mr201227 Specifying the Printmaking Teacher in A Box: On the advice of Mary Burns  

An educator named Mary Burns listed her recommendations for teachers to use as they plan for school starting in six months under COVID-19 restraints. As he read her list it seemed she was describing the specifications for the Printmaking Teacher in A Box.  

Mary Burns’ advice

Mary Burns wrote the specifications for the Printmaking Teacher in A Box, although she never heard of it. Her specifications were in an article she wrote for Edutopia, getting teachers ready for autumn quarter, 2020. He advice was to find balance between the old and the new.

As I read her recommendations, I could see her words apply to the specifications of the Printmaking Teacher in A Box, and I had a strong urge to copy-write over her advice and adapt them to my Printmaking Teacher in A Box. Now that ZOOM has been adopted as a platform-of-choice for many people, and with my escape game concept, it is time to take her cue.

Not only ZOOM, but another aspect impinges on the specifications: money. Though I may not be the only printmaking teacher who thinks about money beyond my personal needs, I may be the only one with a business plan and a product to sell.

Educators, and this may be especially true of art educators, raise their eyebrows at this. For the most part, money is not their immediate concern because they are paid. Their paycheck and the prospect of some security for the coming year allows them to shop for art supplies. It is not so for the students – especially now in America.

Not only the immediate costs (these should be taught to be investments), but he ripple effect of the art materials, tools, supplies and related industries effect the students’ ability to do the work the teachers expect.

Printmaking industry

Every art medium has associated manufacturing industries. Printmaking is not unique in this; however, it is the one field with a unique position in education. In my opinion, printmaking is as much a performing and social art as it is a visual art. This means printmaking invites the teacher and learner to break out of the bounds of the visual arts.

Because printmaking is the ancestor of all science, technology, literature, engineering, and mathematics education, teachers and students can break away from the art school and enter the other domains.

Etching, for example, involves chemistry. Press design involves engineering. Reading has become universal, thanks to printing technology. Mathematics is difficult for me to pin down – weak as I consider myself here.

We realize we are living in a time when science, technology, reading, engineering, art, and mathematics – STREAM – might be experiences in teaching and learning settings if printmaking is the “A is for Art” in the acronym.

It might be, too, that the concept is in itself a work of art, an abstract art of the dynamic kind one experiences in the performance, the act of maker, making and made.

os201023  What I Wrote Today: And this day in the past  

Putting my theory to the test

My theory is that I can put in eight characters in the search window of my computer and the engine will display what I wrote on this day going back as many years as those years in which I did write on that day.

For example, to write this essay I used eight characters and numbers (and two question marks to represent wildcards for the two digits that meant the year. This string of eight is os??1023.

Literally this means, on the island of Open Studios and Hospitality, on years indicated by the wildcard question marks, on October 23, what did I write about? In addition to this one which I am writing at present, three articles are indicated, two that are doubled for 2008 and one for 2004, and their titles.

In 2008 one of the two titles is, “Plotline for Amina: Where does she go from here?” referring to Amina Seattle, the avatar of Janet Fisher which she used in Second Life. This virtual world was in our search for a metaphor fitting the plan for Emeralda, a platform for my distance learning plan for printmaking. Amina was the protagonist in the story of a woman who is given a year to live in Emeralda to develop her printmaking. She uncovers a plot to end Earth’s human and other life sustainability. The subject line of the essay says:

“Writing for a video game is not like writing a story or a screen play. Reading has told this author that fact, yet it is not clear just how to do it. It’s straightforward to write for video cut scenes, but a game is interactive, which challenges a newbie.”

The second one for 2008 is titled, “Professor McGee's Message for Amina: An example of transfer,” referring, to James Paul Gee, author of, “What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy “ - a book about learning games. Its subject description says:

“From reading What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy, the artist/teacher may determine how his game resembles one of the entertainment games already on the market—a game called System Shock II. Transfer is key, the book’s author says.”

Four years earlier, in 2004, the title, "Losing my Grip: Between a hard place and a soft place,” has the subject description:

“The author has spent many years considering the software that has grown up around him and his devotion to education—too many years perhaps. Now he’s got a hand on a piece of hardware, and an opportunity to make art instruments. It poses a dilemma for him.”

Skimming this article was valuable. It is one of the examples that enlightens me, like a parable that teaches how an old man learns from a youngster, and he old man and the youngster are both me. One, the younger, sixteen years ago, lucidly explains the logic of a learning game for printmaking which can be adapted to online games.

The other, an old man, grasping at straws to learn how this can be achieved. This date in October of 2004 when I was preparing for my first demonstration of the Legacy model of the Halfwood Press – which would turn into a business. It is the “art instrument” referred to in the subject description. The Halfwood Press remains part of the theories touched upon in this essay and matured into the Teacher-in-a-box.

 pp200924  Press Saves the Earth’s HOLS:  Human and other life sustainability in the balance 

 Imperfect people in a perfect world

Al Gore was an imperfect person. His book title, Earth in the Balance, was not the perfect title, for it implied that mankind could somehow save the Earth. Obviously, it is mankind – among all the living things – destroying only Earth’s human and many other kinds of life sustainability.

I appreciate and admire his effort, however. He was naïve, like me, putting his trust in the wisdom of Americans and trusting that the Republicans would do the right thing. History teaches he was wrong, that there are many humans who hate and fear others and above all they fear they are wrong.

The Dunning-Krueger effect is strong in people who face uncertainty and lack understanding of that which they cannot see or touch. They fear surprises and not knowing what lies around the next bend, over the hill, and the end of their life.

The Earth will go on after mankind is extinct, as it has since other species did. That’s why I always say, let us try to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability. The Earth does not need saving, it is us and our children that we can try to save by helping Earth’s human and other life sustainability.

Face your fears day

October 14 is National Face Your Fears Day. What am I afraid of? Chiefly I am afraid I cannot change Americans who are afraid of things they cannot see or even languages spoken that they do not understand. In their fears and paranoia, they often think something is being said about them! I remember that feeling and I face the fear, studied a few languages and, although I didn’t learn any of them well, the exercise taught me I am not the center of anyone’s attention nor target of derision or jokes.

The Dunning-Krueger effect does not work on me. Yet, when it comes to saving the Earth’s Human and other life sustainability, the effect is fatal, pervasive as it is in the educational systems of the U.S.A. Teachers, even, too often who are trained in institutions where fear wreaks havoc on evaluation systems and teaching philosophies.

Reinhold Niebuhr said: “Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Who was he? A public intellectual and philosopher of theology with sympathies for the poor working class. He is ranked highly among America’s thinkers and his books are widely read.

I think of his famous quote often when I see I cannot change things, that I can see the difference, and I feel the strength to change what I can. It is the how of changing things that I focus on. How can I change the way printmaking is taught in high schools and colleges, for example?

One action at a time, I believe, and the tenacity to stick to my premise – that printmaking is the ancestor of all things STEM and the artform most likely to benefit young people facing the task of saving Earth’s human and other life forms’ sustainability.

 pp200914 - One Year Remains: Saving Earth’s human and other life sustainability  

By what means can we find ourselves in better condition next year – September 14, 2021? What acts can we perform? How can love be a device? What instruments of love can overcome such fears of attempting to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability?

