os190328 Structure for collaboration - A life insurance policy for hope 

If printmaking were not therapeutic, would I be in such great health? My mental and physical health is good and it’s partly because I have spent about fifty years in the arts and, specifically, printmaking. You would not think, to watch me over the course…

“A structure for collaboration is like a life insurance policy for hope.” – Rosabeth-Moss Kanter

If printmaking were not therapeutic, would I be in such great health? My mental and physical health is good and it’s partly because I have spent about fifty years in the arts and, specifically, printmaking.

You would not think, to watch me over the course of a day, that I am an artist, however, because I don’t fit the stereotype of artist. I do not socialize with other artists. I do not attend openings and visit art museums and galleries.

If one asks me about this – as recently a woman did – I comment that I don’t really like the art world with which she is familiar. It must have sounded odd to me, surrounded as we were, standing in our family’s art gallery, with art!

I assume she would not understand, and I assume she’s not really interested because I have found peoples’ interest in the arts in the United States goes only as far as consumers. Analysis of art and its relation to the world situation is not interesting.

To me art is nothing if not something for analysis. A physicist (or is he a mathematician?) Richard Feynman, believed artists have nothing because their work cannot be measured, its matter measured in terms of Naturally-occurring phenomena and substances.

He’s correct, for the most part. However, the report of art can be measured, thanks to computers and the internet because art has emotional, sensual value and addresses that coffee-bean-sized part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

I will illustrate with the example of a web-based acquaintance who has recently come into my sphere of awareness (again, thanks to the Internet). We met because of a mutual appreciation for the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teaching Prize given to Peter Tabichi.[i]

Her name is Rewana Nduchwa (“You can call me May.”) and she the CEO of Chabana Farms, a farmers’ cooperative in Botswana. She noticed my comment on the announcement of Father Tabichi’s award. I had been following this award because the Global Teacher Prize matches my concept of the Gates Prize. In my comment I related this prize to my own invention of The Gates Prize.

This led to May mentioning she’s coming to Seattle in May to be part of an accelerator, Fledge and since then we’ve been exchanging notes online. Her current focus is bees because she wants to extend Chabana’s product line of honey and Fledge is investing in this, supporting her continuing education so as to increase the market for the honey.

By doing this, Chabana creates jobs and may even help solve a problem which farmers contend with: Elephants. Botswana has the greatest elephant population in Africa, and they maraud the farmers’ fields. Imagine what this means: Cereals is one of the products Chabana offers, and cornfields are a favorite of elephants. Elephants fear bees, so if there are beehives around the cornfields, perhaps the elephants will not trample the cornstalks.

My job, as a teacher, is to bring printmaking into education as a learning experience, so I suggest we form a strategic partnership and explore putting printmaking in Chabana’s marketing plan. Using our Mini Halfwood Press model, Chabana can produce prints designed around bees and elephants, deeply-embossed and colorful images printed on elephant-dung paper. The printing is carried on as entertainment, and the prints themselves are offered to tourists who use Botswana’s safari industry as souvenirs.

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[i] The winner of the 2019 US $1 million prize was announced on stage by movie star Hugh Jackman. Peter was chosen from our top 10 finalists who come from all corners of the globe. From teaching in remote towns and villages to inner-city schools, they advocate for inclusivity and for child rights, integrate migrants into the classrooms, and nurture their students’ abilities and confidence using music, technology, robotics and science. Peter has dedicated his life to helping others. He gives 80% of his teaching salary to local community projects, including education, sustainable agriculture and peace-building. He’s changed the lives of his students in many ways, including the introduction of science clubs and the promotion of peace between different ethnic groups and religions. He has also helped to address food insecurity among the wider community in the famine-prone Rift Valley.

