ps140509 Growth Tip Revisited: Finding our way in difficult times  

Arms too weak—a dream analysis 

In my 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 defined

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 hard stuff. 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 us graduate students in art to focus our energy and our minds similarly as to what the students in engineering or science must.

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 the feeling that 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 continue trying 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 today. I seem to be getting nowhere in my ten-year plan for the International Print Center Incubators and Workplaces, for example, and maybe it’s a concept not appropriate to these times.

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.” In two years, we will form the Ritchie Foundation based on our “stock,” our family art collection.

Dependent

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

 

vi191009 Welcome to my printmaking world -

Where prints are smart 

The printmaking world, according to my lights, is a world where prints are the highest form of intelligence. I learned about such things from a friend of mine, Carl Chew, whose Stamp World was one where artistamps are the highest form of intelligence.

The distribution of 240 Halfwood Presses worldwide.

Many people think that prints belong in the art world, where artworks are the highest form of intelligence. The fact is, artworks in and of themselves have no intelligence at all, let alone high – or low, for that matter. To exist at all, artworks must be given print forms.

The difference between art and prints is negotiation. Prints are negotiable, whereas artworks are not – not without the introduction of prints. For an artwork to be negotiated – that is, transferred from one entity to another – requires mediation.

Generally, art cannot be experienced without mediation – a photograph or digital image, for example – which are prints. I would include plane tickets or museum admission tickets. Such prints – both physical and/or digital – mediate between the art and he or she who experiences it. Print includes text, such as descriptors, textbooks and magazine articles.

Prints that are considered fine art migrate easily into and out of the digital media. Prints are experienced as hanging on walls or in folios. As most prints are on paper, they are highly portable, being mostly of small scale. This is negotiability – the ability to be transferred and exchanged.

Paintings, on the other hand, are less so. That’s why painters make prints – the costs to the buyer being less and the prints themselves more readily shipped to multiple destinations.

The negotiability doesn’t end there because a number of people can experience and own a print from a publication – each print like every other print but varying inasmuch they were printed in succession. Two things are notable about this – one is that they may vary and, two, an invisible link is made among people who have examples of the print.

Stephen Hazel, a twentieth century artist, wrote a paper titled, “The Print is in 4-Space” in which he described this phenomenon as a kind of community-building. However, he didn’t develop this observation – it remained for me to extend into the digital age. He died before he could participate fully in the print as part of the Internet, the so-called IoT, the Internet of Things, defined by Wikipedia as:

“A system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.”

How is this of value to people who need and want prints to be part of both the print world and the art world? The answer lies in economics – the negotiability of prints not only in the sharing of cost-free exchange, such as on an artist’s website where people can experience the visual character of the print, but two economic worlds: experience and creative.

The experience economy is in the replacement of physical objects for sale to the experience around objects. For example, the business models of Build-A-Bear or eating in a restaurant that’s supposed to be in a jungle setting.

The creative economy is business models that rely on artists of all stripes to attract commerce – such as a city boasting of an art district, or a neighborhood that erects an unusual playground to attract visitors.

The print world offers both experience and creativity, making it a world where one’s intellect is stimulated and rewarded easily as well as offering a potential for development of experiences and creativity.

The global map above is my example. It shows locations of owners of etching presses I designed and helped build and sell – the presses themselves capable of making prints for the printmaking world. The owners of the presses are “linked” in the sense that Stephen Hazel postulated and, furthermore, are potential instruments of further extending the scope of the printmaking world.