  We have what it takes

We have everything we need to reverse our progress toward further ending Earth’s human and other life sustainability. What will we do? I will write, but in the back of my mind I know I must not only act by writing, I must act by making videos and sharing them on the Web.

What can I put into words that will inspire others to act, too? Will my writing demonstrate what can be achieved by writing? Words – even in the most effective form – are not enough. Video, no matter how expertly made, won’t do what needs to be done.

Many people think money will solve the problem. I believe we have seen this is not true. Money will not put out the fires burning the west coast of America, or clear away the smoke. Thinking money can do this is like offering money to lemmings not to run into the sea and drown.

Indirect solutions

Watching a movie about playing chess, I recalled that chess was invented to train military strategists the art of war. This is instructive, for we are in several wars today – civil wars inside the USA, and climate wars globally. The enemy is human shortcomings, primarily human emotions. The greatest of these is fear; if the greatest were love, then we would be okay.

One year remains to achieve a love campaign. To the enemy, this is the worst idea. Love is that which brought about the great fears. There’s truth in the expression, “Love conquers all.” However, fear has always leapt into battle gear to put down this as silly, childish, and emotional. Fear looms large at the mention of the word, love.

Fear asks, “Can love put out the fires? Can love reverse global warming?” Of course, love of life can; and love of the Earth can. Love of one’s loved ones can. It’s obvious, one loves one’s own life! One must love oneself if one is to save the Earth’s human and other life sustainability.

How, then?

I love to write. Writing – even if it’s unpolished and poor by artistic, literary, and commercial standards – is my way of organizing and sharing my thinking. I share it in digital form and in books not only to share with other people but to share with my older self when I get t there.

By this I mean I can search back on my computer for what I wrote years ago and, at that time, put on my computer memory retrieval systems. Like a squirrel which hides food for later consumption, I busy myself putting thoughts into digital form for later retrieval – food for thought.

One year from now, will I have occasion to come back to this essay about Love? Will we, that is, humanity, be better off one year from now? What will I have done over the next 365 days?

Three words in the line from the movie, Bridge of Spies, comes back to me: Will it help?

 ap200920  Where to now? The clock is ticking  

Facing uncertainty at this end of his self-imposed, fifty-day workshop using a video editing software program, Adobe Premier Pro, he asks what is next in this post-graduate study in curriculum design development for teaching printmaking. He does not know.

Time has form  

What I learned in college was that time has form, and in the arts people have an opportunity to shape time. We can do it within ourselves and for ourselves. This is what they call art for art’s sake.

When we exercise our time-shaping skills for others, it’s called art for goodness’ sake.

In a perfect world, people who want to own the honorific title of artist, craftsperson, or designer (or all three) merely have to crown themselves as such – like clicking one’s heels together and saying, “I want to be a great artist …”.

Few will object. Most will ignore such a person after a few seconds. Time-shaping is not easy and hardly anyone can do it alone. Great artists – such as a Baryshnikov or Rembrandt – may appear to be alone, but they have multitudes inside like ghosts controlling their moves.

Where to now?

Ten days ago, I wrote an accusatory essay on the two kind of printmaking teachers – the enablers and the disablers. One group is ensconced securely in a perfect printmaking world, a rock-solid fortress of institutionalized art, teaches students it has always been like this. For these teachers, nothing changes. They teach their students to stay on the path they are on.

The other group teaches that, yes, printmaking has always been a matter of making templates to make quick work of solving problems. They emphasize thinking creatively, despite the paradox that creativity is an enigma, a capricious spirit which can lead to dangerous outcomes – like the development of radioactivity by Madame Curie. Hers was suicidal. Creative thinking, yes, but suicidal and fatal for billions of people and perhaps Earth’s human and other life-sustainability.

If she hadn’t developed it, some other creative, discovering, innovative and imaginative person would have. Such is the butterfly of creative thinking. The butterfly effect refers no only to the ways one’s wings can generate hurricanes, as they say, but also in the use of devices to share ideas. In my case, prints made by printmaking from matrices called printing plates, screens, stone, woodblocks, and combinations of these.

The outcome, currently, is video games – a long, twisting path that started with the handprints on cavern walls, the easy way to make one’s mark – traversing time and space with ever more complicated, interwoven systems of technology, science, engineering, and math. What we call STEM today in education may be the only enabling principle left for printmaking teachers as the fortress no longer ensures them there will always be students to pay them.

About me

I was blind to all this when I started teaching college. At 25 I thought I would continue what my teachers had started. It took me almost twenty years to realize the institution was not for enabling students but for enabling professors. Those students who were able to thrive did so by conscious acts of taking what they learned in college and applying it to the world that only rewarded the time-shapers who could keep an audience interested a long time.

Most of them were not Baryshnikov’s or Rembrandts, of course, but good enough to make their art, crafts, and design work for the long haul. And me? I used the system I found myself working in at 25 – a system that said if I could teach, then I could stay out of the military and the Vietnam – the American – war. When it became impossible to teach, I left, but with a stipend that helped keep my family going.

That’s my story. How can I now, in this imperfect world, develop a MOOC for printmaking? I think I can do it by shaping time not as an art of the kind consumers love to have free of charge – like streaming free, feature-length movies in months of isolation like prisoners – deluding themselves in the powers-that-be will save them from working for Earth’s human and other life forms’ sustainability.

No. It has to be taking on the work.

Artsport in five minutes.

I have it on good authority, from my teachers in Russia, that a MOOC affords the teacher only a few minutes at a time to make the point of their lesson. My MOOC teachers (How to Make a MOOC MOOC) assumed their students would have institutional facilities with crews and money to make their lessons and broadcast them.

In the course of events, this will not happen for me. Like the great artists and other time-shaping survivors in history, I must work alone for the present, shaping my 50-year career into five minutes of fame. If I can hold my student audience’s attention for thirty-seconds or more, I may progress.

 os200915 ACE Makes the World Look Big:  Why the American disaster doesn’t discourage me  

He thinks globally although the air he breathes is smokey with ash. It appears the world is coming to an end, but he finds an organization in Argentina called ACE, where life appears to be going on and it is business-as-usual for artists and craftspeople.  

Yes there is hope somewhere  

By chance I found the equivalent of my imaginary Emeralda Region. It’ in Argentina. It reminds me of when I discovered there is a real Emeralda located in South Vietnam, a five-star getaway named Emeralda Resort Ninh Binh which opened in 2011.

As I read the text about the Argentina space on the homepage of https://www.proyectoace.org/en/home-2/ it felt like I was reading a description of the Gates Prize and its features and amenities.

It took a while to figure out that it is a physical residency – not in a paradisiacal setting like the Great Lake of Emeralda Region, but a real place near Buenos Aires.

Still, the feeling lingered that, Yes, there is a place like I imagined Emeralda could be. However, my concept is one heavily weighted toward art blended with science, technology, engineering, and math. Emeralda awards leaders in those fields. Most artist getaways do not.