mr190327 The value of the moment 

An Emeralda Clue 

Searching for the game play and mechanic of Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life, the Emeralda warrior sees for split second the possibility that the moment, as can be applied to a new print which has a moment number on it, is negotiable on the web. Two …408 Words
I am always searching for the game play and mechanic of Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life. It’s my job as the Emeralda warrior. I saw, for split second, the possibility that the moment, as can be applied to a new print which has a moment number on it, is negotiable on the web.I’m reminded of the murder mystery when the investigators attempt to determine the time of death of the victim, only in my world it is the time of life, the moment when the proof is pulled from the plate.How can I share this game mechanic research? I know that in order to win the game, I have to invent it, as invention is part of being an artist and a public intellectual.Two challenges lie before me: One, my former students, Carl Chew and Norie Sato, have an embarrassment of riches in artworks, unsold and apparently unwanted. Two, a woman in Africa named Rewanda Ka Nduchwa, wants to put worker bees and people to work, an investment in labor.These challenges are put before me by my author, who, as Amy Tan described it:“So, let me rephrase: I am the author of a novel told by doppelgänger in possession of my thoughts, who inserts her subconscious into my subconscious, which is rather like being unaware that someone has deftly slid her hands into mine. My hands are not the ones tapping the keyboard, although I still believe they are, and these words you are reading are entirely hers, which I still believe are mine.”
My “author” is that muse whom I described lives in the chips of the computers I have used for forty years – since 1979 when I got an Apple 2+, who uncovers words that are already there.
I trust the day will present the game mechanic on a day and in such a way as to solve the problems of Norie, Carl and Mavis (as Rewanda is known sometimes). Because it is true – the people I meet, whether real or virtually, are chief among the gifts of life.

os190308 The old man leans back  

Art student fantasies

The old man sits down in his favorite easy chair and reaches for his pipe and tobacco. He fills it, lights up and leans back. His canvas is in front of him, glistening with freshly-applied paint strokes, bright in the morning light filtering in over the north-facing, sloping windows. Somewhere a crow caws.

It’s good, he’s thinking. Yes. Good. Thoughts of his upcoming show flit through his mind, mentally anticipating this painting and others displayed under bright lights in the gallery. People gather around him, congratulating him and sipping their wine as he answers questions.

He draws on his pipe. It’s such a good life, living on one’s art this way. It’s been worth it. Fifty years of struggle. True, there were hard times, but it’s been worth it.

Or, picture this.

With a clap of her hands the lights flash on and there, before her, is her latest project – a water-treatment facility in Sacramento. A long, curving wall, 360-feet wrapping around a huge reservoir wall.

This may be my best yet, she’s thinking. Or, maybe that airport in Dallas. No, this is better. People can actually get up close and see the details. Yes. This is my best.

Or this:

Every time he sees a Tesla, there is his masterpiece – that tail-light he struggled and fought for.

Or this:

She always buys that brand of cottage cheese because every time she opens the refrigerator door, there’s her art!

These fantasies were inspired by the news yesterday that the Seattle branch of the Art Institute franchise shut its doors in the face of the students who had enrolled there. I’m tempted to say it serves them right, but I cannot because we paid tuition to AIS when our younger daughter enrolled.

She got out, but not without scars that would affect her for the rest of her life. And my wife and I, too. We were sold by their marketing and sales staff. So, too, were parents and adults who wanted a career in art and bought into their program – paying outrageous tuition fees and investing uncounted dollars in supplies and lost wages.

When I read the news, I thought of the time in California when the great exposition was finished and they furloughed all the craftsman – carpenters, masons, etc. – and Sam Goldman hired them to come down to southern California to build the sets for a great film.

Six-hundred fifty students, the news report said, were shut out of AIS. Some were foreign students, and they will have to go home if some alternative school is not located where they can enroll in a hurry and continue their program.

What a waste of talent. Even a minimally-talented art student has value if they have a dream. Unfortunately, their dreams are only that – dreams and fantasies about what they think is an art career for them in fashion design, film-making, digital arts and etcetera.

While it’s true some of them will find jobs more or less like they imagined are waiting out there (like my new customers, the Anderson/Medaus), few will live their dreams.

