pp161004 Envy and vindication  

The word, “vindicate” may express my need, i.e., I need, “to clear, as from an accusation, imputation, suspicion, or the like: to vindicate my honor. 2. To afford justification for; justify: as in, “Subsequent events vindicated his policy.”

Today I read another bestowal of honor on Anne Focke—the UW Art School “Alum in Residence.” I wrote to her my congratulations, and briefly vented my sad story—especially focused on my brief moment of recognition by the art history students, including Candace Kern.
This, plus my current work on projects spanning the past fifty years (coincident with Anne’s career), brings rise to a constant awareness. Like an elephant in the room, there is my need for vindication, to have my reputation as a teacher restored.
I was not “accused” formally back in the days of my teaching at the UW, because I did few things you could say as wrong. However, I was a whistle-blower. When people in the administration did things that were against university codes, or were harmful to students’ chances at getting the best education, I complained.
Complaining got me nowhere; so I would threaten to resign over some issues. I did resign at one point, and then retracted my resignation at Norman Lundin’s urging. Constantly being accused of being in a conflict with Glen Alps, and doubled and redoubled my efforts just to do a good job of teaching.
And that was the conflict: I stood for good teaching, research, production and services, but Glen stood for Glen. He had the backing of faculty, too, demonstrated to me one time when the chairman (a former student of Glen’s) appointed two others to be on an ad hoc printmaking council—Louis Hafermehl and Hazel Koenig.
In our meeting I was adamant about hiring a woman printmaker. “I want what’s best for the students,” I declared.
Hazel Koening said, “We want what’s best for Glen!”
There it was.
Because these days I’m working on some form of memoirs, I’m doing a lot of reading of my journals and videos. Concomitantly I’m teaching online in connection with my video archive and my Halfwood Presses. When I read about Anne’s new role, I realized that my reputation at the UW art school will never be vindicated.
The powers-that-be are still the powers-that-be, taking their direction from the graves of old, dead professors whose name they venerate.
All I ever wanted to be was the best in what I do. I also wanted to be part of “the best” of what there is to be had. And to be part of a Great University was my aim from the day I was selected by Glen Alps to be his protégé.
I was—and am—naïve to think that was what Glen wanted to be, too. I had to have it hammered into my head that he wanted what was best for him.
I was a true researcher, however, and I found that his role in the development of the collagraph consisted only of giving it a name. No one had ever bothered to name this mere technical innovation—unless you take Rolf Nesch who, for some reason, came up with metal grafiks.
Naïve I may be, but I was diligent in my research and my teaching. It was wrong that I should have been purged from the printmaking division, that Alps’ works should be purged, too, and that the direction of the printmaking division should be turned over the chairman, Richard Arnold and people like Bob Jones and Mike Spafford—who think printmaking is a minor extension of painting and drawing.
It must have terrified many on the faculty to think electronic arts would someday be as important as the physical, visual arts. The idea that installations and performance arts would crowd painting’s supremacy, and perhaps render it irrelevant, was troubling - to say the least.

I thought it would change peoples’ minds if I tripped out around the world and recorded evidence that I may be right about reinventing the printmaking curriculum to include other media such as photo, film, video and computer graphics.

It only made my position worse. Proof of work was not what they wanted—not in THAT direction, anyway. They perverted my work to mean proof I was nuts—and they pushed me to the edge and out of the printmaking division!
They won.
I lost.
However, in the long run, I won because today I have sufficient mastery of media that I can teach online, all over the whole wide world. I may not have an institution of which to claim a part and a credible role, but I have some of my former students’ good will, and on the Web people who come to me for instruction and fraternity.
This may, in a roundabout way, be as good as vindication as I’m going to get.

es160921 Commands from the grave:  

Listen to the old and the child within  

When I first opened my eyes to art, I was looking at a print. When I first started going to art school, I was looking at people much older than I was. Since printmaking was my first passion, and all my printmaking teachers were older, I since then surrounded myself with old artists.

If I didn’t have an old artist around, the next best thing was a book or a movie. In other words, I always looked to older people to be my guides. As I said, when I first opened my eyes to art I was looking at a print, which to me is important because without print I would never have experienced art. Everything that came to me in rural central Washington State had to come by way of reproductions.

