os200915 ACE Makes the World Look Big:  Why the American disaster doesn’t discourage me  

He thinks globally although the air he breathes is smokey with ash. It appears the world is coming to an end, but he finds an organization in Argentina called ACE, where life appears to be going on and it is business-as-usual for artists and craftspeople.  

Yes there is hope somewhere  

By chance I found the equivalent of my imaginary Emeralda Region. It’ in Argentina. It reminds me of when I discovered there is a real Emeralda located in South Vietnam, a five-star getaway named Emeralda Resort Ninh Binh which opened in 2011.

As I read the text about the Argentina space on the homepage of https://www.proyectoace.org/en/home-2/ it felt like I was reading a description of the Gates Prize and its features and amenities.

It took a while to figure out that it is a physical residency – not in a paradisiacal setting like the Great Lake of Emeralda Region, but a real place near Buenos Aires.

Still, the feeling lingered that, Yes, there is a place like I imagined Emeralda could be. However, my concept is one heavily weighted toward art blended with science, technology, engineering, and math. Emeralda awards leaders in those fields. Most artist getaways do not.

To know that these two places exist and that they have plans to continue makes me hopeful. What I need is a structure for collaboration I can offer people in the USA and thus make a kind of insurance policy for hope.

We are living under a shroud in America, the sun is literally behind a haze of smoke from the burning of west coast America extending into Canada. Metaphorically we have lived under a cloud of a corrupted government since the 2016 election and dates back decades.

It is the decline of American educational policies that caused it, and I hope we survive and change the trend that threatens this country and is wreaking havoc in all parts of the world.

To know there are places in the world where the sky is clear of smoke gives me hope. Americans will not lead in restoring Earth’s human and other life sustainability, but leaders and populations in other – mostly small – countries will.

ACE is a reminder there is hope in the hearts and minds of their participants.

 vi200908 Hope Rope: Synergetic hopeful  

  He ponders the small things he does each day and asks he does them. A change in a website, a search of his database for a certain image of a Mini Etching Press with a carrying case, a search for its current owner – small things are like strands in a rope. 412 Words

Inspired by a Mini Etching Press

As I began my day, sitting at the desk and opening files to read them on screen, thinking about having placed the Mini Etching Press in Etsy as I told Tom Kughler I would, I wondered who bought the one which had the chest with it.

The woman in Canada? Yes, I think so. Tom said he had an order for another one. My mind wandered to other things. There is a hint of smoke in the air – California is burning – and we have a major fire burning in Central Washington. God said, “a fire next time.”

But it was not God – it was humankind.

Is this how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper? Schools – the last hope for the USA and some other countries in the world – are closed or reduced because of the virus. Americans haven’t been able to rid the cancer in Washington DC, rending the nation comatose.

My best friend’s wife is undergoing surgery today – a mastectomy.

What keeps me going? I think of one little detail – like finding who owns that beautiful little press with the carrying case and linking this to the Etsy page. I think of the video I put up yesterday which I made years ago when a woman in Florida ordered a DIY kit and I sent her a ready-to-print plate, and the print, and ink.

She said she had a demo coming up fast and needed help, and, boy, did I send it! Could it happen again? I hope so.

Little things like this are like the strands in a rope. Single fiber is joined, twisted around another fiber and the combination of the two is stronger than either one is if alone. I think someone said this is the demonstration of synergy.

Add another fiber, and another and another until you have a piece of twine. Add more strands of twine, twist, and twist and then one has a rope. Every small gesture I make, every video minute, every post in Facebook, is a strand in my rope of hope. My Hope Rope.

Pay-to-Play it Forward

 pp200805 Pay to Play Emeralda: Pay it forward, you Gates Prize Winners!  

 In a flash of inspiration, he comes closer to solving the biggest riddle of his teaching artist career: how to finance the development of the game he calls, “Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life.” The solution is “Pay to Play,” as people buy artistscrip.

Years of playing with no wins

I’ve been working it seems all my life on life’s game, one writer called “The Game of Life.” Her name is Florence Scovill Shinn and her book, “How to Play the Game of Life” was introduced to me by a videographer I hired to document the Wapato High School Class Reunion in 1995. It was by chance she was a fan of Shinn. I located the book, read it, and I read it again.

