What Next? 

Cleaning out the gallery 

Synergy is when two-plus-two-equals-five, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The author has fifty years accumulation of intellectual and tangible property valued in the art world and, more specifically, the printmaking world. What is next?  

Cleaning out the gallery the best way

Shall we begin? In the 1980s, Norie Sato proposed a funding program to solve the problem of artists’ unsold assets—their works of art which, for lack of a market, were piling up in storage. She said, “Announce that the work would be place on a conveyor leading into a garbage truck, and anyone who wanted to could save the artwork and give it a home, could take it off the conveyor and pay for having it.”

I have thought of this proposal many times, but the organization of the event is daunting, not to mention the desperation of it and the perversion of what the art meant at the outset. Lately, however, two recurring themes concern me:

One, I’m getting along okay, but every time I do something to sell a press or an artwork (the former which is many times over the occurrence of the latter) I see myself depriving a Millennial of a meaningful, remunerative task.

Second, the huge inventory of unsold work is going to be junked if I don’t do something with it soon.

If I am creative and deserving the title of “artist” then I should be able to use these themes in a creative way to move forward—solving two problems at the same time and realizing the benefits of a group-funding event, when two-plus-two-equals-five.

Growth Tip 

Finding your way in difficult times 

A dream, a nightmare, makes him think about his role, or his job, in today’s world in which it appears that crises and gloom besets many Americans and the world’s peoples. What can he do to help? A senior artist is not someone people think of as a leader. 

Arms too weak—a dream analysis 

In a 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

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. 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 graduate students in art to focus our energy and our minds similarly as to what the students in engineering or science. 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 feeling 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 continually 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 now. I seem to be getting nowhere in my ten-year plan for the Seattle Printmaking Center, for example, and maybe it’s a concept not appropriate to the 21^st Century.

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.”

Dependent

There is no mistake in believing that our lives—those of my wife 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 and apply our years of experience in our domains-of-expertise.

Killing off the young - 

An old-timer’s disease 

He takes the word “disease” and reads it as “dis-ease,” or lack of ease, of discomfort, of a feeling that with every little task he executes in his handwork as an entrepreneur, he is killing off the employment prospects of a younger generation of artists.

Disease 

Someone said that the word disease really means dis-ease, a lack of ease, a feeling of discomfort and pain. I don’t know if that’s etymologically correct, but it fits the feeling that I get when I see before me a variety of routine tasks that bring me financial and creative satisfaction.

For example, I must complete the packaging of two WeeWoodie Rembrandt Presses and mail them to buyer in Seattle and Saudi Arabia. Also I must pack a Galleon Press to send to Carolina, and a Mini Etching Press for a buyer in Taiwan.

Almost anyone from the younger generations could do this, and be paid from the proceeds of these sales—the gross amount of which is $3,950, and a net of about $1,750. This pencils out to about 40% net income, which I will portion out to pay down my debts and reinvest in new projects.

The dis-ease comes from the feeling in my head that any one of the tasks I will undertake, from the miniscule to the heavy lifting, could be done by a younger person with some training and education. Therein lies the rub—there is no plan for training and education in my scheme.

There is a wish—the teacher’s wish which I have had since I was a boy; I always wanted to be a teacher.

The curse 

I am cursed with a genetically and conditioned view that I can take care of the immediate tasks to satisfy buyers of presses well enough to get me by without training someone else to do them. This is complicated further by the fact that I can’t guarantee that my training of someone younger (or older) will get them the rewards they need immediately and also be sustainable for a long term.

For example, I lack two pieces of plastic material to complete the contents of the to WeeWoodie Rembrandt presses—one for Seattle and for Saudi Arabia. I plan to walk downtown and find this plastic material—maybe at Bed, Bath & Beyond. How can someone else do it?

To get the attention of a younger person, explain the need, show them the purpose of the plastic, discuss alternatives if that material can’t be found at BB&B, etc. and also give them the money to purchase it—all this is overwhelming to me, distracting and unnecessary since I think I can do it all myself in less time.

Plus, I get in a walk, which is necessary to maintain my health—needed to keep in going for the next ten years for my next ten-year plan. My father was beset by the same disorder—practically do the job for his workers in the process of training them because he was a stickler for doing the job right.

