises driven by dopamine. In other words, I have communicated with Artist Trust in the past. In fact, I was in touch with the founders of Artist Trust from it inception, notably Anne Focke and David Mendoza.

When Artist Trust was started, the group was to address as many of the deficiencies in the artists’ support infrastructure as possible—from housing to health insurance. Lobbying and grants may have been the most successful aspects. Health insurance was, I suppose, out of its capacity. My personal wish was that it would address educational deficiencies artists find and, today, Artist Trust is possibly the best source of education in matters of economics, i.e., the business of being an artist in today’s economy.

For example, Artist Trust lists almost twenty resources on line—ranging from asset management to laws that effect artists and their families. Many artists, I think, who would scan this list of resources would experience a tiny hit of dopamine just reading it because there is help available on pressing questions like, “What about copyrights?” and “What about grant-writing?”

Artist Trust espouses community-building. Anne Focke’s life has been a life of a community builder, and Artist Trust would not exist were it not for hers and David’s vision and design plus their political acumen in getting support from the monied people in Seattle both in industry and government.

I shall end this speculative essay now, finish my online Spanish lesson (Duolingo) which is my way of stimulating my nucleus accumbens into giving me hope that, in a circuitous way, will lead to the formation of the Northwest Print Center Incubators.

Ask me about that. And if you’ve read this and wonder why I gave this essay the title, A Town without Pit, it’s the title that popped into my head—a title of a song, the lyrics of which are, “It isn’t very pretty what a town without pity can do.” It’s about the possibility that my blast email will not receive a single answer from a staff member at Artist Trust, as has happened with my emails to the UACC asking for partners to develop the NPCI.

171026 I can jump start your small business in printmaking 

Feeling heady today with my success record, I’m entertaining the idea, Yes, I can! A word of caution, however, and this comes from the story of the Little Red Hen. She had an idea to grow wheat to make flour, and she asked all the barnyard animals for help. No one would help her, and with each refusal she said, “Then I will do it myself.”

When, after she tilled the field and her wheat was harvested and milled into flour, she made a cake! Then all the animals came to ask for some, but she denied them. The trouble then became that she ate her cake alone, with no one to talk to. Moreover, this bred envy and resentment and I don’t like to think what happened after that. It’s too ugly to think about.

I am the Little Red Hen, because I designed and made a number of things. However, I always had help from those around me—my family, first of all, who supported me and who continue to do whatever they can within their abilities to support me. This is the thing for which I am most grateful.

Then, too, there are my friends (I hope I can call them my friends) who support me in many ways—with “Likes” on Facebook, for example. There are former students who, even today, join me in my projects such as the Vladimir Chichinoff Interactive Sketchbook project, and buying the last of the Halfwood Presses.

I’m grateful, too, for the little seeds of new ideas that are sprinkled in the minutes of my daily work—like the name of Lucy Garrick, which came to me in a complex, circuitous way which you might compare to an intriguing novel or mystery story. By tracking her through her online information, I came to an organization with the odd name of Scrum. It turns out it’s a move in a sport and refers to a strategic formation used to win by surprise (I think).

Off I go—like the Little Red Hen across the barnyard—to the Scrum Website, there to find Scrum is a source to connect with consultants who use the Scrum methodology generally known as lean and athletic, fast and thoroughly intended to win in business. I understand this thinking and I’ve practiced it in my way since the days I was a college professor; that’s another story.

Scrum appears to me to be ideally suited to my current project, the Northwest Print Center Incubators. If these incubators were to become real, then each of the units (I estimate nineteen are viable startups) might all be trained under the Scrum framework, which is here copied from the Web:

The Scrum framework is deceptively simple: • A product owner creates a prioritized wish list called a product backlog. • During sprint planning, the team pulls a small chunk from the top of that wish list. That chunk becomes the sprint backlog. The team decides how to implement the sprint backlog within the time frame of the sprint. • The team has the given sprint (usually two to four week time frame) to complete its work, but it meets each day to assess its progress (in the Daily Scrum). • Along the way, the ScrumMaster keeps the team focused on its goal. • At the end of the sprint, the work should be potentially shippable: ready to hand to a customer, put on a store shelf, or show to a stakeholder. • The sprint ends with a sprint review and retrospective. • As the next sprint begins, the team chooses another chunk of the product backlog and begins working again.