It’s another long story how I built my library of good reads that constitute my game, Emeralda. Subtitled, Games for the gifts of life, I’ve been playing this game for decades, and the one puzzle I’ve never solved is how to play it forward. That is, I’ve never figured out how to explain it so other people could play it.

I gave up trying years ago, but I never gave up trying to win my game. It’s like someone playing Solitaire – knowing all the rules and making all the right moves but never once getting the payoff. On a computer screen, it’s that cascading flow of cards that one gets when winning.

Yet, every morning for the past twenty or thirty years, I play and play. Anyone watching over my shoulder (Emeralda is mostly a computer game) would not think it to be much fun any more than someone watching a chess player yet who knows nothing about chess.

 To be an artist takes OCD

Lately I have been considering the degree of my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, OCD, society’s name for sticking to a task until it is done. In our shutdown for the virus, for example, my wife Lynda and I assembled puzzles to help pass the time. If we were chess players, we might have been playing chess. Games are ways to pass the time in solitary, which can be a good thing in times like this and at our age – 78 years.

OCD may be a disorder when it is an inconvenience to ordinary living, but for many tasks in life it’s not a disorder but a handy thing to have. Emeralda may require OCD. For example, I have a compulsion to share my game with other people. One might say I am obsessed with sharing this game. So much so that I think about it all day.

Whatever I am doing, and usually it is something I do with the aid of computer software, I am conscious of Emeralda play. Play might be the wrong word because play implies wasting time or doing frivolous, trivial things when there is work to be done. Society, and this is true of hard-working people especially, have no respect for someone who is playing when they could be helping with important tasks.

For example, I was helping Tom Kughler making, marketing and selling Mini Halfwood Presses for years. Our friendly UPS delivery woman, meeting my wife one day on her rounds, asked my wife, “Is Bill still farting around with his presses?” That said a lot about workers. I wasn’t offended – not at all – when Lynda told me this anecdote. It’s an in-joke.

My point is that things are not what they appear, and as I tap away on my keyboard writing yet another essay to add to thousands I have already logged on these devices, I am conscious there is work to be done – serious work – and especially in American education.

A teaching artist, today, might learn Emeralda. It is not only for teaching artist that I am designing Emeralda. It is for anyone who is interested in education and also in art – specifically printmaking.

To all the people who have touched my life is over my 50-year career, I want to offer my game by sharing all my art. [Interesting typo here because this part of the essay was dictated online, and “art” came out “heart” - which is also true!]

To achieve this, I invented a pay-to-play method. Pay-to-play is well known in the video game business. You pay a dollar or two to download and play a video game. It works with casual games.

Emeralda, however, it's not a casual game. Not the way I design it.

Pay-to-play, in the way I tell it, means pay to play it forward. It means pay for shares and the money goes to develop Emeralda. In that way I bring Emeralda into a playable state to be played by other people, not just me.

The shares people buy are called artiscrip. Buy my artiscrip and one owns my art collectively with other investors. It is like owning shares in a game company but without all the typical IPO brouhaha and legalese.

I feel it's necessary in these times to come forward with a radical, new approach to develop online education in the arts, focused on printmaking.

The time is right. Printmaking teachers all over America are shut out to their studio classrooms. They need a class their students can experience online. Online is no substitute for real studios, but it promises to help students learning about the printmaking world.

In this mode of learning, one will not find old wine in a new bottle. This is not a printmaking class like those I took as a student nor like the classes I taught. Only in one regard is my idea similar, and that is the way my students learned teamwork.

When I taught printmaking at the University Of Washington, I discovered the key value of learning printmaking was in sharing the studios, the etching press, or the lithograph press. Some of the tools, like expensive large rollers, were shared. The list is long.

In fact, everything in the studio was shared. Naturally, in such a complicated setting, management was key to success. In the end it was more than I could handle, and I turned over management to the students and, to my surprise, I had added another dimension to my course.

Summing up, Emeralda is the manifestation of everything I learned and taught in college. Now, partly because of the emergency printmaking teachers face, I offer part of the solution. I ask all those who supported my work for the past 50 years to come forward and buy artiscrip so I can play it forward.

