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.