vp190831 Sharing my world: What remains of my life 

Making use of lessons learned

In a paper by a professor I read that one of the things students hate about professors is that they assign the text he or she authored as reading for the course. “It’s conceit,” was the phrase that stuck in my mind.
This answers my curiosity as to why people at a recent gathering of the Seattle Print Arts registered dismissive expression when I told the group several volumes of my autobiography were available on amazon now – and that these covered the years to generations ago when I was at the UW.
Many of those at the meeting were graduates of the UW, and a few from those years. It was, I felt, not interesting to anyone there; in fact, I felt a sense of dismissal. The article where the professor said students thought it conceited that a teacher wrote the book for the class helped explain the reaction by the SPA members gathered there.
The professor also mentioned a series of books published in the 1980s and 90s which were critiques of US Higher Education and that help understand the problems we have with college today – high tuition costs, for one thing, and loss of the arts and humanities sectors.
There’s no point now in defending myself for my teaching. It’s what I did most of my teaching career and failed. I resigned from UW because I was fired from teaching printmaking, and that’s that. The story is in my memoirs, and I’m glad I write them despite few people will read it; and it’s water under the bridge.
What good is it? There is one good, and that would be that people today can learn from the mistakes made by people in the past and then not be condemned to live the errors over again. I hope young teachers never live through the experience I did; but it’s not likely they will, as the future of printmaking teaching jobs is in question.
What remains of my life that’s of use is not lessons to newly hired printmaking teachers into institutions of higher learning, but what is to be learned from the past fifteen years of my career. I say fifteen years because 2004 was when I detected an alternate universe to that which I was part of in the first twenty years of my art and teaching career.
In 2004, I did not design a simpler, smaller, and extensible printing press – the Mini Halfwood – with the purpose of extending printmaking. It was a joke. The press was a charmer, and people saw something in the design they liked for themselves. They wanted to buy it!
In 2016 had to withdraw from the work of making and marketing the press as my physical and mental limits have been shown to me – plus the failure of American democracy; but it remains to be seen what could be achieved if other people would extend the concept of an alternative printmaking world.
If not in the USA, then somewhere else.
Printmaking Access
I don’t have much time left but following are the four principles I pursue now and wish that I could share with people in the SPA who have concerns about the future of printmaking as it may be important in the world their youngsters are facing.
The first principle is fun.
The second principle is social.
The third principle is STREAMable
The fourth principle is economic.
All the above are topics I am working on, and they are summed up in two words: Printmaking Access.

vp190821 Why take a MOOC-making MOOC? Loneliness of the innovator - 

My dream of teaching 

I’m taking a MOOC in making a MOOC. It’s lonely and sometimes I think it’s pointless. It’s like being in a prison cell, in solitary, and daily they feed you a special formula and you eat it because it’s all there is to eat. And you’re not sure it’s good for you or wasting you.

I feel like writing about it, as though I’m on a therapist’s couch. It’s no wonder. I want to teach, but teaching is outmoded, obsolete and in some cultures in the USA, frowned upon. Especially disliked are new modes of teaching such online learning; these are unwelcome in large educational institutions.

Except those like Harvard, Stanford and MIT where they are less afraid to strike out into untested areas such as Massively Open Online Courses. I’m taking a MOOC so I can measure myself against these kinds of institutions.

These have pooled their resources – including money – to develop MOOCs in their specialties – except in the arts. In Humanities they have developed a few courses, but not in the applied arts such as my field – printmaking.

I am hoping to change this be reinventing printmaking as a technology so that it fits more of the existing MOOCs out there. The fundamental invention is the element of printmaking access, i.e., a press. In my plan, one must have not only a computer and a connection to the Internet, but also access to a press – preferable one designed to complement the MOOC.

My plan goes further than learning how to make an etching for ones’ fun and pleasure. My aim is to take the unheard-of step of pointing to an area of education I care about – STEM. I plan to tweak this by adding Reading and Art to make it STREAM.

There’s more. I want to create a channel for interaction among the people who take the MOOC with a type of social network where they share their work. MOOCs already have forums and other means to exchange images of work and videos, too.

Mine, however, is more specific in that it uses a “moment number” referring to the time and place where the printmaking took place. The intention is to create a virtual world where the highest form of intelligence is the print, date-stamped and including the GIS numbers to give other people a street view of the location where the print originated.

While attention around MOOCs has died down over the past decade, the Coursera company seems to have found a business model for free courses with something it calls Specializations. They’re essentially partial graduate degrees, on the cheap, requiring students to take a series of month-long courses on a focused topic such as data science.

I say, how about printmaking? Although the material is free to anyone to watch, students must pay a fee per course—usually about $70—for a verified certificate proving they successfully worked through it.

I take it further. They must build a press, etch the plate, print the plate (including the paper preparation) and participate in Proximates, the dedicated forum for sharing prints and back stories.

That means these newfangled microdegrees – or Mini MFAs - cost only a few hundred dollars in total.

Beyond that, I take the course to promoting jobs. With this degree, the highest level is the business plan to use the skills (and the press) to start small business selling services such as Sip ‘N Print and Build-A-Press workshops.

But, alas, I’m still in solitary and no one to talk to, no one to share my idea. Back in the days when I was at the UW, I used to find people to tell my ideas to and no matter how wild my ideas were, I usually could find someone to share it with. That was before the ban against new ideas that challenged the leaders’ minds.

ps190718 When an artist dies: The flight of his body of work 

 When an artist dies, the event should be like the soul leaving the body in an artistic way. Some people have told stories and made movies and TV shows depicting the soul departing. Ghost comes to mind. The artist put their soul in their work, and it should fly out like that.