Adept and Adapt

 os200814 Adept and Adapt:  Finding the true value of printmaking knowledge

  Do or die

Printmaking professors everywhere, it is time to adapt to the changing times. You have the power to help make the world a better place. Adaptation is the name of the game – and students, or anyone who loves printmaking, prints and printmakers, must adapt.

It’s not too late! But we must start now.

Adapt and adapt

What does adept mean? I think I learned it from practices as found in monasteries, referring to members who are skilled. As a noun, someone might say he is an adept, as, for example, one who is adept at writing.

Adapt means to change according to the changes in the environment. For example, in evolution a creature must adapt to changes in the weather. This is biological adaptation and occurs over Millennia.

I am thinking about printmaking professors and how they are adapting to a changed world caused by the pandemic.

Their havens for teaching printmaking are almost gone. Their printmaking studios are closed for safety reasons. It used to be safety meant not to use toxic materials to teach printmaking. Teachers adapted and now they teach with nontoxic inks.

But today’s corona-virus pandemic is not as easy to adapt to.

What can printmaking professors do?

My suggestion is to teach printmaking not in ways they found effective in the times dating back decades but teaching printmaking as their students will find useful in decades to come.

For example, the printing press most professors in colleges use for teaching etching will not be available to their students in the future. The presses in schools are too big, too expensive, and worst of all, what they are used to produce will not be affordable to consumers in the coming times.

There is more. All the accouterments associated with printmaking such as frames, art galleries and museums changed.

In my opinion there is only one way for printmakers to adapt so their students have a chance put what they learn in college to good use. That one way is to rewind printmaking history to its origin, which is the hand print on the wall. It represented the mechanization of image-making.

But there are even more aspect.

With printmaking in universities there was a spirit or culture of cooperation and teamwork. No one talked about it, yet often the printing press was the center of productivity, and everyone depended on it.

Therefore, it was the culture of cooperation, sharing time and interactivity with other people. This is the social prospect and perhaps the most important thing about printmaking. It is more important than having a show or winning a prize.

Really, those values are dying.

What will go on living is the need for cooperation and teamwork, socializing and conservation of materials.

And time.

Time is perhaps the most important resource. Students have only a short time open to grow knowledge.

What use are obsolete practices the printmaking professors knew? Most printmaking professors are middle-aged. They received their education’s in the last century.

It’s over. The new world students face needs them, but not to decorate the walls, but to understand the handprint on the wall was the invention of mechanization of visual communication.

Pursuing Investors

os200725  Pursuing Investors: Stamps as artistscrip

  His business plan includes financing schemes. The sales of products and services in the context of the current economy depends on both past performance and the prospects of future performance. The production, research, practice, and service plan is chief.

1202 Words

Artistamp as artistscrip offering

If I offer a stamp, what do I promise in return? This offering must profit both the buyer and me, the seller/developer of Emeralda Works, LLC.

Teacher’s dreams

Teachers dream. Teachers have nightmares. Some teachers’ jobs are living nightmares. I wish I could help them, but I do not have the power. My teaching job had elements of both a dream job and a nightmare. Fortunately, it was mostly a dream job.

Even though I resigned before the usual number of years one gives to college teaching – forty – I still have teaching dreams. There was one dream, however, that I sacrificed when I resigned. That was what I call the Mr. Chips dream.

Mr. Chips was a nickname which students gave their teacher in the film, Goodbye Mr. Chips. Peter O’Toole played the role of the teacher. He was strict, but he was good. When he got old, his students sometimes came back to say hello. Some grandchildren came back as students!

That was my dream – that I would turn out to be such a good teacher that my former students would encourage their children to come to the UW, like they did, and to take a class from me. Or, even better, their grandchildren. How fun that would have been!

My teaching would have been so outstanding that the school would be a different school by the time my former students had been out for ten years, or a generation or more so that their children – coming home from my class – would describe a course of study their parents would not recognize!

These dreams came when I had a job at the UW. My extreme dream then was that the courses or workshops I would pioneer would be worth my former students’ time and expense to sign up. The offerings would be similar to continuing education, but without the accreditation and academic accoutrements we have seen in the past.