Here, again, is the rub: Where are the people? Who are the people who want to jump start a small business connected in some way to printmaking? The Little Red Hen had her barnyard population to which she could make her proposal and hope to gain their help. Who are my friends? Who will help me “take a “chunk from the top” which is the Halfwood Press line?

Like Bob Dylan said in Brownsville Girl, “Oh, if there is an original idea out there, I could sure use it now.” Sam Shepard co-authored the lyrics of that song—it’s one of my favorites. I read that during the recording the group came to a sticking point and they needed some new lines to complete it; Dylan, according to the story, went off by himself and in only a few minutes came back with the needed words—so fast that it amazed everyone.

Back to the title of this essay, I can jump start your small business in printmaking, what does that mean? In my email today I see two items by artists I know, both of them graduates from the UW. One of them took a drawing class from me in the late 1960’s; the other was a student at the UW forty years later and both of them are selling off all their studio and looking for storage for their art. I think to myself, I could have helped you prevent this if you had asked and listened.

But, this won’t happen, any more than I can help that Eskimo I wrote about yesterday. Those I believe will listen are those who have more at stake than their own needs—people who are thinking about other people, too, in a sense of teamwork and winning Big Time. People like Lucy Garrick, maybe, and her colleagues in the Scrum network.

171025 Mistaken identity

 – or – Don’t get me wrong. 

People think I’m an artist just because I studied and taught art in college, made things that look like art and had art shows. Even the etching presses I make “art works of art,” they say. Maybe it’s true, maybe I’m an artist, but what good am I to the world? What good is art? What is art. As one woman said, my plan for the Northwest Print Center Incubators is on the scale of “solving Seattle’s homeless problem and all the elephants of the world.”

She nailed it. Those are exactly the things I work on. The making of an artwork, by comparison is a trivial, self-indulgent and pointless waste of materials and time. I will not add to the waste I see all around me when there is work to be done to help solve Seattle’s homeless problem and save all the elephants. I mean business, the only business I’ve ever been in is education.

It happens I can draw, and when I was a kid everyone said, “Oh, Billy, you should be an artist,” and that wired my brain to think so. Other options open to me were engineering, dentistry and the military (Air Force). Sports was out, and anything to do with math was out. At the critical point when the Army beckoned me, I opted to teach.

Yet, I would serve my country! In college I learned about American Values from conservatives like Giovanni Costigan, plus those of my dad and extended family (some of them, anyway!). I admired my professors and I said I would be like them, I would be a great teacher. Art, in and of itself, was not as important as the Big Picture. To me that meant helping to solve Seattle’s Homeless problem and all the elephants of the Earth.

If my ability to draw and make beautiful etching presses (and ugly ones, too, if that were necessary) is a help, that would be great.

The question is, How? How can art help the homelessness in Seattle? I looked into that. I talked to a homeless man recently. His name is Kiesek. He’s Eskimo, down here to get out of the cold. He told me his background: alcoholic, wife abuser, on the lam, and his name means “shoulder blade.” I wondered, as he told me his story, and I told him mine (Legend of Vladimir Chichinoff), can I help this homeless person?

The main thing he liked was my story of Vladimir Chichinoff. Partly it was because he knows about skin boats. On his Eskimo corporate ID, there’s a picture of a skin boat, in fact. He offered to buy me dinner, or drinks, whatever I wanted. He almost begged me to accept something from him. I deferred. How could I accept a gift from a homeless man?

I pictured myself a story teller in those minutes I was with Kiesek. The homeless need entertainment, too, if it takes their minds off their situation a moment. But would it help? I’m a teacher, but my teaching is limited to manufacturing beautiful objects, such as etching presses.

Could I teach Kiesek to make etching presses? Actually, people like me have been trying to teach Kiesek to make a living, keep a family and sustain these things for over forty years and they—and he—failed because the sellers of booze were better at teaching. The alcohol industry, soft drink manufacturers and titillating entertainment know how to teach.

I have tried to steal those industries’ ideas and adapt them to American Values as I understand them from my history lessons. To some degree, I have succeeded. But for Kiesek, I have only a story. Any notion I might have of training a group of people—homeless in Seattle—to make etching presses’ parts and, better yet, own the market I created is stupid.