The people, however, were next in opening my eyes to the art experience. They were older – much older. When I got my first job teaching art, my boss was twice my age. He was 52 and I was 25. He was my boss, but he was also my mentor. Not in the usual sense of the word, “mentor” because by his examples he taught me more about what not to do, not what I should do.

College, of course, gave me access to more films, libraries, magazines, and contacts with more people with whom I could discuss printmaking. At a crucial point, three years into my college teaching career, another artist, much older than I, became a second important mentor. He was approaching almost three times my age.

Most of my oldest teachers are dead now. In fact, when I visited them they were only a few years short of their time to pass on. Now that I am their age, I think about two things. First the most important thing is what to do with the precious time I have left. Did I learn from them what to do when I reached their age? Did the books I read, and the famous quotes by famous dead artists, teach me anything?

The second most important thing I learned is that I’m gonna die. In a blog I read today the author said those three words are the most motivating words there can be. He, too, surrounded himself with old people when he was young.

They said, “I wish…” so this blogger suggested we take this to mean: At the end of your life don’t be saying, “I wish…” but do what you want to do while there is still time.

He emphasized that you seize the idea that’s most important to you. For me, that’s to develop the Northwest Print Center Incubators. If there is a 75 – year old leader out there who had done that kind of thing, I would sure like to meet them.

The problem is, people the same age I am (74) with whom I have described my plan rolled their eyes and changed the subject. It’s not that what they’ve achieved wasn’t worth it; it’s that they don’t understand why I would want to start a printmaking center when we already have art schools and nonprofit printmaking centers in Seattle.

Secondly, they’re not sure what I mean by incubators.

If I could hold their attention long enough I might be able to explain that printmaking, as I see it from a Seattle perspective, has closer ties to technology than is found elsewhere. Moreover, capitalized art that has been the foundation of fine art prints is less relevant to society now than it was 50 years ago.

I owe this to the fact that my contemporaries, that is, people in their 70s, never had the opportunity to get in early when technologies were becoming useful to creative artists. I was lucky because I was the youngest person hired by the University of Washington art school (that is, who was not graduate of that art school)

Also, as I said above, I had a mentor who demonstrated how not to teach, how not to base my teaching only on capitalized art. He was authoritarian which made me want to be authoritative. Meeting my second mentor proved that this was the right thing to do.

Concomitant with that, I had support from the UW engineers in video and computers. Few others in this country had the opportunities I did. If there were a postgraduate school for printmakers, my experience is what it would be like.

Now we come to the point of this essay: If I can’t go find an old mentor to tell me what to do today, then I must turn inward and consult that child within to which some of the oldest and most revered creative artists referred in interviews published in history books and online.

If I am to think like a child in order to find creative solutions to remove the barriers to the Northwest Print Center Incubators, then I have to act out being a child. I have to feel excited about childish things that I can do with printmaking.

Not only that, I have to always be using not only my traditional printmaking but also the things that children are using today simultaneously, such as mobile devices, online games, and different ways of learning things like foreign languages. So much of what is called education today has not kept up with the changing times and the demands placed on young people.

Now as I go through my days, designing the WeeWoodie Rembrandt press and inventing a game that makes it fun to use and fairly simple, I find myself looking on the Internet at children’s games. The little boy and me, the same little boy that used to take apart toys to see what made them tick, or took apart clocks (which never ticked again) find something like a photo polymer stamp making kit interesting.

Thanks to all those old men and women I met early in my career (Glen Alps, Rolf Nesch, Maria Guaita, Stanley Hayter, and my teachers at Central, Reino Randall and Sarah Spurgeon plus all those kids pictured with my many have would press, I wake up and seize that which I want to do before I die—the Northwest Print Center Incubators.

I say, wake up Billy. Rise and shine! Obey the command from their graves.

vp160820 What can the Ritchie family offer Fort Worden?  

Above, postcard based on screenshot from Champion Video's promotional video on Vimeo with the directors' explanation of the long-range plan of Makers Square at Fort Worden.