For example – although I couldn’t have thought of this forty years ago – a workshop in Artist’s Asset Management and Legacy Transfer would be useful to former students who had developed a career and a valuable accumulation of works – both tangible and intangible.

I am lucky

The teacher’s Mr. Chips’ story was set in old England and things are different all over. I am lucky because not only have I lived into the future my former students say Hello. Not their children, however, at least not for a long time. Those few who do contact me do not come to visit – with rare exceptions – they use the Internet email or social networks.

Many of my former students were topnotch and developed good careers in the arts. When new technologies came out, they were early adopters, in part because I exposed them to ways telephone, photography, film, video, and computer graphics might be useful in the traditional fine arts. Luckily, I am able to see this. Seeing this justifies the extra effort it took me.

More than lucky

Lately I have been working on another one of my dreams – distance learning or what I might call growing knowledge. As the pandemic has shut down most educational institutions and initiatives, distance learning is big news. Educators, most of them who never thought they’d have to use these systems, are rushing to adapt. Therefore, one might call it the Next Big Thing.

Art, and printmaking in particular, are especially hard-hit because the physical, face-to-face human factors in the arts are important. In addition, artists and teachers are rare who gave technology much thought either in their education or their day-to-day studio practice.

I am an exception. I thought about technology all my college life both as student and as a college teacher. In 1980 I made my first proposal to the UW to teach woodcut remotely. They denied me the chance, but I never let it go. Today, as they are beginning to respond to the COVID-19 mandates, printmaking teachers are trying distance learning.

Skirting the topic

This essay was inspired by the challenge I am facing. I can have a company to do what I dreamed of in 1980. I have all the concepts in place. To develop any one of the concepts, however, will require help. I require money to pay people to carry out my plans – to help me.

Under the name of a sole proprietorship, Emeralda Works, I researched and tested plans dating back over twenty years. Now I am upgrading it to the Limited Liability Company status. This I am doing this to sell the business. I am 78, so it is time to think about my exit plan.

For example, financing the business will build on my old teacher’s dream of continuing education, but not in the way I thought about it forty years ago. In 1980, not only was I thinking of ways to teach woodcut printmaking remotely, I was thinking about a post-graduate school for my former students.

The two can comingle. I don’t mean my former students can do post-graduate study in woodcut printmaking, but they can participate in a novel way. In this novel scheme of mine they can buy shares in the company, Emeralda Works LLC, that will produce the online printmaking (or knowledge-growing) offering. Money they put in as investments will pay the helpers.

In some instances, these friends and former students will be the helpers!

I thought of several of my former students and I wondered, “What can I do for them now?” They are mature – some of them in their ‘seventies and ‘eighties – therefore they do not need art lessons.[1] What they need and want is experiences that give them hope. I can create something that ignites their anticipation. Anticipation is the key to hope.

“A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope,” said Rosabeth Moss-Kanter. The structure can be a company, Emeralda Works LLC. The microcosm of it is stamps – hundreds or thousands of stamps known as artistamps and thousands of artworks available as artistscrip.

Dutch auction

When Google went public, they did not know what people would pay for shares in the IPO stage, so they proposed a Dutch Auction. The price floated according to the buyers’ risk tolerance.

When Carl Chew designed the Art Action in 1977, it had a similar birth – the price went down and tested the bidders’ risk not that they would have to pay more but that could pay less if they held out long enough for the price to descend from the initial price.

Conclusion

I feel the pressure building to make my idea clear, but all I can do is suggest that an artistamp goes to a potential investor who has sent money to Patreon to help me make this clearer. Nellie, our manager, maintains the database as it grows – similar to the way we ran the essay contest.

Another option is eBay.

Still another is the home-grown auction platforms.

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[1] Pat Austin is a notable exception – she paid $100 for tutorials on using Kindle Direct Publishing, which gave me the funds to upgrade Camtasia and build a ten-part video series to put on YouTube, free.

Why I hustle for STEAM online

os900705  Why I hustle for STEAM online: A structure for collaboration

 Where have all the students gone?