That part of Kiesek’s brain that is crucial to success of a healthy and whole life and style of living is owned by the industries that got to him first. Those industries beat the hell out of the well-meaning, non-native teachers from my culture. I can’t compete with the alcohol, tobacco and drug industries. No teachers can. The winner in this competition is death itself.

I’m pro-life. That doesn’t mean I’m against birth control and abortion; it means I’m in favor of living. Life is a gift. Every day I live, is a gift. My mother gave me life, assisted by my father and I see them manifest in my reflection in the mirror every morning I awaken. “What will you do with this life we gave you,” they say. “What will you do with the talent I gave you,” they say, like the lord in the parable.

Today is October 25, 2017, and I will work on Fox Spears’ press (he happens to be descended from the indigenous people a little like Kiesek). I will write a few more pages in my autobiography. I will enter my novel in a contest for adaptation to the screen. I will work with our daughter and my wife at assessing the value of our gallery’s contents and preparing it for sale or destruction. There may be surprise visits and emails, perhaps even another order for a Halfwood Press.

Many things await me. I’m grateful. As for the homeless, I wrote an opinion to the Seattle Times last year at the height of what appeared a renewed effort to help the homeless. I suggested building schools under parts of I-5. Education is key to helping the homeless; but are the homeless teachable? The answer is that it depends on who owns the rewards centers of their brains, and how do you compete with those owners? Can you save the elephants? That depends on the competition; can you beat those who are buying the products of the killings? Can you feed the families of the farmers whose crops are destroyed by elephant herds? Can you feed those elephants, competing with human populations which are exceeding Earth’s capacity to feed and water them (and satisfy the reward centers of those humans’ brains?

In short, can you handle it, teacher? Yes, I can, if the student can listen. If the student can handle it.

171022 Six Million? Really? 

Finding ways to jump start our small businesses at the NPCI 

For nine years I have grounded my plans for the Northwest Print Center Incubators on a number: six million. I say, “Six million people in the US alone would buy a Halfwood Press if they only knew about it.” That’s a lot of people, and if I had a dollar for each one sold, I could retire—maybe, like the MTG founders, live like a rock star.

(Can’t you just see Bill and Lynda Ritchie living like rock stars! Makes me smile.)

Where did I get that number?

When?

It was in 2008 when I wrote the first accounting of how I came to make the first Halfwood Presses. In my book I was working on a paragraph, writing under my pen name, Harris Sweed, to explain the dollar-value of my design.

I wrote as though interviewing myself. I gave an accounting in a little Excel spreadsheet, counting who had bought the first 30-some Halfwood Presses up to that year. Taking into account these people (and I knew them in quite good detail) as a demographic; and then I took into account the people I had met when I was an art professor teaching college.

I taught college for nineteen years—call it a generation. In that generation, the population of printmaking classes at the UW School of Art in Seattle was typical of many universities and community colleges in the USA. In other words, 15-20 people in each class of printmaking, ranging across the four printing processes of relieve, stencil, planographic and intaglio.

Digital printing didn’t exist in the 1980s (unless you counted dot matrix or pen plotters), but photography was making inroads in classic printmaking by way of photo-screen printing, etching and lithography.

Technical matters aside, by simple math I concluded that six million people had been exposed to printmaking over the twenty years I had been teaching it (1966-1985) and, at the time I was making the calculation, another twenty years (1986-2006) another number, perhaps equal to or greater than the previous generation—had been exposed.

The calculation at that time (writing my book in 2008) acknowledged but did not include how many people were “exposed” to printmaking (TV, workshops, art fairs, museums, etc.). Nor did my calculations consider people who came to know printmaking sideways, as it were, through photography, computer graphics, book arts, fabric design, collecting and crafting.

Nor did I consider the parents, or the children of print-loving parents, nor their spouses—people who in one way or another love prints, printmaking, and printmakers. I dropped my calculations at the portal of my knowledge: College-taught printmaking.

And that’s how I got six million. The simple equation of the number of students in typical classes, the number of classes taught in a year in the number of colleges in the USA at the time. I remember when I did this exercise in Excel, I distrusted my understanding of my formula because accounting is not my forte. The number six million persisted.

I was trying to assure myself that I wasn’t nuts and that I was making another big mistake in my career and my efforts to restore our living standard to what it was before I resigned from the UW. So I added the codicil: Only ten-percent of my former students continued in the art field after graduation, and of these only one percent would continue making prints in the manner in which they learned in college.