To do list 

My dilemma list goes on as I think about what needs to be done: make boxes and get packing material for the Galleon, fill out postage forms for mailing to Saudi Arabia, also Seattle and Carolina, etc. Certain enclosures that go with the Galleon and the Mini Etching Press need to be checked and updated—a task I can do in an hour but which would take many hours of instructions to a younger person.

Writing my to-do list gives me a vague, aching pain because, not only is it a long list and somewhat boring because I’ve done it so many times, it is painful because I know I am killing off a job opportunity for some younger person by doing it all myself.

Lately I have been telling people that, as a pensioner and drawing social security, I need to hone a two-edged sword to ensure mine and my wife’s long-term security as we get older. How will my pension continue if American industries suffer from poor labor force? How will our Social Security system sustain if young people are not trained and educated and cannot hold down jobs?

Solutions and cures for the disease

I think the solution is a factory school of printmaking arts.

How do I begin?

Have I already begun?

Is anyone reading this?

A’Design Award Winners 2014

Inspire a Seattle Printmaking Center

Eying the future of creative arts

With pleasure, this Seattleite viewed almost 800 images of winning entries in the 2014 edition of the A’Design Award and Competition. I found inspiration! Pictures piqued my interest; some resonated with a vision of a Seattle Printmaking Center.

Having won for a second time with a miniature printing press in the A’Design Award and Competition—originating in Milan and offered every year—I know this is a way for people to share the best creations in many diverse design fields. From more than 12,500 entries, jurors awarded over 700 prizes.

Scanning the winners’ works, seeing the photographs, reading the designers’ articles time-traveled me back to my college days. As a young art student I had a big appetite for designer magazines for inspiration. I especially liked magazines from foreign countries. Designers in 78 countries entered the A'Design Award and competition in 2014.

Visit the A’Design Award website and you will find that it facilitates browsing in some ways that are superior to paper-based magazine of the past century. This website is a design masterpiece and good software engineering in itself. You can find everything on the site, http://www.designaward.com. 

Here in Seattle—with team-mates in England, Canada and Japan—we won the Silver Award in 2013 for the miniaturized etching press, a Pram Halfwood in the Unexpected Design category; this year, we won the Silver Award for the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press in the Toy, Games and Hobby Products category.

Next year, we will enter the design of the Seattle Printmaking Center; therefore, the most attractive winners of 2014 that I looked at and include below connect not only with our primary mission of providing smart artist’s instruments to professionals and educators but also for our 2015 entry, the Center.

It is early in the planning, but it is certain that our entry will encompass architecture, interior design, exhibition design, hospitality, multimedia device and games. There are almost 100 categories from which to choose in the A'Design Award and Competition!

Looking at the pictures to make a selection of my favorites to share with readers, I felt like an art student all over. Seeing hundreds of masterful design works inspires ways we might show the uniqueness of the Seattle printmaking experience to Seattle’s visitors and also within a virtual printmaking world.

You can see the categories and the awards at http://www.whatisadesignaward.com. And if you and your organization want to, you can take advantage of the cost-saving, early-bird, discounted entry fee deal, at http://www.adesignaward.com/earliest-bird.php.

Following are some of the images that stopped me in my scroll through the hundreds of pictures of winners’ works. I indicated the link to the entry under each picture so you can read the details as “from the horses’ mouths.”

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33672

Artist habitat, in the title of this prize-winner, reminds me how the Seattle Printmaking Center will have housing for creative people who contribute to Center programming and visiting artists will have an apartment for their stay.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33425

Thinking about a printmaking board game in which printmaking, prints, and printmakers are the parts that make up the game turns me on. Add collectible playing cards, a printmaking fantasy land, sci-fi and time travel and you have products selling at the Seattle Printmaking Center. Not only home-grown, indigenous games but games produced by printmakers all over the world.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=28777

The idea of convertible, detachable and trans-formal games and detachable devices makes me think of re-tachable devices such as our Halfwood Press, an etching press with a brain. The apps depicted on the screen in this picture would be printmaking apps and online printmaking games and magazines, graphic novels and more. They can be produced in the Seattle Printmaking Center.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=31913

How is a Roman Warrior helmet like a Do-it-yourself printing press? The former is not utilitarian; the latter is useful; and they send a different message. But they share one thing—and that important thing for transferable skills is the maker aspect. Kids grow when they put things together and can put them together again.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=34381

Ireland’s Google headquarters has interior design that reflects the industry and I’m inspired by the several designs built for Google around the world. No doubt our Seattle Printmaking Center will attract a diverse group of hi-tech underwriters because Seattle artists are hi-tech, hi-touch printmakers.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=32871This is called “Any 202 Tablet for K-12 Education,” entered by Portugal’s Jp-Inspiring Knowledge. I would like to connect with a company making K-12 tablets like this, as any company that is interested in printmaking arts for K-12 people (and their grown-up friends and parents, too).