Singing to the tune of the Peter Paul & Mary song from the 1970’s war protest era.

People worked so hard to get here. Parents invested so much. Teachers invested. Students are their shared interest. They built infrastructure and organized their lives around the classrooms for teachers and students. Not only classrooms, but playgrounds and even sports arenas.

Art, craft, and design rooms, too, kitchens for culinary education, science labs – the list goes on. I believe they are all empty now – as if struck what was called the “neutron bomb” in the old days, during the cold war and during the build-up for the final war we feared would come. It would kill life but leave infrastructure standing for the victor’s takeover.

It can’t be said that no one expected viruses to be the “bomb” because thousands of scientists, doctors and world leaders knew how pandemics are a constant threat and measures should be ready when pandemics come.

National leaders, however, are not as smart as doctors and scientists when it comes to disease. They can’t handle the truth - like the truth that came out in 1992 when over 1,500 leading scientists from around the world declared humanity had no more than 30 years to solve five critical problems to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability.

What did the politicians do? The only national leader who comes instantly to mind is Al Gore; but he was no match for Florida politicians. Gore made a splash with his books and his movie – even winning an Academy Award! Not only did the court’s decision to back Bush thwart America’s participation in sustainable action, the decision damaged the reputation of the court, increasing the view of judges as partisan, and decreased many citizens’ trust in the integrity of elections.

The schools were under siege by the time the Union of Concerned Scientists made their plea for help. In the 21^st Century the United Nations mapped out their sustainability strategy, but by the time Donald Trump took over the presidency (with help from America’s enemies oversees) teachers were nearly helpless.

It got worse. The winter of 2020 will be remembered when millions of students and teachers were deracinated[1] from their classrooms, parents were enlisted to teach at home. In the USA, it wasn’t for sure the schools – including colleges and universities – would open for months or years.

Kids – from preschool to high school – lose the most because they are in the prime of their learning readiness. The kids born after 2017 will miss preschool (if they had access to one). First graders halfway through their year stayed home and no one knows when they’ll have classes like before. Seniors’ last year of school ended early. Those going on may have no “on” to go to, as schools of every kind – and most jobs - are unavailable, as it’s unsafe.

Everybody knows this by now. Why am I writing about it? Because I feel the urgency, the need for action, immediate, 14-hour day action to bring all classes online. To me it’s like an amber alert. The technology is there for amber alert, and it’s there for online or distance learning. The USA is the world leader in distance learning technology and experience. Distance learning is the only way to continue education after the “clean bomb” has emptied the classrooms of America.

Act now

The root problem created over the past half-century was a process of uprooting and cutting democracy off at the root – education. A people cannot have good governance without education in the deepest sense. Cutting off at the roots of our future hopes - children’s’ education - is to deracinate our hopes.

The remedy to stop deracination of our hopes is a structure for collaboration to act on distance learning. A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope.[2] From the domain of arts, craft, and design I offer the printing press as that structure. The printing press served the authors of our constitution (even though the constitution was written by hand on parchment) because already the printing press had assured the disparate colonials a degree of willingness to work collaboratively to overthrow the British.

Printmaking is the only form of art suitable to include in STEM, to make STEAM. Print is the ancestor of all the technologies that make science, technology, engineering, and math what they are today. For better or worse, there’d be none without print having structured collaboration.

Now is the time to put printing press toys and games in children’s hands and links to other children and teachers all over the world. Join me to build the production of presses and software to make it so.

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[1] There is a hint about the roots of deracinate in its first definition. Deracinate was borrowed into English in the late 16th century from Middle French and can be traced back to the Latin word radix, meaning "root." Although deracinate began life referring to literal plant roots, it quickly took on a second, metaphorical, meaning suggesting removal of anyone or anything from native roots or culture. – MW Word of the day

[2] Rosabeth Moss-Kanter

Seen from where I have been

ps200627 Seen from where I have been:  

A press and the modem artist  

Having been far, I added some impressions to my ongoing education. I learned a press is more than meets the eye, that it’s a generator of dreams and anticipation when seen by an artist, craftsperson and designer who makes printing plates for enjoyment and elucidation.