To know that these two places exist and that they have plans to continue makes me hopeful. What I need is a structure for collaboration I can offer people in the USA and thus make a kind of insurance policy for hope.

We are living under a shroud in America, the sun is literally behind a haze of smoke from the burning of west coast America extending into Canada. Metaphorically we have lived under a cloud of a corrupted government since the 2016 election and dates back decades.

It is the decline of American educational policies that caused it, and I hope we survive and change the trend that threatens this country and is wreaking havoc in all parts of the world.

To know there are places in the world where the sky is clear of smoke gives me hope. Americans will not lead in restoring Earth’s human and other life sustainability, but leaders and populations in other – mostly small – countries will.

ACE is a reminder there is hope in the hearts and minds of their participants.

 vi200908 Hope Rope: Synergetic hopeful  

  He ponders the small things he does each day and asks he does them. A change in a website, a search of his database for a certain image of a Mini Etching Press with a carrying case, a search for its current owner – small things are like strands in a rope. 412 Words

Inspired by a Mini Etching Press

As I began my day, sitting at the desk and opening files to read them on screen, thinking about having placed the Mini Etching Press in Etsy as I told Tom Kughler I would, I wondered who bought the one which had the chest with it.

The woman in Canada? Yes, I think so. Tom said he had an order for another one. My mind wandered to other things. There is a hint of smoke in the air – California is burning – and we have a major fire burning in Central Washington. God said, “a fire next time.”

But it was not God – it was humankind.

Is this how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper? Schools – the last hope for the USA and some other countries in the world – are closed or reduced because of the virus. Americans haven’t been able to rid the cancer in Washington DC, rending the nation comatose.

My best friend’s wife is undergoing surgery today – a mastectomy.

What keeps me going? I think of one little detail – like finding who owns that beautiful little press with the carrying case and linking this to the Etsy page. I think of the video I put up yesterday which I made years ago when a woman in Florida ordered a DIY kit and I sent her a ready-to-print plate, and the print, and ink.

She said she had a demo coming up fast and needed help, and, boy, did I send it! Could it happen again? I hope so.

Little things like this are like the strands in a rope. Single fiber is joined, twisted around another fiber and the combination of the two is stronger than either one is if alone. I think someone said this is the demonstration of synergy.

Add another fiber, and another and another until you have a piece of twine. Add more strands of twine, twist, and twist and then one has a rope. Every small gesture I make, every video minute, every post in Facebook, is a strand in my rope of hope. My Hope Rope.

Pay-to-Play it Forward

 pp200805 Pay to Play Emeralda: Pay it forward, you Gates Prize Winners!  

 In a flash of inspiration, he comes closer to solving the biggest riddle of his teaching artist career: how to finance the development of the game he calls, “Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life.” The solution is “Pay to Play,” as people buy artistscrip.

Years of playing with no wins

I’ve been working it seems all my life on life’s game, one writer called “The Game of Life.” Her name is Florence Scovill Shinn and her book, “How to Play the Game of Life” was introduced to me by a videographer I hired to document the Wapato High School Class Reunion in 1995. It was by chance she was a fan of Shinn. I located the book, read it, and I read it again.

It’s another long story how I built my library of good reads that constitute my game, Emeralda. Subtitled, Games for the gifts of life, I’ve been playing this game for decades, and the one puzzle I’ve never solved is how to play it forward. That is, I’ve never figured out how to explain it so other people could play it.

I gave up trying years ago, but I never gave up trying to win my game. It’s like someone playing Solitaire – knowing all the rules and making all the right moves but never once getting the payoff. On a computer screen, it’s that cascading flow of cards that one gets when winning.

Yet, every morning for the past twenty or thirty years, I play and play. Anyone watching over my shoulder (Emeralda is mostly a computer game) would not think it to be much fun any more than someone watching a chess player yet who knows nothing about chess.

 To be an artist takes OCD

Lately I have been considering the degree of my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, OCD, society’s name for sticking to a task until it is done. In our shutdown for the virus, for example, my wife Lynda and I assembled puzzles to help pass the time. If we were chess players, we might have been playing chess. Games are ways to pass the time in solitary, which can be a good thing in times like this and at our age – 78 years.

OCD may be a disorder when it is an inconvenience to ordinary living, but for many tasks in life it’s not a disorder but a handy thing to have. Emeralda may require OCD. For example, I have a compulsion to share my game with other people. One might say I am obsessed with sharing this game. So much so that I think about it all day.

Whatever I am doing, and usually it is something I do with the aid of computer software, I am conscious of Emeralda play. Play might be the wrong word because play implies wasting time or doing frivolous, trivial things when there is work to be done. Society, and this is true of hard-working people especially, have no respect for someone who is playing when they could be helping with important tasks.

For example, I was helping Tom Kughler making, marketing and selling Mini Halfwood Presses for years. Our friendly UPS delivery woman, meeting my wife one day on her rounds, asked my wife, “Is Bill still farting around with his presses?” That said a lot about workers. I wasn’t offended – not at all – when Lynda told me this anecdote. It’s an in-joke.

My point is that things are not what they appear, and as I tap away on my keyboard writing yet another essay to add to thousands I have already logged on these devices, I am conscious there is work to be done – serious work – and especially in American education.

A teaching artist, today, might learn Emeralda. It is not only for teaching artist that I am designing Emeralda. It is for anyone who is interested in education and also in art – specifically printmaking.

To all the people who have touched my life is over my 50-year career, I want to offer my game by sharing all my art. [Interesting typo here because this part of the essay was dictated online, and “art” came out “heart” - which is also true!]

To achieve this, I invented a pay-to-play method. Pay-to-play is well known in the video game business. You pay a dollar or two to download and play a video game. It works with casual games.

Emeralda, however, it's not a casual game. Not the way I design it.

Pay-to-play, in the way I tell it, means pay to play it forward. It means pay for shares and the money goes to develop Emeralda. In that way I bring Emeralda into a playable state to be played by other people, not just me.

The shares people buy are called artiscrip. Buy my artiscrip and one owns my art collectively with other investors. It is like owning shares in a game company but without all the typical IPO brouhaha and legalese.

I feel it's necessary in these times to come forward with a radical, new approach to develop online education in the arts, focused on printmaking.

The time is right. Printmaking teachers all over America are shut out to their studio classrooms. They need a class their students can experience online. Online is no substitute for real studios, but it promises to help students learning about the printmaking world.

In this mode of learning, one will not find old wine in a new bottle. This is not a printmaking class like those I took as a student nor like the classes I taught. Only in one regard is my idea similar, and that is the way my students learned teamwork.

When I taught printmaking at the University Of Washington, I discovered the key value of learning printmaking was in sharing the studios, the etching press, or the lithograph press. Some of the tools, like expensive large rollers, were shared. The list is long.

In fact, everything in the studio was shared. Naturally, in such a complicated setting, management was key to success. In the end it was more than I could handle, and I turned over management to the students and, to my surprise, I had added another dimension to my course.