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=34296

There will be a Seattle Printmaking Center website focused on learning printmaking and a user interface. In this example, instead of college graduates the resources will be open to almost anyone, anywhere, anytime in Persistent Online Open Courses originated in Seattle with Seattle’s unique blend of old and new technologies. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=30548

An “iLoop” might be a better way to relate mobile devices to smart presses and give printmaking students access to their virtual printmaking teachers. These would be for sale at the Seattle Printmaking Center Store online where content providers develop for printmaking education 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33459

An online digital printmaking magazine will originate at the Seattle Printmaking Center, and this picture of one award-winning online magazine which illustrates it on three platforms. Our online printmaking magazine will be the first to produce an online printmaking magazine in the USA, but it is also an international magazine. As with all the businesses housed in the Center, profits flow toward sustaining the center and its programs for printmakers. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33531

“Mixed use,” the category of this winner, sounds exactly like what the Seattle Printmaking Center would be, like a mini-college with an emphasis on people, printmaking and multimedia education.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=34088

The word, mediatheque reminded me of the word cinematheque, and brought to my mind the all-encompassing nature of the Seattle Printmaking Center vision—bringing prehistoric handprints into the same environment of Seattle’s renowned multimedia technologies.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=30597

The Seattle Printmaking Center is for interpretation. This winner’s museum display system offers kiosks which could tell the story of the evolution of media arts from the time of prehistoric cave handprints to reach today’s new Seattle-area industries.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=27394
Great humor! In items related to printmaking are the conceptual Artists’ Ghosts—a flash memory drive mounted in a likeness of Rembrandt. That’s one example. Another nutty idea is my WallNut—a push pin in a walnut shell. These are little money-makers to support the Seattle Printmaking Center. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=32484

A Chinese graphic design, which could be a poster or a stamp, attracted me to it because the Seattle Printmaking Center will include reproductions of art by Seattle’s designers who are either printmakers, too, or who collaborate with printmakers and performance artists to publish their art, design and crafts. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=29923

Say “education” and my heart goes pitty-pat, and this entry does it. I visualize the images on the screen as being partly related to the history of printmaking with plenty of resources that originated from printmakers around the world and published by experts at the Seattle Printmaking Center.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=28516

Visualize a stone hand, not merely a handprint on stone, and you have the kind of association with the handprints on the stone walls of caves. These inspired the connection between performance and printmaking which connects to the core value of the Seattle Printmaking Center. 

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=29353

A printmaker studio furniture workshop is part of the Factory School located in the Seattle Printmaking Center concept, and this image reminded me that designers in wood will find plenty of inspiration to produce for the printmaking studio furniture market.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=32723

If there are goddesses of media arts, they will come—I was mindful of this when I read the title of this entry, and I could not leave it out. My muse (her name is Media) insisted!

There were other pictures that stopped me in my review of the A’Design Award winner showing—interior designs for restaurants and mini-homes, multimedia display designs, games, hi-tech devices and others. In closing I will leave them here with my crib sheet.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=28544

We could have a lot of fun meeting with companies like this.

docking station to connect printmakers with other printmakers worldwide.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=32866

Detachable devices make me think of re-tachable devices.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=29830

The SPC needs a nice restaurant.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=29831

Workspace makes me think of the Live Artists.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=30597

Multimedia, now we’re cooking – this is the arcade of prints.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=33372

Cafes are one of the best places for printmakers to meet.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=34007

You have to think about a logo or brand.

http://www.adesignaward.com/design.php?ID=30338

You need to keep high tech and virtual worlds in mind.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy more at A’Design Award and Competition

Ethan Lind, Busker-Etcher on banjo.