Upon Seeing an ugly press

Ten days ago, I thought about going where no one has been, and as I glanced over the Facebook groups dedicated to prints, printmaking and presses I thought:

“What ugly presses!”

Where did I get the notion that printing presses should be beautiful?

  
Two examples of ugliness in presses – one assembled from junk and one of such large and heavy proportions that they are unaffordable.

It is because I have been where no other printmakers have been. I’ve been around the world, for example, in one contiguous journey. Before that I have been in many schools, workshops, and museums – plus I’ve been in machine shops to realize my dream of a perfect press. I’ve in the Rembrandt Museum and I’ve seen a facsimile of the old master’s press.

Having done this, and added these impressions to my ongoing education, I learned that a press is more than meets the eye, that it’s a generator of dreams and anticipation when taken by an artist, craftsperson and designer who makes printing plates for enjoyment.

It is clear to me that the press should be a progenitor of beautiful prints. Add to this the digital age where communicating the image of the print virtually is reasonably simple and an added pleasure; and the combination is harmonious.

A beautiful press makes beautiful prints; and it can make a beautiful life for the one who has the fortune to have a beautiful, functional press such as this.

Bill Ritchie’s award-winning designs, the Halfwood press and the Wee Woodie Rembrandt Press

The designs of the Halfwood Press and the Wee Woodie Rembrandt Press come from my having been where no one has gone.

From the days I transitioned from farmer to professor I gained a deep and wide range of views from which to see printing presses.

The most important view is that a press is an instrument, not a tool, not merely equipage. Similar to what a pipe wrench is to a plumber and an explorer is to a dentist, one is a mechanical thing in the hands of a mechanic while the other – the delicate, fine instrument in the hands of a highly skilled and knowledgeable person in oral health – is an instrument.

A musician does not refer to his or her violin or piano, or voice, as a tool but as an instrument. Over centuries, such musical instruments have been refined so that they combine physical characteristics to achieve both visual and utility perfection in the musician’s art, craft and design; and so, it is, too, with the printmaker.

The second most important of these views, these printmaking worldviews I’ve gained, is that the press is the ancestor of all sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics that are the cornerstones of the STEM movement in education.

Without print, these would be moribund, never leaving the confines of their discoverers, inventors, imaginers and creators. It’s this view that justifies printmaking experiences for young people (and old people looking for continuous, contiguous learning experiences).

The idea that art should be implanted in the acronym STEM to make STEAM is a good idea. It’s that which Allan Bloom said in his book, Closing of the American Mind is what makes artists valuable to problem-solving enterprises:

“The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man. His unconscious is full of monsters and dreams. It provides the pictures to consciousness, which takes them as given and as "world," and rationalizes them. Rationality is only the activity of providing good reasons for what has no reason or is unreasonable. We do what we do out of a fate that is our individuality, but we have to explain and communicate. This latter is the function of consciousness; and when it has been provided with a rich store by the unconscious, its activity is fruitful, and the illusion of its sufficiency is even salutary. But when it has chopped up and chewed over its inheritance, as mathematical physics has now done, there are not enough nourishing plants left whole. Consciousness now requires replenishment. Thus, Nietzsche opened up the great terrain explored by modern artists, psychologists, and anthropologists, searching for refreshment for our exhausted culture in the depths of the darkest unconscious or darkest Africa.”[1]

[Note: in one iteration, I mis-typed modern and typed modem, to yield modem artists. Ha ha! Or, that I may have used a scanner to get this text, and the scanner saw the r next to the n and resulted in an m (em)]

This overly-long paragraph boils down to the need that there be an artist among the five solvers-of-problems facing Earth’s human and other life-sustaining ability.

Not just any artist, however. The painter works alone, for example, but the artist who calls himself or herself a printmaker is more suitable for the teamwork and collaboration than artists who work in solitary and are disinclined to collaborate.

The press that is designed for collaboration is a perfect press and should be in the hands of young people in STEAM education programs. A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope.

I want to use my assets to make this so. The press is that structure, thanks to the modem artist, an artist who sees a modem as a perfect press.

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[1] Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster. NY. 1987. P. 206