vp190831 Sharing my world: What remains of my life 

Making use of lessons learned

In a paper by a professor I read that one of the things students hate about professors is that they assign the text he or she authored as reading for the course. “It’s conceit,” was the phrase that stuck in my mind.
This answers my curiosity as to why people at a recent gathering of the Seattle Print Arts registered dismissive expression when I told the group several volumes of my autobiography were available on amazon now – and that these covered the years to generations ago when I was at the UW.
Many of those at the meeting were graduates of the UW, and a few from those years. It was, I felt, not interesting to anyone there; in fact, I felt a sense of dismissal. The article where the professor said students thought it conceited that a teacher wrote the book for the class helped explain the reaction by the SPA members gathered there.
The professor also mentioned a series of books published in the 1980s and 90s which were critiques of US Higher Education and that help understand the problems we have with college today – high tuition costs, for one thing, and loss of the arts and humanities sectors.
There’s no point now in defending myself for my teaching. It’s what I did most of my teaching career and failed. I resigned from UW because I was fired from teaching printmaking, and that’s that. The story is in my memoirs, and I’m glad I write them despite few people will read it; and it’s water under the bridge.
What good is it? There is one good, and that would be that people today can learn from the mistakes made by people in the past and then not be condemned to live the errors over again. I hope young teachers never live through the experience I did; but it’s not likely they will, as the future of printmaking teaching jobs is in question.
What remains of my life that’s of use is not lessons to newly hired printmaking teachers into institutions of higher learning, but what is to be learned from the past fifteen years of my career. I say fifteen years because 2004 was when I detected an alternate universe to that which I was part of in the first twenty years of my art and teaching career.
In 2004, I did not design a simpler, smaller, and extensible printing press – the Mini Halfwood – with the purpose of extending printmaking. It was a joke. The press was a charmer, and people saw something in the design they liked for themselves. They wanted to buy it!
In 2016 had to withdraw from the work of making and marketing the press as my physical and mental limits have been shown to me – plus the failure of American democracy; but it remains to be seen what could be achieved if other people would extend the concept of an alternative printmaking world.
If not in the USA, then somewhere else.
Printmaking Access
I don’t have much time left but following are the four principles I pursue now and wish that I could share with people in the SPA who have concerns about the future of printmaking as it may be important in the world their youngsters are facing.
The first principle is fun.
The second principle is social.
The third principle is STREAMable
The fourth principle is economic.
All the above are topics I am working on, and they are summed up in two words: Printmaking Access.