There is no such thing as a career, said one of my former students. It’s she and her account of the 360-foot wall that I used, above, to imagine what a student is thinking. Her remark was meant to underline the fallacy put forward by marketers of art schools.

Her point was that advanced education, if it involves art, merely gives students a different mindset, a peculiar way of seeing things sometimes.

Another one of my former students said, “But that was always the case . . . that place [AIS] was a dumping ground for alienated tattooed kids who hated their parents and had some juvenile idea of making it big in the arts . . . the initial partial scholarships sets the hook, makes the parents proud and the kid into a believer that they actually had talent . . . you and I know that the BFA kids end up working at an art supply store or a frame shop . . . most never earn enough to pay back the $100K loan.”

What would I do, the reader may ask. What makes me think I have a better vision? True, I am old, like the old painter in my opening fantasy. In my ‘teens I envisioned myself designing record-jackets and movie posters. What changed my mind was the lifestyle of my college professors. They seemed to have a secret, what I came to understand was a mind.

My mentor suggested I teach college art because it was a life of the mind besides a life of making nice designs and interesting objects of art. Besides, there was a war going on, and I’d be drafted if I tried to get a job in the design field.

My mind is still living, and I would suggest to those 650 orphaned students that they should scrape away the scales from their eyes, take off their rose-colored glasses and do what industrial leaders have done to get themselves in the position where they can collect $22,000 tuition fees from a targeted age group with stars in their eyes.

Everyone does it in a consumer society. It’s the leaders in a producing society who are smart enough to survive. If I could sell those orphans on opening a productive company aimed at doing something for a needy country like the USA to help save Earth’s human life sustainability through education, I’d be worthy of the name of professor, or at least a public intellectual.

Yes, I’d convince them, if possible, to startup my International Print Center Incubators, something even Elon Musk or what’s-his-name, the guy that started amazon, wouldn’t have thought possible.

It’s in the balance, Al Gore said, and getting deeper in shit, I think.

vp190304 A contest to win  

Playing Emeralda one day I came upon a PowerPoint dated March 31, 2009 which described the game design for a teaching printmaking online User Experience, or UX.

On the same day I wrapped up a survey of essays I wrote between 2010 and 2019, preparing for the next publication of my anthology, Ritchie Mined, volume 2.

The two are connected, because in my idle time I can enter six digits in the search window and the built-in search engine in Windows will pull up any matching string. This time I played the game using only the last two numbers, 1-31, and today’s first four of ten years ago, i.e., 0903.

It’s part of my ongoing search for a UX for teaching printmaking online. Meanwhile, Jen Graves is on my mind because I listened to her 60-minute talk from Smoke Farm last year, and she mentioned the public intellectual.

She inferred there is the campus intellectual and the public intellectual. I distinctly remembered coming across these two types not long after I resigned, and how it boosted my hopes that there might still be a place for me in the world of the mind.

The big difference between Jen Graves and I is that she is a print-based intellectual who loves and depends upon the physical substance of reading matter, while I am accepting of the intangible mediums of carrying on among humanity. I adopted an imaginary muse named Media for that reason, a playmate as it were, to help me in my loneliness.

Once cut off from the printed newspaper – the Stranger – Jen migrated to another profession, it seems. Once I was cut off from the campus at the UW, it freed me to apply myself to becoming the public intellectual I identified with a long time ago when I first heard the expression.

Fortunately, I do not rely on the tangibles – such as Jen Graves’ column in the newspaper. Such tangibles cannot be depended on in this world, particularly in the USA with its self-destructive bent. I like the tangibles of my work, and I take care of them, but I’m prepared to see them go into the landfill with little remorse.

Nevertheless, I would still like to have met Jen and her kids. Now she is well into a new career – like I was in the late 1980’s. As we both continue to carry the burden of Nuclear Integrative Fantasies, we’re repelled by one another if the truth were known.