The perfect Press  

Perfect Press grew out of Bill’s vision of a Perfect Studio. As a teacher, he defined Perfect Studios as, “a place where teaching, research, practice and service all happen under one roof, at the same time.” Perfect Press is the result of his life’s work.Bill Ritchie wants to offer Fort Worden the Perfect Press. The reader may wonder, if they know that Fort Worden’s printmaking facility already has presses, offer a press? True, the the printmaking studio has large presses of the kind found in printmaking workshops and schools all over the world. Bill was a printmaker-in-residence there twenty years ago, and it hasn’t changed much. Bill taught in shops like it for 20 years when he was a printmaking professor; his Perfect Press is a different idea.
The idea of a “perfect press” is not about mechanical things—although presses are machines. He means “press” in the sense of the whole business of publishing—as in, for example, “Copper Canyon Press” already at Fort Worden, or “North Press,” another small press in Port Townsend. The word press is associated with publishing; and hand printmaking is for fine art prints—Bill’s domain-of-expertise.
Perfect press is an idea that grew out of Bill’s vision of a Perfect Studio. As a teacher, he defines Perfect Studios as, “a place where teaching, research, practice and service all happen under one roof, at the same time.”
He learned this the idea from the UW Hospital, known as a “teaching hospital.” The cornerstones of a teaching hospital are Teaching medicine, Researching new medical ideas, and Practicing medicine all at the same time. The acronym he uses is TRPS—Teaching, Research, and Practice with S for “Service.”
For the professor in a state-supported institution of higher education, service to the community is obligatory; Public speaking and sharing of information about printmaking, prints and printmakers was Bill’s job.
Including that what makes teaching hospitals successful could also be applied to art schools—TRPS was Bills offering to the UW Art School. Teaching and sharing with a wide audience beyond the walls of the art building was possible with campus resources (video, computers, grants, consultants, etc.). The UW Instructional Media Services was like PBS in miniature; time on the mainframe gave Bill access to digital technologies, followed with a grant to buy his first Apple PC.
The year 1985, when Bill was a resident at Fort Worden offered by Centrum Foundation, was the year he left the UW on a quest to find the Perfect Studios, a home for the Perfect Press for hand printmaking. The department chairman let him go on his quest, wishing him good luck.
And Lucky Bill was. It took time and sacrifices to learn to navigate the parallel universes of old world printmaking and new technologies. Bill and his wife were able to stay lean, and within another twenty years they had the Perfect Press.
This takes a surprising form. It’s not merely a better, more perfect machine; not a better-engineered machine for doing the same old thing—that is, printmaking for the world of art galleries, museums and collectors. True, it’s beautiful, and beauty was one thing Bill wanted in his Perfect Press. It’s a printing press its owners claim is “a work of art in itself”—lovely to look at with its combination of hand finished wood, steel and brass appointments. If it’s not a work of art, it is a nice piece of craftsmanship and is part of the home, studio and office spaces of almost 200 people around the world.
Twenty years at the UW gave Bill the opportunity—the obligation, really—to drill deep into the meaning of printmaking as an art form—its social and economic impact as well as printmaking’s value as an art form. Most of all, the educational aspect of hand printmaking is what Bill thinks is important—important enough to offer the Perfect Press to strengthen Fort Worden’s new Maker Square initiative.

ps160718 An offer of help: What is the good of money? 

A friend stops in the author’s studio and workshop with a suggestion that if a piece of paper is presented, he can take the investment proposal to someone he believes would finance the startups. This poses a problem because the author is already doing it.

A friend stopped by, and you won’t believe what happened!

A friend stopped by, a man who has been talking with me for three years about the businesses I want to start up. He said if I would write down my business plan, he would show it to somebody who might have money for the startup.

As usual, I was very busy just at that moment, but I couldn't stop thinking about his offer. So I thought to myself, "What would I do with the money?" Here I am, working away, doing my usual mix of activities—multitasking. Now I must add another task to my list: analyze my financial needs.

One approach that occurs to me is to face the fact I'm on the job. I ask myself, "What's my job?" Today I’m creating a one–minute video showing making etched brass badges. This entails a range of skills.

One skill is to start with the design on a computer, using Adobe Illustrator. Every step must be recorded as a video file. Every video file must be organized for the editor, then files must be imported to the video editor. The list of steps goes on and on.

This is my job description for that part of my day. And there's more! Not only do I have to make videos and manage the files, I also have to actually, physically, etch the brass and, on top of that, I have to file more videos my etching procedure. All told, it takes me about eight hours to make a one-minute video—one of about twelve installments—suitable for YouTube or a DVD.

Thinking back to my friend and his offer, I face a dilemma: How can I do my job and still work on an application for money? Moreover, why ask for money?