Summing up, Emeralda is the manifestation of everything I learned and taught in college. Now, partly because of the emergency printmaking teachers face, I offer part of the solution. I ask all those who supported my work for the past 50 years to come forward and buy artiscrip so I can play it forward.

Adept and Adapt

 os200814 Adept and Adapt:  Finding the true value of printmaking knowledge

  Do or die

Printmaking professors everywhere, it is time to adapt to the changing times. You have the power to help make the world a better place. Adaptation is the name of the game – and students, or anyone who loves printmaking, prints and printmakers, must adapt.

It’s not too late! But we must start now.

Adapt and adapt

What does adept mean? I think I learned it from practices as found in monasteries, referring to members who are skilled. As a noun, someone might say he is an adept, as, for example, one who is adept at writing.

Adapt means to change according to the changes in the environment. For example, in evolution a creature must adapt to changes in the weather. This is biological adaptation and occurs over Millennia.

I am thinking about printmaking professors and how they are adapting to a changed world caused by the pandemic.

Their havens for teaching printmaking are almost gone. Their printmaking studios are closed for safety reasons. It used to be safety meant not to use toxic materials to teach printmaking. Teachers adapted and now they teach with nontoxic inks.

But today’s corona-virus pandemic is not as easy to adapt to.

What can printmaking professors do?

My suggestion is to teach printmaking not in ways they found effective in the times dating back decades but teaching printmaking as their students will find useful in decades to come.

For example, the printing press most professors in colleges use for teaching etching will not be available to their students in the future. The presses in schools are too big, too expensive, and worst of all, what they are used to produce will not be affordable to consumers in the coming times.

There is more. All the accouterments associated with printmaking such as frames, art galleries and museums changed.

In my opinion there is only one way for printmakers to adapt so their students have a chance put what they learn in college to good use. That one way is to rewind printmaking history to its origin, which is the hand print on the wall. It represented the mechanization of image-making.

But there are even more aspect.

With printmaking in universities there was a spirit or culture of cooperation and teamwork. No one talked about it, yet often the printing press was the center of productivity, and everyone depended on it.

Therefore, it was the culture of cooperation, sharing time and interactivity with other people. This is the social prospect and perhaps the most important thing about printmaking. It is more important than having a show or winning a prize.

Really, those values are dying.

What will go on living is the need for cooperation and teamwork, socializing and conservation of materials.

And time.

Time is perhaps the most important resource. Students have only a short time open to grow knowledge.

What use are obsolete practices the printmaking professors knew? Most printmaking professors are middle-aged. They received their education’s in the last century.

It’s over. The new world students face needs them, but not to decorate the walls, but to understand the handprint on the wall was the invention of mechanization of visual communication.

Pursuing Investors

os200725  Pursuing Investors: Stamps as artistscrip

  His business plan includes financing schemes. The sales of products and services in the context of the current economy depends on both past performance and the prospects of future performance. The production, research, practice, and service plan is chief.

1202 Words

Artistamp as artistscrip offering

If I offer a stamp, what do I promise in return? This offering must profit both the buyer and me, the seller/developer of Emeralda Works, LLC.

Teacher’s dreams

Teachers dream. Teachers have nightmares. Some teachers’ jobs are living nightmares. I wish I could help them, but I do not have the power. My teaching job had elements of both a dream job and a nightmare. Fortunately, it was mostly a dream job.

Even though I resigned before the usual number of years one gives to college teaching – forty – I still have teaching dreams. There was one dream, however, that I sacrificed when I resigned. That was what I call the Mr. Chips dream.

Mr. Chips was a nickname which students gave their teacher in the film, Goodbye Mr. Chips. Peter O’Toole played the role of the teacher. He was strict, but he was good. When he got old, his students sometimes came back to say hello. Some grandchildren came back as students!

That was my dream – that I would turn out to be such a good teacher that my former students would encourage their children to come to the UW, like they did, and to take a class from me. Or, even better, their grandchildren. How fun that would have been!

My teaching would have been so outstanding that the school would be a different school by the time my former students had been out for ten years, or a generation or more so that their children – coming home from my class – would describe a course of study their parents would not recognize!

These dreams came when I had a job at the UW. My extreme dream then was that the courses or workshops I would pioneer would be worth my former students’ time and expense to sign up. The offerings would be similar to continuing education, but without the accreditation and academic accoutrements we have seen in the past.

For example – although I couldn’t have thought of this forty years ago – a workshop in Artist’s Asset Management and Legacy Transfer would be useful to former students who had developed a career and a valuable accumulation of works – both tangible and intangible.

I am lucky

The teacher’s Mr. Chips’ story was set in old England and things are different all over. I am lucky because not only have I lived into the future my former students say Hello. Not their children, however, at least not for a long time. Those few who do contact me do not come to visit – with rare exceptions – they use the Internet email or social networks.

Many of my former students were topnotch and developed good careers in the arts. When new technologies came out, they were early adopters, in part because I exposed them to ways telephone, photography, film, video, and computer graphics might be useful in the traditional fine arts. Luckily, I am able to see this. Seeing this justifies the extra effort it took me.

More than lucky

Lately I have been working on another one of my dreams – distance learning or what I might call growing knowledge. As the pandemic has shut down most educational institutions and initiatives, distance learning is big news. Educators, most of them who never thought they’d have to use these systems, are rushing to adapt. Therefore, one might call it the Next Big Thing.

Art, and printmaking in particular, are especially hard-hit because the physical, face-to-face human factors in the arts are important. In addition, artists and teachers are rare who gave technology much thought either in their education or their day-to-day studio practice.

I am an exception. I thought about technology all my college life both as student and as a college teacher. In 1980 I made my first proposal to the UW to teach woodcut remotely. They denied me the chance, but I never let it go. Today, as they are beginning to respond to the COVID-19 mandates, printmaking teachers are trying distance learning.

Skirting the topic

This essay was inspired by the challenge I am facing. I can have a company to do what I dreamed of in 1980. I have all the concepts in place. To develop any one of the concepts, however, will require help. I require money to pay people to carry out my plans – to help me.

Under the name of a sole proprietorship, Emeralda Works, I researched and tested plans dating back over twenty years. Now I am upgrading it to the Limited Liability Company status. This I am doing this to sell the business. I am 78, so it is time to think about my exit plan.

For example, financing the business will build on my old teacher’s dream of continuing education, but not in the way I thought about it forty years ago. In 1980, not only was I thinking of ways to teach woodcut printmaking remotely, I was thinking about a post-graduate school for my former students.

The two can comingle. I don’t mean my former students can do post-graduate study in woodcut printmaking, but they can participate in a novel way. In this novel scheme of mine they can buy shares in the company, Emeralda Works LLC, that will produce the online printmaking (or knowledge-growing) offering. Money they put in as investments will pay the helpers.

In some instances, these friends and former students will be the helpers!

I thought of several of my former students and I wondered, “What can I do for them now?” They are mature – some of them in their ‘seventies and ‘eighties – therefore they do not need art lessons.[1] What they need and want is experiences that give them hope. I can create something that ignites their anticipation. Anticipation is the key to hope.