Meanwhile, I have my game – or, as in the lyrics of a song that comes back to me, “I have my books and my poetry to protect me.” My poetry is one of dumb hope, a fantasy world where a professor’s musings are a component of a teaching printmaking method designed for online and real learning, a teacher-in-a-box.

If there were a contest for such, I would win, hands-down!

es090405 Dear Former Students: A professor asks his former students to be his board of advisers   

For years I have watched people who used to be art students at the UW as they became good citizens as well as fine artists, craftspeople, designers, teachers and professionals in various important functions in our communities. I need their advice on ELPO.

©2009 Bill Ritchie - 1231 Words - 3 Pages

Dear Former Students,

Writing to you is timely in the sense that I considered doing this for decades, literally. Since the time you were in college, and you made contributions to my life in ways you may never have fully realized, I knew the day would come I would write this letter to you, my former students.

You helped me when I was a professor learning teaching, the arts, technologies and politics of the walled-in institutions of universities, museums and art galleries.

When I left the UW campus, you continued to give support in the ways you played your own tune, making marvelous lives for yourselves based, maybe, on things you picked up in school when I knew you. I might flatter myself and think I taught you some things that you needed for your successes, but I know better.

The truth is we had a community going in college, and the essence of community leaked out into life after the university. I never shut down my community work, and I am writing to you at this time because I have reached a stage in my professional life that’s something like a post-doctoral stage. If there were a university for me, I’d be boning up for my finals.

You, my formers students—having been around the block many more than a few times—would be my examination board. If I pass the next hurdle—in your collective judgement—I think we will experience a great satisfying feeling to add to our lives’ works.

Here is the deal. To reach the goal of a great teacher, I need and want to take my offerings online, in ways and shapes and forms apposite to these times. I will teach printmaking online; and I will do so in a what is called—by academics—blended learning. It’s a mix of distance learning and face-to-face workshops. I’ve been working on it since 1980.

It has been an interesting goal to work toward, and the idea is rooted in our years at the UW. What I need now is a board of advisors—people like yourself who are artists, craftspeople and designers who have proven yourselves in ways surpassing perhaps even your own expectations. I think I need a core of a dozen former students with your experience and insights as professionals, community servants, members of nuclear families and homeowners and—a few of you—parents.

A board of advisors can help me refine factors that teachers and professors need to sort out the right things to bring our following. The arts have important contributions to solve the nation’s and the world’s problems in the name of creativity. Distance learning is creative, and blended learning in higher education is a way to bring arts education to more people.

Looking back, I think we met at a fortunate moment, you and I, when it wasn’t so difficult to have traditional art studio classrooms. We had it all, I think—safe, relatively inexpensive and open-ended learning and productive facilities. I made the most of the freedom and security of my nineteen years at the UW.

Today, when I set foot on campus or hear the stories of art teachers, I feel like Rip Van Winkle, wakening to a world so vastly different they make me go back to sleep. I think, compared to the old days, teaching art is nightmarish.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I don’t think people—at any stage of their lives, whether they are traditional-age college students or people late in their lives—have to give up their jobs, move away or make long commutes, and spend inordinate amounts of time and resources to study and produce in the printmaking domain. And I would try not to teach people to do things that will require sacrifices of money for oversized equipment and unnecessary baggage typical of 20^th Century printmaking.

You can help this enterprise, to make printmaking online real, get it out and on the street as it were. You can help me by examining my plan, advising me, and connecting me with other people and agents of change who want to develop the best parts of what we launched in college and have practiced over the past forty years in our own ways.

You may be wondering, “What do you want?” Have a meeting?

That would be nice, if we can agree that what I am doing justifies taking your time.

What would be the focus of the meeting?

Money, undoubtedly.

Do I want your money? No, you’ve paid enough, I think, but Other Peoples’ Money (OPM) is the goal I have in mind.