I read a book titled, "The Mythical Man Month," which explained how by adding manpower (i.e., man-hours or man-months) to a task does not save time and get the task done faster. Adding manpower to a task actually makes the task take longer.

Why is that? It's because of communication, for one thing. Imagine that I must explain to someone how to make the video of using Adobe Illustrator. Not everyone knows how to use Adobe Illustrator. That's a fact. Moreover, not everyone knows how to use a video camera–even a simple webcam or smart-phone version. Then comes file management.

There are the physical tasks, next, such as cutting the metal plate, laminating the laser toner to the metal plate, and all the other steps that I'm describing with my video series.

The solution

To solve my dilemma is to go forward with my incubator idea. Get money to start the incubators and set the stage for training people for meaningful jobs around printmaking, manufacturing the presses for printmaking, and creating support materials that go with the presses and the processes for plates for printmaking.

These tasks are not as mundane as they sound. By that I mean the incubators are set up for fun and games for profit. Taking off from my experience as a teacher, I know that people learn better if they’re playing around, experimenting and solving problems. Extending this fact to the business of manufacturing presses, I arrive at the idea that, by letting younger people incubate the idea (in groups no fewer than three) they can, over time, develop profitable businesses for themselves and a few more people.

But there’s more to this. The man—my friend and I—have been discussing a young woman who has an art history degree from the University of Washington. It seems as though she has a hard time finding a job for which she’s trained and which she likes. Actually, she’s his daughter-in-law.

Her problem is the same for many people who go to art schools, who rack up a big financial debt from student loans, and then go out to find that the only jobs they can get our services such as tending bar, clerking in art supply stores, and waiting tables.

Many of these art school graduates take it in stride, having been taught in art school that they are there to learn to be artists, not to be trained for employment. This translates into the reality of holding down a “day job” so that they can have time to develop their artistic career.

I taught at the University of Washington, and I know the truth of this. What I can offer my friend’s daughter-in-law, the art history major, is a position in an incubator. My incubator is a time-tested method by which college graduates from for example business schools, can get a start to qualify themselves for the business world.

Business students might collectively help each other find internships or, as is popular nowadays, start new businesses. The arts, however, don’t have incubators waiting for graduates from art schools. This is no surprise if you think all art is painting, sculpture, or drawing.

My field, printmaking, is different from those other arts mainly because of technology. Even a simple woodcut requires knowledge of techniques and materials that painters can ignore. Not only that, printmaking is the ancestor of all technologies; this means we can look to new technologies to guide our problem–solving thinking.

What I can offer my friend is an investment in the Northwest Print Center Incubators. The art history graduate can develop a position in one of the incubators. If she finds one or two other people with a similar problem and using new communications methods they exchange ideas, then a new solution might be found.

My job—on top of my daily tasks—is to help.

It may be a reach to connect making brass etchings with art history, and an even further reach to connect art history with a meaningful, well-paid job. But if a startup succeeds, these art majors can own a business! They can work for themselves. There quotes “day job” will not be tending bar, or cleaning homes. There day job will be a meaningful job connected to their college education.

Bill Ritchie plans that printmaking will be taught, researched, and practiced in a community of practice and blends traditional printmaking and new technologies. His press designs and videos are for printmakers globally while he builds local teams to develop the Northwest Print Center and Incubators.

ps160208  Sustainable education art: Origins of STEHM art in the 21st Century  

The author got his first exposure to an alternative history of printmaking when he was an undergraduate student helper in the A/V labs. He provides his account of where he began and where he’s going over the course of fifty years in the arts and teaching.

Bill Ritchie, A/V lab, Central Washington University ca. 1964

Origins of STEHM art in the 21^st Century

Printmaking is the ancestor of all technologies. Although Seattle was the end of the world of printmaking, for me it would be the starting place in my exploration of technology in humanities, science, technology, engineering and math—STEHM.

Technologies for humanities and art interested me beginning in my undergraduate years in college. In the early ‘sixties, technologies only meant photography and rudiments of analog recording and film for me as I was student employee in the campus audio-visual service.

Graduate school provided me with a solid grounding in traditional printmaking and a job in Seattle as an instructor at the University Of Washington. Not much had changed technically, but in my third year at the UW, I flipped.

The epiphany didn’t happen overnight. I spent months in European museums met a few old masters of printmaking; then I understood what was happening. Like the septuagenarians I met—those pioneers of creative printmaking—I had seen the beginnings of technology changing printmaking, printmakers and prints.

