ps140509 Growth Tip Revisited: Finding our way in difficult times  

Arms too weak—a dream analysis 

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

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

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

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

I woke up, thinking, “growth tip.”

Growth tip defined

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

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

Maybe that’s why I took to the tree as my guide when I was in graduate school and required to state my master’s thesis project. The requirement was to help us graduate students in art to focus our energy and our minds similarly as to what the students in engineering or science must.

Trees became my obsession, which was an obvious choice because I had already started on trees as symbols of life itself when I was an undergraduate.

Wake up

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

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

Times have changed, and the problems I met and solved over fifty years are not necessarily problems that are worth anyone’s time to address today. I seem to be getting nowhere in my ten-year plan for the International Print Center Incubators and Workplaces, for example, and maybe it’s a concept not appropriate to these times.

Yet, I can still be the growth tip and find a tiny hole or a crack in the rocky ceiling of indifference and confusion about the place of art, design and education. What stops me from doing what I hope to do? I have to ask myself this question every morning.

There is light out there, somewhere, and, underneath me like a foundation, the enrichment of my past. It is my basis for believing it is possible to save Earth’s human life sustainability through education of the world’s young people.

In corporate language, such a foundation is called the “stock basis.” In two years, we will form the Ritchie Foundation based on our “stock,” our family art collection.

Dependent

There is no mistake in believing that our lives—those of my wife Lynda and mine—depend on an educated, trained and cooperating population of young people, for it is the wages that they will earn if they are qualified to get salaried jobs that will, through our Social Security, Medicare and Pension systems, sustain us.

Therefore, it is incumbent on all “growth-tippers” to mobilize the wisdom to know how to edit, revise, re-define and apply our years of experience in our domains-of-expertise.

 

vi191009 Welcome to my printmaking world -

Where prints are smart 

The printmaking world, according to my lights, is a world where prints are the highest form of intelligence. I learned about such things from a friend of mine, Carl Chew, whose Stamp World was one where artistamps are the highest form of intelligence.

The distribution of 240 Halfwood Presses worldwide.

Many people think that prints belong in the art world, where artworks are the highest form of intelligence. The fact is, artworks in and of themselves have no intelligence at all, let alone high – or low, for that matter. To exist at all, artworks must be given print forms.

The difference between art and prints is negotiation. Prints are negotiable, whereas artworks are not – not without the introduction of prints. For an artwork to be negotiated – that is, transferred from one entity to another – requires mediation.

Generally, art cannot be experienced without mediation – a photograph or digital image, for example – which are prints. I would include plane tickets or museum admission tickets. Such prints – both physical and/or digital – mediate between the art and he or she who experiences it. Print includes text, such as descriptors, textbooks and magazine articles.

Prints that are considered fine art migrate easily into and out of the digital media. Prints are experienced as hanging on walls or in folios. As most prints are on paper, they are highly portable, being mostly of small scale. This is negotiability – the ability to be transferred and exchanged.

Paintings, on the other hand, are less so. That’s why painters make prints – the costs to the buyer being less and the prints themselves more readily shipped to multiple destinations.

The negotiability doesn’t end there because a number of people can experience and own a print from a publication – each print like every other print but varying inasmuch they were printed in succession. Two things are notable about this – one is that they may vary and, two, an invisible link is made among people who have examples of the print.

Stephen Hazel, a twentieth century artist, wrote a paper titled, “The Print is in 4-Space” in which he described this phenomenon as a kind of community-building. However, he didn’t develop this observation – it remained for me to extend into the digital age. He died before he could participate fully in the print as part of the Internet, the so-called IoT, the Internet of Things, defined by Wikipedia as:

“A system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.”

How is this of value to people who need and want prints to be part of both the print world and the art world? The answer lies in economics – the negotiability of prints not only in the sharing of cost-free exchange, such as on an artist’s website where people can experience the visual character of the print, but two economic worlds: experience and creative.

The experience economy is in the replacement of physical objects for sale to the experience around objects. For example, the business models of Build-A-Bear or eating in a restaurant that’s supposed to be in a jungle setting.

The creative economy is business models that rely on artists of all stripes to attract commerce – such as a city boasting of an art district, or a neighborhood that erects an unusual playground to attract visitors.

The print world offers both experience and creativity, making it a world where one’s intellect is stimulated and rewarded easily as well as offering a potential for development of experiences and creativity.

The global map above is my example. It shows locations of owners of etching presses I designed and helped build and sell – the presses themselves capable of making prints for the printmaking world. The owners of the presses are “linked” in the sense that Stephen Hazel postulated and, furthermore, are potential instruments of further extending the scope of the printmaking world.