See Ethan most Wednesdays and Thursdays at the Pike Place Market, printing copper etchings on a Mini Etching Press. Sorry - the Agitated Strings Band demo disk is not ready to share.

Bluegrass Emeralda

These are songs inspired by my work with Ethan Lind and the Agitated String Band—a bluegrass band in Seattle. Ethan is a painter and etcher, too, besides a banjo player.

Emeralda is a mythical ship I imagined brought the design of the Halfwood Press to me, and after ten years of making these presses it happened that Ethan Lind stopped by my shop. Together we made a plan: If he could get a spot at the Pike Place Market, I would loan him a Halfwood Press so he could get more exposure. In addition, I would give him pointers in the art of etching and printing.

I knew he had a bluegrass band, and this interested me because Peter Rowan, world-renowned bluegrass musician had bought two Halfwood Presses. My secret desire was that I would find musicians to collaborate in the Emeralda songbook. After all, what is a story without music?

The difficulty was that I never thought the bluegrass genre had a connection with the Emeralda story. The first Emeralda, a ship of the frigate type, was made in Spain. It was lost in the failed Spanish Armada. A copy was made a century and half later, which carried the Halfwood Press to our part of the world in the mid-18^th Century. It was bound for China, but was sunk by a giant rogue wave in Puget Sound.

Bluegrass music may have originated in Europe, and it may be related to sea shanties—but that’s only conjecture. Clearly, bluegrass music is no more connected to the elements of the Emeralda myth than, say, hip hop.

However, I noticed that the most recent version of Hunger Games (or was it Game of Thrones?) was going to have a hip hop sound track. Then, maybe bluegrass could serve the Emeralda saga.

I always think the people who have been interest in the Halfwood Press are like “gifts” on my pathway. What they contribute is anybody’s guess. Money, yes, but there are more important things in art—and art is what I find in common Peter Rowan and also Ethan Lind and the Agitated Strings Band.

Practice session – April 8, 2014

Ethan invited me to listen in on a practice session. I recorded on my pocket camera—a very old camcorder with a broken sound system. The next day I made a DVD for it, thinking it would be a useful experience. Also, I want our daughter and son-in-law to consider hiring the Agitated Strings for their Wedding vow renewal, coming up.

I also wanted to continue to solve the riddle, “How could Bluegrass music serve my Emeralda story?” Besides these, which are my personal interests, I have a dream to bring Peter Rowan to Seattle for a fundraising concert to support the Seattle Printmaking Center development, and have Ethan’s band open for him.

Structure

It is common in bluegrass to hear stories of love, heartbreak, and other kinds of personal relationships. Sometimes animals, sometimes old pickups or guns—anything that people love. So maybe there is a clue in this love element. You can love a printing press, can’t you?

You can love a ship – even if it’s a made-up ship like the Emeralda. You can love a vision. Look at what the Gibbs brothers did.

Another element is the hero’s journey—common in books, screenplays and sagas in every kind of artistic creation.

Musical Dinner Theater 

It all comes to this 

He has a concept for a 12-course offering in a story about a sailor, a stolen da Vinci drawing, a kidnapping and a magical, musical printing press. As songs and twelve ethnic dishes are served to an audience, we re-discover the lost ship, the Emeralda II. 

Fact or fiction? 

In art, we sometimes experience make-believe worlds populated by make-believe people. In the minds of the artistic creators, crafters, designers and directors of teams of people, the make-believe world and its people come to life briefly—they live and die away as though their stories could actually have happened. As such, they become heroes and villains, unfortunate losers and masters of their chosen destinies. They interact with each other, with Nature, and wrestle with mechanization which, if it wins, will take command.

This proposal for a Musical Dinner Theater production comes from one author who had many opportunities to find and develop the elements of the story titled, Emeralda. It is a story in many parts, and on the occasion of a chance meeting with the Artistic Director of Gallery Concerts—a performing group specializing in period music and instrumentation—it is fit into the musical dinner theater art form.

Emeralda

“The Jewel of the Ocean” was the name given to a ship in the 1500s by its architect, a Basque shipbuilder. The Emeralda was the fastest frigate of its day. Its secret design made it outrun pirates and win shipping contracts even into its second generation, the Emeralda II, the daughter frigate restored in the 1700s.