Thus reasoning, then six-thousand was a number with which I felt more at ease. Still, if we made and sold six-thousand Halfwood Presses over the next decade, my partner Tom Kughler's and my families could do well financially. At that time, Tom and I were only making Mini Halfwood Presses and selling them at the top price of $1,300. The larger ones—which sold up to a price of $3,500—were just a twinkle in Tom’s eyes.

I wonder: Will I look back (or am I now looking back?) and realize that, once again, I’m making a big mistake—like the time I put my faith in the integrity of the University of Washington’s Powers-that-were and lost my family's financial foothold?

Have I, again, gambled on a vision of the success of the Halfwood Press for thirteen years and now assessing my losses?

I find myself awakening in an era of big data—when success seems is measured by how many millions of dollars you can acquire as seed money to launch a startup like the Northwest Print Center Incubators. So it seems, from the meetings I attend regularly, dominated by high tech and a favorite pursuit of Millennials, dreaming of the Next Big Thing.

In these times, six million dollars’ income from sales of presses spread over a year may not be enough to impress anyone! However,  like making an artwork from scratch, few can see how.

170925  It’s education, stupid 

Before you put the cart before the horse or the horse before the cart, either way you must remember the cart and the horse are matters of education. The conventional thinking is that horses always go before the cart, however it occurs to the educated person it might be better sometimes to put the cart before the horse. For example, in crossing a field of land mines.
Watch your step!

Education taught me four principles to keep in mind when taking a journey across an unknown territory: recursivity, concurrent engineering, complementarity and circularity. These are all matters having to do with planning your journey through life—which is full of “unknowns”.

In the case of Ritchie Foundation, Mini Art Gallery, and the Northwest Print Center Incubators, these endeavors solve the problems that, the NPCI being the cart, that there is no center of learning in this region for printmaking. Pushing this cart across unknown territory (no one has ever attempted it) requires testing the uncertain path.

Like inching over a frozen pond. Will the ice hold this bold and vast plan?

People might point to the schools which have printmaking classes, however the classes are incomplete because they don’t connect old printmaking with modern technologies. I would teach that as printmaking is, number one, the ancestor of all the innovative technologies and, number two, that printmaking is a performance art.

Also, I would teach that printmaking has more in common with games than it does with painting and in addition, you get results that are good for society. Printmaking is a social art as well as a visual art. Because printmaking is full of little technical problems, therefor printmakers can solve other kinds of problems better than painters, I believe, because printmaking is an art of designing solutions.

Printmaking is self-satisfying, like painting, drawing, and crafts, but because of its technical connections to the history of science, technology, reading, engineering, art and math (STREAM) the self-satisfaction goes further than those arts and crafts which have less to do with society, economics and solving the problems we face today.

It’s especially important for kids from ages 4 to 14, in my opinion, because there is hand and team work.

Therefore, as I proceed to develop the three entities in my hands—Ritchie Foundation, Mini Art Gallery, and the Northwest Print Center Incubators—I have a fourth entity in mind:

Education.

And I will not forget it when I am discussing Sip and Print, Young Printmakers, Seniors Printmaking or any of the nineteen segments of the NPCI.

mr170804 My mistake, too?  

I’m writing my autobiography. Is it to be my mistake? Should I be doing something else? I think about the world situation, and I remember what Signora Maria Guaita said: “Only artists and poets can save the world now,” she declared to me when I visited her in Florence. An old resistance fighter during WWII, I pay heed to and I honor her view.

But, here I am, writing about my life. Is this what an artist should be doing to help save Earth’s human life sustainability? Is this what an Emeralda Warrior should be doing? That old warrior, Maria Guaita, has her story—and the story of Il Bisonte, her printmaking school—in books.

Seven months and 450 pages into my autobiography, I read a memoir titled, My Mistake, by Daniel Menaker, a well-known writer in New York. Menaker wrote an article about his brother’s death—the second article he’d written about this tragedy and his self-blame. It was rejected.

He told his analyst about it. But his analyst, he writes:

“Instead of responding to the umbrage I’ve taken, he tells me that my brother’s death is threatening to turn into a nuclear integrative fantasy for me. Nuclear because it is becoming the center of my unconscious emotional life. Integrative because it creates a shape, a terrible and beautiful structure, for everything in my life that came before it and has happened afterward. And a fantasy because for reasons of unconscious conflict and patterns, I’ve begun to inject its occurrence into many parts of my history upon which it has no rational bearing.”