What is the money for? Blended learning as a solid, credible offering takes money to shape into ways that fit the expectations of potential learners. The details take time, and specialists who can do the work will be paid in the course of making blended learning printmaking work.

It is with a tinge of guilt and remorse that I have not kept in close contact with you, seldom attending art openings, limiting my social life, and not publishing my work so most former students do not know what I’m up to. I wish you did, but it all takes time; and, for you, school was out decades ago.

Schoolish matters don’t concern you so much, for only a handful of you are teachers, and only a few of you have kids in schools; you are probably more concerned over the high costs and outcomes than being involved in talking higher education or distance learning with your old professor.

Since the year I started teaching—1966—my philosophy has been that education is mankind’s most enduring and—speaking of the language of our times—recession-proof industry. I’m glad I took on that mantra, because I feel like someone just starting out, like a freshman—on a new experience. The Rip Van Winkle effect isn’t so bad, the way I see it. It’s fun, in fact.

I want to share it with you. I want to talk about how, for example, Second Life—the current pop virtual world—might be a way to teach printmaking. If you were on my board of advisors, you could either prove I’m wrong or you could see this idea has something to offer you, personally, and to the community at large.

I’m a hundred words over my limit of writing a thousand a day, so I must end with a request: communicate with me on this subject, blended learning printmaking for the future. How would you proceed, if you were me?

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About the Author: Professor Bill Ritchie taught printmaking and media arts who took early retirement to start a learning, research and production company. His goal is a teaching studio for the 21^st Century printmaker, blending printmaking and digital arts. Code-named Emeralda: Learn Printmaking Online (ELPO) it is comprised of three elements: A mini-etching press, periodic meetings, and a digital game-based interface.

ap190223 Touching the past, feeling the future  

Recently I was in touch with a former student. I met him in the mid-1970’s and we have seen each other and talked together many times since then. We’re not close friends, but we are close enough that he invites us to his family affairs. I’ve worked in his studio. I’ve even walked in his shoes, literally!

He commented on a Facebook page, referring to his student days with his compliments. His daughter is now an art major – like he was – in the same school, the UW School of Art. I told him about my Mr. Chips syndrome – a feature of my NIF (Nuclear Integrative Fantasy).

He’s thinking about a reunion for the benefit of his daughter and her peer group of art students. It would be a get together to talk about the past and how students of the past fifty years have used their education.

Thinking about this, I came to a memory of a book he and his peer group made – a report from a lower-classman seminar. I searched for this book on my shelf and as I did so I had an epiphany. I wanted to touch this book, take it from the shelf, and be reminded of his work and the work of his classmates.

It wasn’t on the shelf, however. It may be in my studio across the street. I may look for it later. The feeling, the epiphany, lingered. It was the same feeling one gets in a museum, seeing artifacts from the past and the mind wandering to these places and times mentally reconstructing what people were thinking and doing then.

There is a kind of distortion, however, a lack of focus. In film special effects, there’s one in which they try to convey this flash back with wavy distortions or soft focus, color shifts and camera angles to simulate time out of time.

My friend is thoroughly in the world of art and the art museum, volunteering his time to do docent and guide work there. He has produced thousands of artworks and traveled back and forth to Russia in pursuit of his art and teaching. His life has been quite amazing, as one can see on the Internet in articles about his work.

Now he’s proposing a reunion, as he believes his work at the UW School of Art was the beginning of it all and, like any parent (myself included) he wants the best for his daughter.

My epiphany lingers long enough for me to begin this essay, but there is more. For one thing, if I were to think his path could be similar to his daughter’s, for one thing there would be no underclass seminar for her.

I don’t have to touch this book to be reminded of the circumstance of that seminar. My mind needs no tactile contact. He has a copy of the same book, in fact, because I gave him an extra around the time his daughter was born almost a generation ago.

What I’m reminded of is what I consider a better student experience than what I think his daughter will experience.

I am making a mistake in thinking so, however, because I see the world partly through that old frame of reference which Einstein warns us is an error in thinking. He made the comment in reference to solving problems.