In the 16^th Century, a Jesuit order had come into possession of a diary by a sailor who had been to the far east; and also a stolen drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Led by an enterprising member of the order, they made plans to trade with the people of the Celestial Empire.

In his diary, the sailor cautioned that any European who wished to do business in China would have to bring things both beautiful and functional. In Spain, a monk found two brothers one a renowned steel wright and the other a fine luthier. With gold, the order contracted with the two to make a European-style printing press which the Chinese were bound to treasure.

To the brothers the monk suggested that the wood from the French fer grape could be used, or perhaps lignum vitae. The steel wright and the luthier knew better, and they contrived to combined wood and steel by fixing the materials together with pins. The finished printing press was called the media ferlignum imprimo machinamentum, the Halfwood Press.

By 1746, several models of the Halfwood Press were completed and, along with other trade goods, they were part of the manifest on the Emeralda II, contracted for the voyage to China. The ship was manned by officers and crew of an extraordinary kind—not the usual able-but-rough-and-tumble lot. The navigator, for example, had turned down a position with the famed explorer, Vitus Bering, an old friend. The Emeralda's navigator spoke several languages, including Russian.

Kidnapped

Meanwhile, far north, in Russia, as the Halfwood Press was coming into being and plans being made for the expedition, a boy was kidnapped and was taken on a trek across Russia to the eastern coast. He was eleven at the time he was stolen and when he reached Kamchatka, he was fourteen. He was taken as a cabin boy on a mission to trade with the natives of the Americas for fur. His story is an adventure in itself, and includes the miraculous intersection with the voyagers of the Emeralda.

Many subplots

The treatment of this story, to be adapted to Musical Dinner Theater, remains to be adapted to musical theater. It will include the rescue of twin girls from slavery on Madeira, a stopover in Desterro (Florianopolis, the “Floripa” of today), a Colombian emerald and the tragic ending of the voyage in the San Juan Islands of Washington State.

My ongoing story

Despite the failure of the fictional mission to China, as I made in my works of art, writing and teaching, the story of the Emeralda and the Halfwood Press inspired my ten years of production of Halfwood Presses—the jewel to crown my fifty years of making prints and teaching the enjoyment the printmaking experience in its many transformations.

Then, on March 27th, three days before I wrote this essay--in San Francisco--I met with visitors from Taiwan and sold them a model of the Halfwood Press. The Emeralda mission, with the Halfwood Press, has succeeded.

To make it known for the enjoyment of others

I am proposing the production of an experience for audiences to enjoy the fantasy that I built into, and made manifest in, Halfwood Presses which stems from my belief that mechanical and digital reproduction evolved over hundreds of centuries from hand prints on the walls of prehistoric peoples’ performance chambers—the caves—to include today’s artistic communication technologies. Musical dinner theater is one way to show that live performance cannot be replaced by new technologies, no matter how divinely it is crafted and widely disseminated, but they complement one another.

I think musical dinner theater is an ideal format with which to give young people a way to see the complementary relationship of living and media arts.

Perfect Storm of Printmaking 

Conditions for Seattle Printmaking Center 

According to a radio story about the Stradivarius violin, experts can’t figured out why these instruments have an extraordinary sound. There is speculation that it could have been the of 17th Century ecosystem likened to an arts and intellect “ecosystem.” 

Preface 

In 2000, a film, based on a book by the same title, Perfect Storm was released and the expression perfect storm has become popular. It means any event where a situation is aggravated drastically by an exceptionally rare combination of circumstances. It can mean, for example, a list of meteorological factors that lead to a flood. I am using the expression to describe a series of seven factors spanning fifty years that may bring about a new printmaking center in Seattle.

Factor 1 - luck

While I am not the smartest person you will meet, I have been one of the luckiest. Starting my life as a farm boy was a positive factor in my ability to study my way off the farm and use artistic skills I inherited from my mother. My father taught me discipline and with these i was able to get my bachelor’s and master’s degrees and—what is factor 1—a college teaching job.

Factor 2 - naiveté

In the nineteen years that I was a college teacher I went from a naive 26-year old instructor—the lowest rank on the academic ladder—to a naive 43-year old full professor with tenure. In my naiveté, I carried my first impressions of what higher education means all the way to my resignation from the University Of Washington. It was my belief that the system was corrupted by a few university administration people, some faculty, and some students.