The analyst illustrated this nuclear integrative fantasy by what we know of the lives of survivors of the holocaust. Menaker continues to illustrate, from his experience with an example of nuclear integrative fantasy in meeting a woman whose brother had died, and who dwells on this in conversations with everyone she meets.

Is this a good use of time?

sp170720 Stuff of a saga 

In a time when story finds more interaction in video games than opera or movies, the stuff sagas are made of is still the core of these arts. In pop literature, I think James Michener did great things by the way he gave his readers a grounding in primordial time and space in books like Hawaii, Alaska and others.
When I designed and built the Halfwood press, at times working alone in my woodshop—a pencil and paper handy—phrases about the press’ origins came to mind. Like cookie crumbs I followed the trail of the press, a serial of logical sequence. I compared this to movies like The Red Violin. I imagined people’s involvement with the Halfwood press over time. I created a saga like that of that violin, a musical instrument designed for beauty and functionality just like the halfwood press.
Someone observed that in the crafts and the arts that you master your instrument and then the instrument masters you, or that artists and their instruments become one in the making of fine arts, crafts and performances. If I am an artist—living at a time when story finds its greatest interaction in video games—then the halfwood press is the stuff out of which a saga may emerge—the back story for a great hybrid game.
Taking my cue from Michener, I built a sequence of events beginning with The Women Who Fell to Earth and which courses through the history of sailing ships named the Emeralda I and Emeralda II, then to the design of the etching press. My blend of printing press and musical instrument, the halfwood press, travels from 18^th Century Spain to the muddy bottom in the Pacific Northwest waters. After two-hundred years it emerges in another story—autobiographical in part—a digital component added-on which makes it part of the Internet of Things—IoT.
My desire for a suite of Games for the gifts of life, I have the right stuff for a saga, a back story for a suite of games I call Emeralda. The saga has the unearthing of skeletons of a man and a monkey, along with a halfwood press chest. In another part a Russian man, dying in the far north, engraved his life story on ivory parts of a facsimile halfwood Press, telling how the halfwood press came to the northwest; and, in the finale of my screenplay, Swipe, a precocious Brazilian street kid grows up to be a globe-trotting teacher of printmaking.
I love the chain of events in words I was given to write—the best gifts I could have received for my part in designing and making of the halfwood press. Now I want the stuff of its saga to be the spine of a video game and a film series.
Who will help?

ap170623  Saving Earth’s human life sustainability 

Why write an autobiography? 

When I came into the world, the belief I met was that any little thing was a chance for growing conscious of humanity in a relationship with Nature. By the time I had lived twenty years, my belief encompassed all Natural things—stones, trees, animals, birds, fish—and I took my role to be that of an artist and a teacher. To be an artist, I had to teach. Survival of that element of humanity to see every little thing as a chance for growing conscious of humanity’s relation with Nature depended on me teaching cultural arts.
Mechanization was constantly growing, too; and often the demands of mechanization were counter to consciousness of Nature and our dependence on Natural forces. By the time I was forty, I had been adopted, it seemed, by a being showing me both Natural and mechanical forces and they are enemies.
By the time I was sixty—around the year 2001—I could see the balance of survival tipping to the mechanical. Now that I am seventy five, the victory in the contest between Nature and mechanization is almost won by the latter. Humanity no longer controls the forces of mechanization. It is a fact, as one of the authors said in a book I read when I was in my ‘thirties, that mechanization takes command.
Mechanization has disrupted even the simplest human reactions—such as one human making eye-contact with another human meeting on a sidewalk. Plugged in—either with ear buds or only mentally—most people I meet walking avoid showing any signs that they know I am there. I feel like a ghost; I can see them, but they cannot see me it seems.
People acknowledge a dog, yet do not acknowledge another human being. Humans put out extreme efforts to husband their vehicles above all else—devoting huge sums of money to buying and maintaining their cars while wasting and ignoring Natural things such as humans.
Is it only Americans who behave this way? Probably not. However, among the inventions of Americans is entertainment and the mediums to distribute the power of mechanization overwhelming Nature, so that billions of non-Americans fall under its power, too.
The endowment of cultural arts allows those who practice and teach them to see the others’ meaning, and to sense an understanding of the reasons that people hate Americans for having destroyed so much of Nature that was good.
Therefore, when I was in my ‘fifties and my thoughts encountered those of a few other Americans by way of the mechanical means of communications—TV and books, mostly—I believed that my teaching and artistic role had found a value that transcended my expectations as an ordinary, limited Natural human. The mechanics of goal-setting is a helpful method to keep one’s bearings when the forces of mechanization overwhelm me.
What is this writing - this blog - worth? Six months ago I made a commitment to write my autobiography. This project is conditional, however. If I wrote my autobiography within the same framework as autobiographies were written in the past, it would be like wasting Natural resources. It would be like a person facing a walk in a desert and pouring the contents of a water canteen into the sand as if this were the first step toward a successful journey.
It would be a waste of the most precious of all resources given to me: Time. Therefore, in the spirit of human creativity, creating an autobiography must have an artist and teacher’s touch. It must use the best of what mechanization has to offer to achieve the most human of goals—Earth’s human life sustainability.