“A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope,” said Rosabeth Moss-Kanter. The structure can be a company, Emeralda Works LLC. The microcosm of it is stamps – hundreds or thousands of stamps known as artistamps and thousands of artworks available as artistscrip.

Dutch auction

When Google went public, they did not know what people would pay for shares in the IPO stage, so they proposed a Dutch Auction. The price floated according to the buyers’ risk tolerance.

When Carl Chew designed the Art Action in 1977, it had a similar birth – the price went down and tested the bidders’ risk not that they would have to pay more but that could pay less if they held out long enough for the price to descend from the initial price.

Conclusion

I feel the pressure building to make my idea clear, but all I can do is suggest that an artistamp goes to a potential investor who has sent money to Patreon to help me make this clearer. Nellie, our manager, maintains the database as it grows – similar to the way we ran the essay contest.

Another option is eBay.

Still another is the home-grown auction platforms.

---

[1] Pat Austin is a notable exception – she paid $100 for tutorials on using Kindle Direct Publishing, which gave me the funds to upgrade Camtasia and build a ten-part video series to put on YouTube, free.

Why I hustle for STEAM online

os900705  Why I hustle for STEAM online: A structure for collaboration

 Where have all the students gone?

Singing to the tune of the Peter Paul & Mary song from the 1970’s war protest era.

People worked so hard to get here. Parents invested so much. Teachers invested. Students are their shared interest. They built infrastructure and organized their lives around the classrooms for teachers and students. Not only classrooms, but playgrounds and even sports arenas.

Art, craft, and design rooms, too, kitchens for culinary education, science labs – the list goes on. I believe they are all empty now – as if struck what was called the “neutron bomb” in the old days, during the cold war and during the build-up for the final war we feared would come. It would kill life but leave infrastructure standing for the victor’s takeover.

It can’t be said that no one expected viruses to be the “bomb” because thousands of scientists, doctors and world leaders knew how pandemics are a constant threat and measures should be ready when pandemics come.

National leaders, however, are not as smart as doctors and scientists when it comes to disease. They can’t handle the truth - like the truth that came out in 1992 when over 1,500 leading scientists from around the world declared humanity had no more than 30 years to solve five critical problems to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability.

What did the politicians do? The only national leader who comes instantly to mind is Al Gore; but he was no match for Florida politicians. Gore made a splash with his books and his movie – even winning an Academy Award! Not only did the court’s decision to back Bush thwart America’s participation in sustainable action, the decision damaged the reputation of the court, increasing the view of judges as partisan, and decreased many citizens’ trust in the integrity of elections.

The schools were under siege by the time the Union of Concerned Scientists made their plea for help. In the 21^st Century the United Nations mapped out their sustainability strategy, but by the time Donald Trump took over the presidency (with help from America’s enemies oversees) teachers were nearly helpless.

It got worse. The winter of 2020 will be remembered when millions of students and teachers were deracinated[1] from their classrooms, parents were enlisted to teach at home. In the USA, it wasn’t for sure the schools – including colleges and universities – would open for months or years.

Kids – from preschool to high school – lose the most because they are in the prime of their learning readiness. The kids born after 2017 will miss preschool (if they had access to one). First graders halfway through their year stayed home and no one knows when they’ll have classes like before. Seniors’ last year of school ended early. Those going on may have no “on” to go to, as schools of every kind – and most jobs - are unavailable, as it’s unsafe.

Everybody knows this by now. Why am I writing about it? Because I feel the urgency, the need for action, immediate, 14-hour day action to bring all classes online. To me it’s like an amber alert. The technology is there for amber alert, and it’s there for online or distance learning. The USA is the world leader in distance learning technology and experience. Distance learning is the only way to continue education after the “clean bomb” has emptied the classrooms of America.

Act now

The root problem created over the past half-century was a process of uprooting and cutting democracy off at the root – education. A people cannot have good governance without education in the deepest sense. Cutting off at the roots of our future hopes - children’s’ education - is to deracinate our hopes.

The remedy to stop deracination of our hopes is a structure for collaboration to act on distance learning. A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope.[2] From the domain of arts, craft, and design I offer the printing press as that structure. The printing press served the authors of our constitution (even though the constitution was written by hand on parchment) because already the printing press had assured the disparate colonials a degree of willingness to work collaboratively to overthrow the British.

Printmaking is the only form of art suitable to include in STEM, to make STEAM. Print is the ancestor of all the technologies that make science, technology, engineering, and math what they are today. For better or worse, there’d be none without print having structured collaboration.

Now is the time to put printing press toys and games in children’s hands and links to other children and teachers all over the world. Join me to build the production of presses and software to make it so.

---

[1] There is a hint about the roots of deracinate in its first definition. Deracinate was borrowed into English in the late 16th century from Middle French and can be traced back to the Latin word radix, meaning "root." Although deracinate began life referring to literal plant roots, it quickly took on a second, metaphorical, meaning suggesting removal of anyone or anything from native roots or culture. – MW Word of the day

[2] Rosabeth Moss-Kanter

Seen from where I have been

ps200627 Seen from where I have been:  

A press and the modem artist  

Having been far, I added some impressions to my ongoing education. I learned a press is more than meets the eye, that it’s a generator of dreams and anticipation when seen by an artist, craftsperson and designer who makes printing plates for enjoyment and elucidation.

Upon Seeing an ugly press

Ten days ago, I thought about going where no one has been, and as I glanced over the Facebook groups dedicated to prints, printmaking and presses I thought:

“What ugly presses!”

Where did I get the notion that printing presses should be beautiful?

  
Two examples of ugliness in presses – one assembled from junk and one of such large and heavy proportions that they are unaffordable.

It is because I have been where no other printmakers have been. I’ve been around the world, for example, in one contiguous journey. Before that I have been in many schools, workshops, and museums – plus I’ve been in machine shops to realize my dream of a perfect press. I’ve in the Rembrandt Museum and I’ve seen a facsimile of the old master’s press.

Having done this, and added these impressions to my ongoing education, I learned that a press is more than meets the eye, that it’s a generator of dreams and anticipation when taken by an artist, craftsperson and designer who makes printing plates for enjoyment.

It is clear to me that the press should be a progenitor of beautiful prints. Add to this the digital age where communicating the image of the print virtually is reasonably simple and an added pleasure; and the combination is harmonious.

A beautiful press makes beautiful prints; and it can make a beautiful life for the one who has the fortune to have a beautiful, functional press such as this.

Bill Ritchie’s award-winning designs, the Halfwood press and the Wee Woodie Rembrandt Press

The designs of the Halfwood Press and the Wee Woodie Rembrandt Press come from my having been where no one has gone.

From the days I transitioned from farmer to professor I gained a deep and wide range of views from which to see printing presses.

The most important view is that a press is an instrument, not a tool, not merely equipage. Similar to what a pipe wrench is to a plumber and an explorer is to a dentist, one is a mechanical thing in the hands of a mechanic while the other – the delicate, fine instrument in the hands of a highly skilled and knowledgeable person in oral health – is an instrument.