Marvin Oliver was – and is – an artist. I didn’t know him. I may have seen him in the early 1970s because he worked on his MFA degree at the UW, graduating in 1973. If he took a printmaking class, which is unlikely because he was probably in the sculpture program, then his name might be in my database of former students.

He died recently. I read that he was on the faculty at the UW art school. I was a little surprised because I didn’t know him. He taught there from 1974 on, and still I never met him. He was associated with Native American Studies. Stonington Gallery shows he made screen prints besides glass art and mixed media sculpture.

I wonder, what is it about the UW where two people like myself and Marvin Oliver never met? Why is it that I am only finding out about him now? Is it because I’m white and he’s Native? The closest I came to know a Native American artist was when I met and worked briefly with Edward Raub.

Was I being the acquisitive white man, frankly wanting his help to validate my story about the carver who made a halfwood press in his or her own native way?

When I met Edward and warned him, I would take advantage of him, he joked, “It wouldn’t be the first time.” I was innocent, not taking into account his and his people’s history with us white invaders. How deep the feelings run I will never know.

I justify my actions because I meant to work as an artist, to collaborate with Ed. I did work, too, more perhaps than Edward realizes. But why should he care? In the end, we cashed out – I sold the press and paid him what was probably a minimum wage - $750 for his carving and another $50 for his share of the sale of his paddle (which I paid him $150 for, and framed it).

When I die, like Marvin Oliver, and when Edward Raub dies, it should not be left as an article in the local newspaper and a Facebook notice. Death of an artist in the digital, Internet age should not be passive. The event should be like a spring unwinding, our souls may leave the body quietly, but our art should blossom out into the Internet like a persistent online interactive game – a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

That is what I have in mind.

Marvin Oliver, thank you for reminding me, and nudging me toward the realization of my vision of an artists asset management and legacy transfer game.

sp190710 Reason 8 for ARTISTSCRIP  

No more time 

Time is like real estate, there is no more of it. In our life we showed enough wisdom to invest in real estate over other peoples’ projects. First for a home, then for a gallery – which was also a hedge against the growing corruption in our government and corporations.

Those were wise investments. Now the property most important is time, and it’s running out. ARTISTSCRIP is many things, and in the world of investing, it can be important both to me and to those who participate in it.

If it became a movement, it could help save Earth’s human and other life sustainability.

Who will help me? Who?

vp190622 Is this what it’s like to die? All is quiet: 

  I get no emails. No press orders. No comments. Only one Facebook “friend” request. Is this what’s it’s like to die in obscurity – a phrase sometimes found in the annals of art history when an artist or poet, writer or other creative, inventive, discovering and imaginative individual passes?

Or is it, as prefer to think, my mysterious muse’ way of protecting me from entanglements with the distractions that emails, press order and comments on Facebook are to my real tasks of being creative, inventive, discovering and imaginative – in all, a producer of valuable things.

“Be gone, dull care” comes to mind. What? It turns out to be a title of “an extraordinary short animation, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colors, shapes, and transformations directly on to their filmstrip. The result is a vivid interpretation, in fluid lines and color, of jazz music played by the Oscar Peterson Trio.”

Something my muse dredged up out of my past, a film from the 1960s when I was a junior in college and Ron Carraher was bringing film to my attention. It was like the time Carl Chew and I were playing with video feedback and made the video, “My Father’s Farm from the Moon.”

“So,’ as Elmer Gates said on his deathbed, “this is how it has to be.” Whatever happened to Bill Ritchie and Carl Chew?

“Be gone, dull care.” What did they have in mind when they titled their film? What did Carl Chew and I have in mind? Stories I’d like to tell and, thanks to my freedom, I’m able to tell in my autobiography.

My stories are too long to tell in this age of sound bites and stampedes of people running over cliffs, fearing anything creative, inventive, newly rediscovered and imaginative which has not been vetted to fit on a “smart” phone.

The day after Carl sent me the advice I asked for regarding my Artistscrip idea, I checked out the title of his recommended reading: The art of selling altruism. But it was like the story of the yellow scarf tied ‘round the trees – there were too many books like that. I’m waiting for him to tell me which one to read.

In the meantime, I read one about partnerships for altruism[i], thinking of my strategic alliance with Rewana Nduchwa – my friend from Botswana – whose Kalahari Honey project is my current model. Reading the article, I felt like I could copy-write over it and insert Carl’s and my names into it and come up with a plan to, as I believe it can be done, sell off our legacy for the benefit of our chosen altruistic efforts.

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[i] https://www.marketingmag.com.au/hubs-c/opinion-karen-monaghan-agency-arts-organisations-partnerships/