os170606 Tiddlywik-ing my autobiography  

Inspired by an onyx apple  

I am writing my autobiography, and I have been at it for about four months. I work on it every day—sometimes all day—when I’m not corresponding with people about printmaking and my Halfwood Press line. When I tell people about it, I’m probably guilty of humble bragging. That’s when you brag about yourself behind a mask of self-deprecation.

It’s something like this: “I have to realize that writing an autobiography today—if you’re not somebody famous—is foolish on two counts: One, you’re not famous so who cares? And, Two, no one reads books any more.

It could be that I am famous, but not famous to millions of people—only a few hundred. The only big number I can claim is the number of people who have watched my videos on Youtube. One of them got over 22,000 views the last time I looked.

There is another reason for writing my novel, and it’s a secret—even to me. I am what people call a visionary, or a creative person. I’m not happy about that because there’s no demand for people like me. (Humble bragging again?). Since there’s no demand, I’m lonely—an outsider to most peoples’ circles of friends and professional associates.

In other words, I don’t know what I’m doing.

On the upside of this, however, is that I’m free of encumbrances, such as non-business telephone calls and social obligations. Even my close family members leave me alone to do what I think is important to me (and what I hope, in the end, will be important to them, too).

Here’s the point of this essay—I have in my collection of memorabilia a red onyx apple. It’s one of the things that will be discarded when I die because it’s of no apparent value. They sell for about $20 from carved gemstone suppliers. Here I paraphrase one supplier’s claims:

“Onyx apples remind people of the magic and mystery of fairy tales, and the legend of good versus evil as in the Garden of Eden. Their properties are ever-potent, a symbol of trust, growth, sustenance, and bearing fruit. Apples have also historically been used for happiness and drawing love, as well as divination rituals. Onyx is a stone of inner strength, persistence, willpower, and concentration. It keeps you focused, to develop into a master of self-realigning perceptions, emotions, actions, thoughts, and more. It purifies your inner monologue, to help you think more positively. Because as we think, so we believe and behave. This is a stone that can change your life.” – Sage Goddess

Yet I wouldn’t throw away this apple as long as I live. It was a gift to me in 1965 from my teacher in graduate school, Professor Geoffrey Bowman. It is a souvenir from Mexico, and he brought it back because I took care of his house and cats while he was gone.

Now, writing my bibliography, the onyx apple is mentioned in connection with my description of the two years I was in graduate school. As I said above, there are two reasons not to write an autobiography—being unknown and no readers—and the onyx apple, as the Sage Goddess wrote, has the power to focus on becoming a master of self-realigning perceptions, etc.

This I interpret to mean that the apple onyx may lead me to a reason to write an autobiography, which is to realign the emotions, actions, thought and more. The “more” is to create an autobiography that is a game more than a mere tome. It might be simple: make the apple, including its image, part of the autobiography and then use a wiki platform to provide the user (reader?) with an interesting experience in pursuing the links associated with the onyx apple.

Online I find several types of wiki platforms, one of which gets high ratings by writers. It is a called tiddlywiki.  I'm going to download it and try it.

ap170305 Close call: Wake up call  

Yesterday I walked from our home in lower Queen Ann. I was with four blocks of my destination—the Trader Joe’s store at the top of the hill. It was there that Lynda and I planned to meet. We coordinated my walk time and her bus time. It was about 1:05.