I returned to Seattle not only changed as an artist and teacher but also I was a father of two as well. I was energized, and I did not want to shut myself in the old printmaking world. Besides, if I was to help educate young artists who would be developing their careers for decades into the future, I had to do the right thing.

The old baggage of printmaking would not be enough to sustain emerging artists. I felt this more than I knew it. There was no crystal ball, but when I brought video into printmaking, the students saw in the boob tube something portentous. Their video art became prints, and their prints became installations, performance art and sometimes looped back to video.

Similar things happened when we had the university mainframe computers to play with. Next came a mini computer, then microcomputers started showing up in my classes. By that time, computer games were taking more of students’ time and attention; video alone could not compare to multimedia art.

Another survey abroad—this time circling the globe—convinced me the printmaking division had to change. The study of multimedia art could be grounded in traditional printmaking as part of a balanced, sustainable curriculum. The painters—overlords of printmaking—felt otherwise.

My thoughts had reached a different level, and the only way I could proceed was to go outside the institutionalized art world. I had to redirect my work owing to the old, rigid national standards. I had been just a short step from a vanguard place for UW printmaking.

I could not work in an institution without collegial leadership. I would neither lower my sights nor try to change the rules of their games. I would make my own games, and call my new world, Emeralda.

About the Author: Bill Ritchie plans that printmaking will be taught, researched, and practiced in a community of practice and blends traditional printmaking and new technologies. His press designs and videos are for printmakers globally while he builds local teams to develop the Northwest Print Center and Incubators.

A world traveled art professor, a teacher of people of all ages, at eighteen Bill Ritchie took up printmaking the year he left his father's farm. At twenty-five he moved to Seattle to teach at the University of Washington. He is a visionary and innovator—considered by some to be a little edgy. As Seattle is a center of high-tech industries, he challenged students to expand hand printing and incorporate new technologies for education and design.

He extended university-level printmaking education though non-conforming to traditional standards. For over 50 years he exhibited in art exhibitions ranging from traditional visual arts, through electronic arts, to installations and performances. For nineteen years, the University supported his research and enabled him to travel around the world. He writes essays, fiction and screenplays for elucidation and pleasure, but is also included in books, newspapers, newsletters, radio interviews and TV features.

Educated in state universities in Washington and California, he was hired at age 25 to teach art at the University of Washington in Seattle, with emphasis on printmaking. He served as an adjunct professor at The Evergreen State University, University of Oregon, Highline and Shoreline Community Colleges. He extended printmaking to video and computer art. Believing that technologies would be helpful to future teaching cultural arts, he took early retirement at age 44 and started a studio for teaching, research, practice and services. He and his wife bought a gallery in 2008 for a permanent work and exhibition space.

For his visual arts, teaching, research and design he won 67 awards, fellowships, grants and prizes. Fifty-nine events included his participation in honors and his contributions. He had 29 solo shows and participated in 249 mixed visual art exhibitions worldwide with works being collected by 582 individuals and 61 public and corporate collections.

He provided for 113 events in public speaking, consulting and workshops on printmaking techniques and history, new technologies and cultural arts entrepreneurship, many with other artists and designers to develop art installations, computer-aided business models and design, manufacturing, marketing and sales of etching presses and printmaking toys.

ps160617  Dwarf Fortress and Emeralda: It’s all about re-inventing reality 

Reading about the hit video game, “Dwarf Fortress,” the inventor of “Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life,” discovers parallels that inform him how fantasy games reconstruct reality in the minds of video gamers, and how Emeralda has had this use for him.

 When I read about Tarn and Zach Adams—the brothers who created Dwarf Fortress—there were bits of the text written for The Stranger by Kelton Sear that struck a familiar chord. I have nothing like the programming skills of the Adams (nor the Miller brothers who created Myst, nor Richard Garfield of MTG).

Those pioneers of games who inspired me to make Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life are decades younger than I am, therefore it’s natural that they could skip the kind of hands-on, high touch, low-tech arts and crafts that I worked on for a generation before they were born. They had computers and music synthesizers and they knew how to use them.

Yet there is something about games, including collectible card games and computer games that kept the creative fires going in me despite that I don’t code and I don’t play games at all. The strategic back story of collectible card games interests me only a little. These games are all fantasy-based actually, and this fact is boring to me.