A musician does not refer to his or her violin or piano, or voice, as a tool but as an instrument. Over centuries, such musical instruments have been refined so that they combine physical characteristics to achieve both visual and utility perfection in the musician’s art, craft and design; and so, it is, too, with the printmaker.

The second most important of these views, these printmaking worldviews I’ve gained, is that the press is the ancestor of all sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics that are the cornerstones of the STEM movement in education.

Without print, these would be moribund, never leaving the confines of their discoverers, inventors, imaginers and creators. It’s this view that justifies printmaking experiences for young people (and old people looking for continuous, contiguous learning experiences).

The idea that art should be implanted in the acronym STEM to make STEAM is a good idea. It’s that which Allan Bloom said in his book, Closing of the American Mind is what makes artists valuable to problem-solving enterprises:

“The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man. His unconscious is full of monsters and dreams. It provides the pictures to consciousness, which takes them as given and as "world," and rationalizes them. Rationality is only the activity of providing good reasons for what has no reason or is unreasonable. We do what we do out of a fate that is our individuality, but we have to explain and communicate. This latter is the function of consciousness; and when it has been provided with a rich store by the unconscious, its activity is fruitful, and the illusion of its sufficiency is even salutary. But when it has chopped up and chewed over its inheritance, as mathematical physics has now done, there are not enough nourishing plants left whole. Consciousness now requires replenishment. Thus, Nietzsche opened up the great terrain explored by modern artists, psychologists, and anthropologists, searching for refreshment for our exhausted culture in the depths of the darkest unconscious or darkest Africa.”[1]

[Note: in one iteration, I mis-typed modern and typed modem, to yield modem artists. Ha ha! Or, that I may have used a scanner to get this text, and the scanner saw the r next to the n and resulted in an m (em)]

This overly-long paragraph boils down to the need that there be an artist among the five solvers-of-problems facing Earth’s human and other life-sustaining ability.

Not just any artist, however. The painter works alone, for example, but the artist who calls himself or herself a printmaker is more suitable for the teamwork and collaboration than artists who work in solitary and are disinclined to collaborate.

The press that is designed for collaboration is a perfect press and should be in the hands of young people in STEAM education programs. A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope.

I want to use my assets to make this so. The press is that structure, thanks to the modem artist, an artist who sees a modem as a perfect press.

---

[1] Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster. NY. 1987. P. 206

What did you do in the war, Grandpa?

mr200525  What did you do in the war, Grandpa? A chart how my day is invested

  He ponders how he uses his days, as if he only has a few days to live and work. Imagining what his granddaughter might as him, “What did you do in the time of the pandemic?” he draws a chart in an effort to account for how he spends his time and its worth.

 What did you do in the war, Grandpa?

My granddaughter might ask me, “When teachers, students and parents were suddenly evacuated from the normal schools and sent home - the school doors shut and locked behind them – what did you do?”

I got ready to fight the enemy. The enemy used to be a vague, abstract notion I call ignorance – a plague of ignoring important things. I am a teacher, after all. My thing is art – specifically the art, craft, and design of printmaking. Art might not seem like a weapon.

I’m spending my days like an artist works on a large, extremely detailed painting. Instead of brushes and paint, I practice my content-building and access to my content as a printmaking teacher.

The art of printing is the ancestor of all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics which are designated as STEM, a theory that says young people who work all four areas concomitantly are preparing to fight the war on ignorance.

How I’m spending my last days

The corona virus pandemic blindsided us. We were warned – like we were warned about climate change and environmental disasters in the 1950’s. Like my father, who complained about environmentalists. He was practicing ignorance, ignoring the effects of DDT on birds for one thing.

Now two-thirds of the world’s bird population are gone. Not only because of DDT but by thousands of other man-made pesticides, herbicides, climate change caused by greenhouse gases, and the list goes on. It’s “Silent Spring,” as forecast sixty years ago, by Rachel Carlson.

Now Nature has unleashed her doomsday weapon – a virus pandemic powerful enough to stop human “progress” in its tracks and send human civilization on a downward spiral. A good thing for us. 28 years ago, scientists forecast that by 2022, Earth would not sustain human life unless we reversed our production and consumer binging.

But schools are where the cure might be found – not for the virus – but for the mindfulness of people who realize they love life, that they love other people and animals and all living things, great and small.

The chart shows how I’m spending my last days. I’m investing my life in teaching on the web, and my plan is to make a virtual world, a region named Emeralda, where prize-winning scientists, technologists, engineers, artists, and mathematicians convene in STEAM Teams and act on issues of the day. I’m there all the time, in my imagination.

It’s what I’m doing – as the chart shows – every day in the war. The chart, by the way, doesn’t show me living – but I am, thanks to my wife Lynda.

 

Worst nightmare

ps200518 Worst nightmare: Exiguous teaching  

  I had the same awful dream

My worst nightmare is to fail as a teacher, and the nightmare I was having this morning was exactly that – a recurring nightmare I’ve had since I left the university. In the past I have described this dream before. I follows the same theme – I’m late for class, the students are surly, and the building is under remodeling.

What does it mean? That I’m a terrible teacher? I dismiss this by remembering some students who – even recently – said I was the best teacher they ever had in college.

Yet the dreams keep coming! The one I had this morning was so bad it made me reconsider all that I’m doing now. In the onset of the global pandemic and economic meltdown facing the world, American students are frozen in place like some horrible sci-fi movie.

In the moments after I wakened from this nightmare, I questioned the notion of making printing plates in the manner we’re accustomed to. The etching grounds made of Asphaltum, the powdered rosin for aquatint and all the rest seem so foolish.

Would it be better to use the silitransfer method I’ve been using for the past ten years? In a way, yes.

Would it be better to use a combination of laser engraving and non-metal plates? In some ways, yes.

In the end, however, it’s better to ask, why make plates at all? I think of the Proximates principle – that it’s better to expand on the geosocial aspect of making and exchanging prints than make prints for pleasure and profit.

It’s better to develop entertainment skills – thinking neither of the wholly practical and rational nor of the wholly delusional and impractical but somewhere in between. Better to vacillate than remain in the old world that is dying.

If I could control my nightmare, I would speak out to the students. “Go out and work in the garden for the same time duration as they labor over drawing lines in a hard ground on a copper plate.” With growing things, communing with the Natural order of things, one may hope of surviving the end of the old world when printmaking was mere self-gratification.

By exchanging prints with a kid in Africa, for example, my friends the Hartman family is can give their kid hope – him watching the mail delivery for a letter from Africa with a print inside, part of the game of Proximates. If the mail delivery system functions it will be by people who have eaten. If not by real, physical, energy-wasting and air-polluting deliver, then perhaps the internet.

Why the exiguous teaching?