Walking on 1^st Avenue North I came to Blaine Street, and I was looking down the sloping street at the Number 4 bus, waiting there. I was startled by the sound of a vehicle skidding to stop. There, about ten feet from me, was a black SUV that had almost hit me! I froze—like they say, like a deer in the headlights. I looked at the driver—she was aghast. I felt meek and I hurried out of the way.

One second was all the separated me from serious injury or even death. She may have been going about 10 miles per hour—a little slow because at that intersection there is a jog where Blaine meets 1^st Avenue. It takes about 27 feet to stop a car going this speed—about one and a third times the length of a Sports Utility Vehicle like hers.

As I resumed my walk, I began playing back what a difference that one second would have made. At ten mph, a car covers about 15 feet per second. One second would have been enough to smash into my right side, probably breaking my hip and femur. I’d probably be thrown a dozen feet besides, hitting who knows what on my body: My head? Shoulder? What the overall impact would do to my back—operated on five months ago—shoulders, neck and head is hard to tell. If not killed, I could have been hospitalized for months.

Visualizing different scenarios in my imagination as I walked on, I wondered how, would Lynda be informed of my situation. Would medics go through my things, my wallet and cell phone and know to call her (assuming someone called 9-1-1)? Lynda would be on the bus by then, heading up the hill to meet me. Would she hear her cell phone?

What about the SUV driver? Yes, this close call was partly my fault because I was looking the other way, distracted. Was the driver distracted, too? Was she looking at her cell phone, or paying attention to a kid in the back, perhaps? Honestly, I was too shook up to think about walking around to her car window and talking about this, cussing her out, maybe, or anything. I don’t even know if we made eye contact.

I’m pretty sure it was a woman; and as I reached Queen Ann Avenue I hoped I would see her parking her SUV. My thoughts collected now, I’d be pretty sure I’d have a talk with her. I didn’t see her, though. From Blaine Street she could have gone the other way down Queen Anne Avenue.

I would never know for sure what happened yesterday when I was in that crosswalk, but I know it was a wakeup call. Old men like me shouldn’t go walking unattended if they don’t watch out. My mind wandered; I wasn’t watching out for cars—like a little kid. It’s cool to think young if you’re a creative artist, but not cool if you are in traffic.

What if I’d been hit? What would happen to the art in our gallery, and the software experiments I’m working on? I believe I am doing things to ensure that the art and the gallery is useful and helpful to Lynda, and to our two daughters and their families. I will die—run over by an SUV or struck down by a fatal heart attack or stroke; and that’s the bottom line of why I spend my time the way I do.

That is why I’m pay Nellie to learn and develop database management for all that I’ve made; and bookkeeping, using our family assets as content to her databases and financial accounting. That’s why I refer always to the dumpster story[1] to underscore the alternative to valuation and dissemination of the gallery’s contents for the benefit of my family and community.

---

[1] The dumpster refers to the inevitability of discarding my entire life’s work into a 10-yard dumpster at the time of my death in order to clear our gallery and storage room so as to leave no obligation to family and friends.

vi170303  Wiki or not:  Here I come  

Anne Turner, one of the children of the late Stephen Hazel, suggested how to preserve and extend artists’ legacies. She maintains a website for him and is one of a number of children of region’s notable printmakers, the Children of the Printmaking Revolution. The author offers up his different approach.

Wiki nor not wiki

Should I start a wiki? The original question came up when Anne Turner and I began discussing ways to preserve and extend artists’ legacies. She is the one of the children of the late Stephen Hazel, and she has designed and maintains a website for him. I commented that she is one of a number of children of regional artists and printmakers of note, suggesting the term Children of the Printmaking Revolution.

We had a meeting at our family’s Mini Art Gallery. She commented, as she looked around the gallery and seeing artworks on the walls and Halfwood Presses for sale: “I didn’t realize there was so much here.” I thought, You have no idea how much there is . . . and Stephen is part of it.

There is a great deal to say about artists’ assets and the transfer of their legacy. Usually people think only of selling the art as a way of transferring it. They assume there is a market. Sometimes the art auction is a choice. With no alternatives planned or imagined, what are the descendants to do? The bottom line is that it is no easier to sell the art after the artist dies than it was during his or her lifetime; otherwise, there would be no discussion.