Are we to think about solving problems?

In the days I created the seminar, the problem was that there were inadequacies in the curriculum. Management, for example – what is called professional practices today – was non-existent. My friend took up the matter of framing art with cost-cutting methods. Another student team took up papermaking.

Are the curricular offerings at the UW School of Art adequate today to prepare his daughter for forty years of living? What is the frame of reference? Is it different today than in 1976?

I think so. A comparative study should include, for example, climate change and socio-political issues and the artist’s relation to them. Consider, for example, money to live on and develop security enough to make art.

I’ve got mine, but what are her chances, at the age of seventy-seven, or, her father’s at age sixty-seven, to be in a position like ours?

Later in the morning I returned to this essay. As it was in he midst of my work – which consisted of updating several files for the Internet. As I worked – moving my cursor over my logic tree, opening and closing directories, updating pages in Dreamweaver – I thought again about her.

Could she follow what I’m doing, if watching over my shoulder? Could my former student? What questions would arise?

It should occur to both that I’m doing something their schooling did not, and is not, preparing them for. I call it Legacy Management.

There is a broken link in the line of education where we hold something in common: The UW School of Art. I was on the path I was on up until 1985. My former students were left behind in some areas but stayed on the path of convention.

I did not fit in, and I do not fit in today. Much as I might like to share in community development where the arts and technology offer his daughter a path she can follow and a path she can trust, it’s not likely.

sp190210 Why Martin’s 3D etching press is not enough

Martin Schneider’s design of a downloadable/upload-able deliverable assemble-able and functional etching press is a breakthrough for sure. Now teachers can have a model to work with, both as an exercise in 3D printing and, taken further, an enabler to make prints using the press.

https://openpressproject.com/

There is more to do, however, to make the design thoroughly effective for people – young and old. It needs a culture of interaction with other people. Printmaking has a unique character which other art forms do not have – social development.

Since its invention, when prints first became a faster, easier way to make one’s mark as a hand print on a stone wall of a cave underground or under an overhanging cliff, it opened human interaction on a massive scale.

The hand-made paintings adjacent to the hand prints in caves were no less important, but the prints hinted at mechanization. They were the first algorithms! The use of a stencil (the hand) or a relief printing method (the hand smeared with pigment) was, like an algorithm, a way to solve a problem. It worked uniformly across the spectrum of humans. It was an innovation.

Unlike the signature paintings of the caves and the famous signature of a Rembrandt, the print made a statement: I am. Anyone could do it. It was a mechanical invention and led eventually to the printing press. The rest is history.

Mechanization takes command, however, when the human interaction is not in the mix. For example, I think of this when I throw out junk mail sent to me. The sender is not a human, thinking, “Bill would like to see this – I’ll send it to him.” The sender is mechanization in a multitude of steps.

When my email includes invitations to sign up for a political movement or buy a new car, it is not human interaction. To me, it’s dehumanized, and fully mechanized media having taken command.

I liked the article in School Arts magazine about Martin’s press, and the teacher’s description of the way the kids made printing plates using 3D printing. But it is not enough because the prints go nowhere. They have no point in creating human interaction of the scale I hope for with my concept of Proximates.

In a more humanistic effort, the prints those kids make would be part of Proximates, registered in an Internet system like a social medium, each moment becoming part of a vast database of times-and-places when and where the prints were made.

I would like American kids to have a personal acquaintance with kids elsewhere and an idea about other kids’ situations – their needs and wants, their hopes for a better world and how their education is preparing them to take part in helping Earth’s human and other life sustainability.

That’s what I mean when I say Martin’s press can only go so far as a valuable teaching and learning experience. For my part I am searching for a cohort to help me achieve my goal of blending the printmaking experiences of people with connecting with other people on a human, enriching manner through time and space.

I want to make the climaxing moment that a print is made as the beginning of a human interaction and understanding all over the whole wide world web of humanity.