To be parsimonious or petty gave exiguous its present sense of inadequacy in education. As a subscriber to the Merriam Webster “word of the day” service, this word came when I was thinking about my inadequacy as a teacher in the higher education system which I entered in the 1960’s - a time of exiguousness in teaching at all levels.

vp200512 What does museum quality mean? STEAMWORK  

  He revisits the museum without walls idea, asking that the subject be looked into to help understand what print professors must do to make the arts part of education to help Earth’s human and other life sustainability by making printmaking the A in STEAM.

 A demonstration of reading notes

In two instances in this essay I found opportunity to test my reading notes “app” which was to be part of the Art Students software Carl Chew and I planned in 1988, but which never was realized. This test probes the possibility now may be the time to share it.

In a world of closed museums …

What does museum quality mean?

It used to mean permanence, enduring, reliable, certified, precious, rare, exclusive, valuable, unique, and of limited access. I suppose all those things still apply. However, in mid-twentieth-Century, Andre Malraux wrote, Voices of Silence: Museum without walls, a book that changed my mind.

Nelson Rockefeller, who was once Mayor of New York City, lauded the book and interpreted it to mean he should finance companies that used modern techniques to reproduce exact replicas of rare works of art. The technology was there, waiting to exploit the market demand for these.

To Rockefeller, the museum without walls meant his walls and the walls of those who can afford these replicas at prices ranging from fifty to five-thousand dollars. Museum shops stock these replicas, in addition to hundred of take-offs from posters to puzzles.

As I read his book, I don’t think Malraux meant what Rockefeller thought. Malraux meant reproductions, but in the mass media. Malraux didn’t mean that companies should start making perfect copies of the Mona Lisa, but merely postcards or fairly good color posters.

It was the consciousness of the existence of masterpieces that Malraux was suggesting, a consciousness that, Yes, there is a painting in Paris, and this is what it looks like. More importantly, to Malraux, is the back story, the words that can go with the painting.

It is the back story that we respond to, words that can written, translated, told, or shown in the media that grabs our attention and sustains our interest. We take away an impression; and the more times we hear it, see it, and tell it in our own way, the more it sticks in our mind.

The icons of the art world, in all their forms – the visual and performing arts – which can be mediated, and their back stories told – become part of the cultural fabric of humankind. If the back story can be translated into the languages of most humans, set to music, acted out or made into a video game, all the better.

This is what museum quality really means to me.

Virtual museums

In the 20^th Century, people of the stature in their fields – such as Malraux and Rockefeller – were not experts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - STEM. They were politicians and admen, more expert in behavioral psychology than STEM.

Experts in STEM visited museums, but probably more often the museums of science, history, and industry than the museums of art. Some were no doubt well-paid and therefore they could buy season tickets to the performing arts and museums, too.

I have found a few in those fields who told their views of the arts – Einstein and Feynman come to mind – plus the book on the creative process by Ghiselin which I read when I was a college student. There is no doubt that people in the research areas of STEM are creative, innovative, discovering, and inventive. They share this with many artists, but their work goes beyond the walls of museums.

In fact, even museum walls are the products of their collective work, as is the mediation of what’s inside and on those walls.

Now we have a problem – Earth’s human and other life sustainability is coming to an end. Mass destruction is happening. Thirty years ago, fifteen-hundred of them warned humanity of this and they called for the help of all the world’s people.

Almost no one answered or acted. I wondered then, “How can artists respond?” I called my musings on this subject, “EarthSafe 2022.” It didn’t do any good, but it helped me in my quest for a better world.

My museum without walls

My neighbors, a company called Linksbridge, is also working for a better world. They want to buy our family’s art gallery – what I consider my museum. Our Mini Art Gallery is an art gallery in all appearances, but it’s really my place of musing and carrying out the suggestions my musings give rise to.

What shall I do without it when we sell it to Linksbridge? How can I make it more than self-serving and a pattern of self-indulgence? My life has always been around education and my specialty has always been the arts. Malraux, Einstein and even Nelson Rockefeller were among my guides - like teachers without classroom walls because they are mediated teachers.

The word virtual teachers comes to mind.

How to be a virtual teacher

Is there a book about becoming an effective virtual teacher? Is there a book of the kind Stephen Covey wrote, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Maybe his book, and the companion book about effective leadership, would serve as blueprints to write it.

sp200410 Rewards and buried treasure:  What it’s all about 

  In his academic years (which never ended, it seems) he read about anticipatory learning, the role which anticipation plays in our life. For some, the anticipation of treasure is the thing. For others, it is a big win – either to achieve oneself or a team.

A lizard and a ruby

As a kid I was fascinated by buried treasure. One time I put several of my most valued things in a glass jar – the dried carcass of a chameleon I’d had a while, a fake ruby and such – twisted the lid on tight and buried it. I thought some day I’d go unearth it but never did.

The movie, Treasure Island stands out as a film I still like – in fact I “unearthed it” on the web a while back. I realized I hadn’t remembered the details but one, the treasure itself. I probably watched the whole movie to see the treasure.

In my academic years (which never ended, it seems) I read about anticipatory learning, the role which anticipation plays in our life. For some, the anticipation of treasure is the thing. For others, it’s a big win – either to achieve oneself or see one’s team make.

I’m no kid anymore, but as I thought of a topic to write about and seal it in my computer along with others in this directory, reward popped into my mind, and buried treasure. What did I think I’d find if I had dug up that glass jar? Would the chameleon look any different? Would the ruby turn out not to be fake, after all, but worth thousands?

Reading notes

In my middle age, I was fascinated by books about creativity and human potential for problem-solving. By this time, I was an art professor; and some I was considered an artist, but that meant less to me because, in my pursuit to be a great teacher, research taught me art is not as essential to sustainability as science, technology, engineering and math.

STEM, today, reigns supreme. The coronavirus pandemic is a demonstration of this. For the past three decades, climate change and a score of other critical needs have shown it, too. Art is critical for communicating the need for STEM in early education especially.

The most important thing I learned in school is that printmaking is the best communicator among the arts. We need design and craft, but the repetition of a message is what makes it important to STEM.

I believe printmaking could be the “A” in STEAM, a small movement among educators who try to blend the terms for a more rounded, interrelated curriculum for kids. They are correct in this, but it’s more difficult when the masses were educated in a half-century of fragmented curricula.

Resistance to STEM starts in college, where teachers are trained to be suited to autocracy. The politics of college and university programs is legend and trickles down to educational policy at the government levels from the local school board all the way up to the federal government.

Map to treasure

Most efforts to educate the masses have failed, leaving youth to find meaningful ways to satisfy our shared sense of anticipation. Business has rushed in to fill the void where school failed to provide meaningful goals and treasure maps. Games prevail.

Fantasy and delusion are the cure for depression when people face the coronavirus pandemic. The tiny cadre of microbiologists, epidemiologists and other researchers are working overtime to find a solution, a cure or a vaccine against the virus (or mutants) causing it.

Every healthcare worker spent years learning their art and now they’re on the front lines of a war they never really expected. Kids are shut out of regular schools and colleges are also shut down. People are ordered to stay home, and the world economy is depressed.

Is there a map showing how to get out of this alive? Who are the map makers? Where are they now, when we need them most? Are they the fantasy and delusional artists who have entertained kids for decades – and adults who, early on, found respite from school in games?