The work did not sell—period. When the work of art became a commodity, it entered a pool of sharks. Commodities sell when there is a plan to sell—usually before the object is made. Artists traditionally do not plan to sell a work of art before they start.

Commercially successful artists do, however, plan ahead. They choose colors that are currently in fashion and that will probably stay in fashion for the duration of the artwork offering. They consider medium, size, subject matter—everything they can imagine and study in the marketplace of design, decoration, entertainment, and interior furnishing.

Some artists, like Stephen Hazel, eschew this approach to making art. We—and I include myself with his kind of artist—have the idea that art comes not as a commodity but as an experience moving us to make something. If our finished art moves another person or people to something like an esthetic experience or cultural idea, they appreciate it; they may buy it.

Since the combination of the object’s appearance to the eye, the content to the viewer’s mind in some cases, and the exposure to the kind of people who can and will share this experience are rare, it’s rarely that the artworks sell. Even if the price is low, it may not sell. Commodities are like that.

My view is that there is a way to surmount this situation, and surmount it I must. I’m willing to see all my works destroyed—“sacrificed,” as Carl Chew would say—to simply clear out our valuable piece of real estate so that it can be rented to create an income for our family.

To create a bridge and connect to that point in time when and if the art and all the gallery furnishings, as well as miscellaneous tools, etc. (and the Halfwood Presses) are sacrificed, I work to change the art from commodity status to utility status.

If I succeed, it may be partly from my vision of the Northwest Print Center Incubators, because, among the 19 incubators, I planned a one feature called by a working title Printmaking Hall of Fame. Its focus is on artists of the Pacific Northwest Region who made important contributions to the art, craft and design of printmaking, including innovative tools and techniques. Think Dan Smith and Glen Alps, or Elton Bennett and Sheila Coppola.

I am the oldest printmaker (born 1941, the year before John P. Morgan) who has lived in Seattle since 1966; I may also be the oldest teacher of printmaking—unless my nineteen years at the UW do not qualify me as others whose formal teaching career was longer—such as Thomas Johnston. Therefore I am qualified to design a printmaking center which spans fifty years and blends old and new technologies in a way to benefit Seattle’s Cultural Arts.

sp170122  Practice makes perfect: Practice also makes it permanent  

The expression “practice makes perfect” comes to mind as he begins this day’s work on his Memoir Project. Perfect studios is the idea he formed in the early 1970s based on a teaching hospital where teaching, research, practice and service are concomitant.

As I sit down today to work on my memoir project, my 1977 Journal open in front of me, I’m ready to start dictating using this capital Dragon software. I put on my headset and open the program and realize this is only practice. The expression “practice makes perfect” flashes into my mind. Perfect studios is a matter of practice. Perfect studios, the idea I got in the early 1970s from the teaching hospital, is about practice.

Practice and production are the “P” in the TRPS principal underline the perfect studios. “T” is for teaching; “R” is for research; “P” is for practice and production – which go hand-in-hand with each other; and “S” stands for service. 

The culmination of artistic practice—whether it’s in the visual arts, music or architecture—is service. We are all servants to humanity and Earth’s human life sustainability.

If an artist is to be a valuable part of the community, his or her value comes only by virtue of their commitment to TRPS. Practice, then, includes buying and sustaining productivity software. I am about to copy out a statement from August 11, 1977, for my memoir project using this Dragon software.

This serves me as an example of how to be an artist of value to the community, because this practice gives me the ability to answer or respond to the needs of my community, starting with my family.

By the end of the day I have practiced several kinds of software applications in connection with my computer and its peripherals—including the Internet. Because I am working on my memoir project, this has a strange effect on me because the traditional memoir is a book. Therefore, why include the Internet?

My mother wrote her memoirs by hand in three blank books given to her by my sister, Gail. Beginning in 1995, Gail and my older sister Wilma and our younger sister Jennifer labored to put her longhand text into type, and then into machine-readable text. Eventually I published it as an on-demand paperback.

My memoir project, however, is not destined to be a book. What it will be, if not a book, remains to be discovered. I think if I practice every day with the apps and equipment I have, and utilize the remains of my lifework in this practice, I will be fulfilling the basic TRPS formula. Then, in a process known in industry as concurrent engineering, the form of my memoir project may become clear.