Factor 3 - corruption

It is said in Sayre’s Law, that "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter." My bitterness in resigning was not so much the fact that my research in art, technology, and emerging globalization was stymied by art school politics as it was in the opportunities that were showing up all around the Pacific Northwest. From Oregon to British Columbia, new technologies useful to artists were inviting and open to exploration.

Factor 4 - students

In the ten years before I resigned, I had a decade to work with students who, like me, frustrated with the art school dogma, nepotism, male chauvinism and rigid curricula. It was the height of protest in the United States with issues that included civil rights, the Vietnam conflict, assassinations and government corruption. The fourth factor in my “perfect storm” was the intellectual and ethical expressions my students were involved in; I was swept up in their curiosity as to what the new technologies and new artistic movements might offer them for their careers in art. They graduated and went on to prove their point by being successful on their own terms, not the terms of the schools of art.

Factor 5 - restraint

For ten more years I struggled to find ways to make a living for my family by applying what I had been teaching in college. The system was against me, however, because technology continued to be anathematic to the existing art museum and gallery atmosphere. For awhile, alternative art galleries gave artists some space and time—notably And/Or and COCA—but the art medium I believe to be the root of all new art and technology developments (which is printmaking) continued to be restricted to traditional printmaking, thanks to the UW School Of Art, which was putting printmaking back in its pre-war level as being a minor art.

Factor 6 - internet

The internet opened up in 1994, and my cocoon period ended because with the internet I could apply what I had learned in college. The globalization I witnessed when I went around the world on my fact-finding mission of 1983 could now be realized. I took what I learned in school from my students, who by now were successful mid-career professionals, and architected a curriculum around printmaking as the nexus of new technologies. I put a high value on the intellectual side of artistic creativity, discovery, imagination and invention and made it an imaginary place I named Emeralda, referring to the emerald region spanning Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.

Factor 7 – Halfwood PressGhost

Researching the term perfect storm in Wikipedia, I found: “The first use of the expression in the meteorological sense comes from the March 20, 1936, issue of the Port Arthur News in Texas: "The weather bureau describes the disturbance as ‘the perfect storm’ of its type. Seven factors were involved in the chain of circumstances that led to the flood." (My italics). Seven is a good number to stop on, and Factor 7 is the press I designed I call the Halfwood. By adding the flash memory drive so I could put my ghost in this new machine, it is more than an etching press; I borrowed the term platform from the digital technology industry and I applied it to what this etching press really is—a platform for both intellectual, artistic, learning and communal pursuits.

Bases for a Seattle Printmaking Center

Since 1966 when I came to Seattle, I have wanted to be part of a printmaking community which had both a clearly beneficial position in Seattle and a fluid, creative core. In that year, the Northwest Printmakers Society was slowly shutting down—for reasons I am still not sure of but probably because of a lack of money. That organization re-emerged in Portland about ten years later because Gordon Gilkey—the city’s most ardent advocate for traditional printmaking—cultivated the idea successfully.

Traditional printmaking clubs and workshops are located in major cities—and some out-of-the-way places—around the world. However, when I visited them in 1983, they were moribund, often empty rooms with plenty of space and equipment but few people actually working there. Sometimes, but rarely, I found foreign printmaking workshops were dabbling in things like video and computer graphics and this gave me the evidence I needed to transform printmaking back home in Seattle.

It is not only money that keeps printmaking organizations from becoming important community centers, it is a backward-looking policy, a fondness for hands-on, old timey crafts similar to what you see in weaving, ceramics, and other crafts centers. Tourists visit these centers to see how things used to be done, or clubs form around resurrecting the old days of war, agricultural practices, and entertainment. Experience is key to the success of these centers.

A Seattle Printmaking Center would combine the seven factors above, which would culminate in the printing press platform for using digital technologies to be both teacher and stage for the artists who use the Halfwoods. The presses are gateways or portals to bigger worlds, yet they are simultaneously a beautiful functional instrument for the art, craft and design of printmaking for the 21^st Century.

Best of all, the Seattle Printmaking Center would also be a factory school located in a place like the Pike Place Market redevelopment where people learn all about printmaking while they produce the cash-cow of the center—Halfwood Presses.