Daily I face this question. I wanted to be a map-maker, to at least begin drawing maps for the students in my classes. In my drawing, design, printmaking and video art classes, that’s what I was doing – sketching possible roads and byways they could try using to fulfill their anticipated treasure hunts.

It has come to this: Writing an essay a day and storing it on my hard drive – sometimes putting on my old, outdated blog online which, in fact, few people find, and no one comments on.

Still I look to find a reason to believe.

ri200330  Searching for hope: Following the advice of Moss-Kanter  

Good advice then and now 

Rosabeth Moss-Kanter, in an article published in AARP magazine in 2006, stated, “A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope,” and it came at a good time. I was, that year, exploring ways to tap into senior experiences – such as my own – that would help college art students at my alma mater – Central Washington University.

I never found good soil there, sadly, although it added to my experience. Her statement about an insurance policy for hope never left my mind. Now it’s more important as we live in the onset of the corona virus pandemic, and schools nationwide are shut, forcing separation of teachers and students.

Parents of school-age students are forced into home-schooling and most were not prepared. Many are not going to their workplaces because of the risks of contagion. Once again, as people have faced crises in the past, we need an insurance policy for hope.

What does “a structure for collaboration” mean to me?

In the first place, it’s an abstract design, this structure. In a perfect world, it would be a successful printmaking studio where people came together not only to make prints for their enjoyment, but to share in the creative processes that color human interaction in achieving goals.

The collective goals, for example, of having a group show such as an “Open Studio.” When I was a member of the collective, Triangle Studios, we hosted those events and they are among the highlights of my life. The physical studio and the abstract design of an open studio event are structures for collaboration.

I think this fits Moss-Kanter’s definition.

But, what now?

pp200328 Value your museum: Your future has arrived

The future of the brick and mortar museum has been questioned for two generations of the information age. It’s like the 1850’s when halftone photography made mechanical printing plates feasible. A surge in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)… 

 It’s happening

The future of the brick and mortar museum has been questioned for two generations of the information age. It’s like the 1850’s when halftone photography made mechanical printing plates feasible.

The surge in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) was unstoppable, yet printing in the old ways continued in the arts. Artists found the obsolete printing methods useful, freed of the pressures of mass production associated with publishing.

The Internet caused a similar sea-change in the art world. Art museums and galleries, however, hung in there because the physical presence of tangible artworks means more than what meets the eye.

There’s something about the presence of a real artwork that transcends digital communication – like the presence of a real person!

Then how shall we deal with it? As an artist, I love to meet people who like my art whether or not they buy it. If distance makes this impossible, then knowing they ordered it online and received it is enough. I can imagine my art somewhere in their home.

Thankfully, I can communicate with my art patrons and people who own the presses I designed for printmaking via email and social media. Thanks to the web, I can even communicate with my former students from fifty years ago!

An old movie image comes to mind as Carlton Heston ponders humankind and time in the movie, Planet of the Apes. “Are people still cruel to their neighbors?” he asks. I ponder, “Will people return to museums when – and if – the corona virus is brought under control?”

What about the present? What about artists who are faced with cancelled gallery exhibits, art festivals and art museums? Art schools are closed and my cohort – printmaking teachers – are scrambling to figure out how to keep their students going.

A good question

I liked a question posed on the Facebook group addressing the emergency, Printmaking Distance Learning:

Hello all, I am looking for a good (ideally short) reading on the history of the printing press and its impact on society, its relationship to mass media, accessibility etc... Similarly, along the same lines, how about a reading about print media, such as the newspaper, and its history up until today (its decline and takeover by internet/digital media, much like the decline in printed books...). Open to any resources related to these topics as well (like videos, podcasts, exhibition websites, etc...) Any suggestions?! – Professor Beverly Acha, University of Texas at Austin

Historically, I think print was always closer to STEM than to fine art. This is not a welcome concept for people (and I am one of these people) who, as students, never cared as much for science, tech, engineering and math as much as they cared about arts and humanities.

Change was forced on me when I was a professor at Ms. Acha’s stage in her career. Today, if what I think about print and STEM is of use, then what is it? If it’s valid, then what to do about it today when the whole shebang – faculty, administrators and students - is on forced leave of absence, shut out of the art buildings?

Hope

Professor Acha sets the stage, a forum, for hope! I compare it to the flat bed of a press – that piece of equipment around which people of all stripes gathered for centuries. Priests, paper makers, artists and business people used printmaking; and when presses were invented to be more effective, they benefited – each in their own domains-of-expertise.

Now, for almost everyone in art schools, presses are under lock and key. It’s like a dictator took over and banned independent printing - like entering a kind of censorship.

Where’s creativity?

However, we have the Internet– the child of the press - for now. Printmaking is the ancestor of all STEM, yet when the pressure grew to train more technical people, the creative element of research had a hard time.

I get comfort when uneasy around “STEM people” by thinking creativity, imagination, discovery and innovation are part of STEM, and Art has these cornerstones in common with the world of science and the rest. I research how to fit Art into STEM and make it STEAM.

I’m not alone – there’s a huge community who promote STEAM. There’s even one called STREAM which is R for Reading/Literature.

It’s in the moment

Where the press fits in, therefore, deserves hard study, and that’s why I was glad to see Professor Acha raise the question. She reminds me of that moment we printmakers enjoy, the moment we lift the freshly-printed paper off the plate lying on the bed of the press.

Sharing that moment is the key, in my opinion, that might open doors to reasons to make prints. Printmaking moments can be useful in the unfolding, post-corona virus future. If there is more than meets the eye in a print, it’s that moment of 4-dimensions: The height, width and depth of a print plus time – time marking the moment the print is pulled and time expressed by international agreement: GMT.

The date and the twenty-four-hour clock, in other words, can be part of the signature of the print. It states the moment it was pulled. Combined with the year, month and day, I call it the moment number. For example, I wrote this text as: 2003281012. The year 2020, month 03, day 28 hour 10 and minute 12 – that’s Pacific Standard time (for GMT, add 8 hours).[1]

In addition, today we have found GPS is useful. It’s stamped on every Google street view and satellite image. One pastime I like is to enter the address of a friend or owner of my work and look at their home via satellite. I “beam myself up” and get a birds-eye view and for a moment I can imagine myself flying over to them.

Somehow this helps me realize our relationships, similarly as to when they share an image on social media only, in my case, we share something of a physical kind, too, if I made an artwork that they see in their home – or an etching press which I designed and helped make.

In this way I would like to introduce to Professor Acha what I think the printing press has brought us to and what’s in printmaking education for her students’ futures. It’s a relationship few people have considered – STEM – in art schools because, until now, there was no need for it. Now students might need to know about this as part of the history of printing and art.

Let students be challenged to examine the history of the printing press in the STREAM age.

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[1] My friend Peter van Honk, an hour’s drive out of Amsterdam, thinks it’s about 6:30 and, for a moment, I can think of Peter and his Rembrandt project! I’m a time traveler!