Saturday, August 15, 2020

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.

Friday, August 14, 2020

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.

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

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.