I would rather devote my time and energy on strategies with which I can deal with reality. Even if Jane MacGonigal, clarifying her view (shared by most gamers I suppose) that “reality is broken,” I nevertheless prefer real life versus the lives that I observe many people living by their games.

However, as Sear, writing about the Adams brothers for The Stranger offered, “The game is largely about dwarves and the fortresses they build, it’s mostly about life. Or, more accurately, the infinite narrative and experiential possibilities that can arise from the universe’ tangled web of natural laws and the unyielding flow of time time that carries it all forward,” I remembered my similar, parallel description of Emeralda.

Emeralda is about my experiences that I set in motion in 1972, a short story that began what is today a forty-four year narrative. The documents I made offer me an infinity of experiential possibilities that arise from the web of events that flowed over the time of my life. On my computers and a variety of media are documents about artworks, photos, ephemera, text and electronic recordings. That I have managed to keep Emeralda alive for so long is a wonderment.

From the mid-nineties, when the web came along and I was learning how to use it I wished I could be like the Millers, Garfield, the Adams and other game masters so that I could put Emeralda into a form that other people could play with it the way people play with Dwarf Fortress. The difference is that Emeralda is about real things—works of art, for example.

The nearest I came to realizing this wish was when I had coffee with two family attorneys to show them my Perfect Studios trilogy, and how the books were intended to be foundations for families of artists to insure that the artist’s legacy would not be lost. Instead, because of the design of the game, the artists’ legacy would be in a form prepared to transfer by selling or otherwise placing the works of art in some kind of socially and artistically beneficial way.

In this way, Emeralda is an artist’s legacy management and transfer system. It might be economically beneficial to the artist’s heirs would be a plus; and there was a strong possibility that the community might benefit, too, utilizing the economic valuation of the work and establishing nonprofit, charitable trusts or foundations. That’s what I plan for my legacy.

Emeralda is a lonely game—like playing Solitaire. Sears said that Dwarf Fortress is not as well-known as it should be. A Dwarf Moot was held a few days ago, and Richard Garfield was there to add his support, lauding the game and its creators.

“How could a game so influential and groundbreaking be so obscure?” quoting one DF player. Occasionally I hear that my nineteen years at the UW were influential, yet not as well-known as Dwarf Fortress, of course. If Emeralda were to be downloadable and families of artists used it, that would be my crowning glory.

vp160601 Inspired by a new guy in town: Taking the chill off Seattle 

Several emails exchanged with a newcomer to the Seattle printmaking world, hired by the Henry Gallery to be print curator and programming person, reminds this author of the days when he was a professor at the UW, and how he welcomed Stephen Hazel to town.

Inspiration

Several emails passed between me and a newcomer to the Seattle printmaking world. He was hired by the Henry Gallery to be the print curator and programming person. The first time I approached him I was reminded of the days when I was a professor at the UW, and I welcomed Stephen Hazel and his entourage.

I think it’s only proper to welcome new people who practice in your field, but in the decades I’ve lived here, I have learned that it is exceptional to do so. People talk about the “Seattle Chill,” referring to the fact this is a generally unfriendly place for newcomers.

He’s lived here a year this month, but I didn’t learn about it until last winter, and then I introduced myself to him at the Seattle Print Arts annual meeting. I gave him my card and invited him to come and visit. He never did. Yet, I really wanted to get to know him—I had never met a print curator for any museum in Seattle.

It often occurs to me that it is strange that, if there are print curators at the Seattle Art Museum, the Frye, or in Tacoma, they never seek me out despite that I am the oldest printmaker in the region (with few exceptions) but moreover, a former professor of art in printmaking. Not only that, I’ve traveled around the world and I have met and worked with some of the old, famous printmakers, studied at the Munch Museum, and accumulated a long list of shows and the rest of the things that make for an interesting background.

Could it be that this huge resume of mine is the very reason I feel like a pariah—someone to be avoided because, as Linda Farris once said to me, “You’re too big.” Are people afraid of me, feeling perhaps that they are unworthy? Pshaw!

I’m inspired to do emails with this new guy mainly because he seems untainted by the local printmaking history. He probably doesn’t care about the history of jealousies and grudges that I know about (and try not to care about). I hope he is bigger than that, and if he wants to accomplish great things in Seattle, he probably can if—for one reason—he comes from the outside and is not dependent on local favors.