Thursday, September 24, 2020
We have what it takes
We have everything we need to reverse our progress toward further ending
Earth’s human and other life sustainability. What will we do? I will write, but
in the back of my mind I know I must not only act by writing, I must act by
making videos and sharing them on the Web.
What can I put into words that will inspire others to act, too? Will my
writing demonstrate what can be achieved by writing? Words – even in the most
effective form – are not enough. Video, no matter how expertly made, won’t do
what needs to be done.
Many people think money will solve the problem. I believe we have seen this
is not true. Money will not put out the fires burning the west coast of
America, or clear away the smoke. Thinking money can do this is like offering money
to lemmings not to run into the sea
and drown.
Indirect solutions
Watching a movie about playing chess, I recalled that chess was invented to
train military strategists the art of war. This is instructive, for we are in
several wars today – civil wars inside the USA, and climate wars globally. The
enemy is human shortcomings, primarily human emotions. The greatest of these is
fear; if the greatest were love, then we would be okay.
One year remains to achieve a love campaign. To the enemy, this is the
worst idea. Love is that which brought about the great fears. There’s truth in
the expression, “Love conquers all.” However, fear has always leapt into battle
gear to put down this as silly, childish, and emotional. Fear looms large at
the mention of the word, love.
Fear asks, “Can love put out the fires? Can love reverse global warming?”
Of course, love of life can; and love
of the Earth can. Love of one’s loved
ones can. It’s obvious, one loves
one’s own life! One must love oneself
if one is to save the Earth’s human and other life sustainability.
How, then?
I love to write. Writing – even if it’s unpolished and poor by artistic,
literary, and commercial standards – is my way of organizing and sharing my
thinking. I share it in digital form and in books not only to share with other
people but to share with my older self when I get t there.
By this I mean I can search back on my computer for what I wrote years ago
and, at that time, put on my computer memory retrieval systems. Like a squirrel
which hides food for later consumption, I busy myself putting thoughts into
digital form for later retrieval – food for thought.
One year from now, will I have occasion to come back to this essay about
Love? Will we, that is, humanity, be better off one year from now? What will I
have done over the next 365 days?
Three words in the line from the movie, Bridge
of Spies, comes back to me: Will it
help?
Sunday, September 20, 2020
ap200920 Where to now? The clock is ticking
Facing uncertainty at this end of his self-imposed, fifty-day
workshop using a video editing software program, Adobe Premier Pro, he asks
what is next in this post-graduate study in curriculum design development for
teaching printmaking. He does not know.
Time has form
What I learned in college was that time has form, and in the arts people
have an opportunity to shape time. We can do it within ourselves and for
ourselves. This is what they call art for
art’s sake.
When we exercise our time-shaping skills for others, it’s called art for goodness’ sake.
In a perfect world, people who want to own the honorific title of artist,
craftsperson, or designer (or all three) merely have to crown themselves as such
– like clicking one’s heels together and saying, “I want to be a great artist …”.
Few will object. Most will ignore such a person after a few seconds. Time-shaping
is not easy and hardly anyone can do it alone. Great artists – such as a Baryshnikov
or Rembrandt – may appear to be alone, but they have multitudes inside like
ghosts controlling their moves.
Where to now?
Ten days ago, I wrote an accusatory essay on the two kind of printmaking teachers
– the enablers and the disablers. One group is ensconced securely in a perfect
printmaking world, a rock-solid fortress of institutionalized art, teaches students
it has always been like this. For these teachers, nothing changes. They teach
their students to stay on the path they are on.
The other group teaches that, yes, printmaking has always been a matter of
making templates to make quick work of solving problems. They emphasize thinking
creatively, despite the paradox that creativity is an enigma, a capricious spirit
which can lead to dangerous outcomes – like the development of radioactivity by
Madame Curie. Hers was suicidal. Creative thinking, yes, but suicidal and fatal
for billions of people and perhaps Earth’s human and other life-sustainability.
If she hadn’t developed it, some other creative, discovering, innovative
and imaginative person would have. Such is the butterfly of creative thinking.
The butterfly effect refers no only to the ways one’s wings can generate
hurricanes, as they say, but also in the use of devices to share ideas. In my
case, prints made by printmaking from matrices called printing plates, screens,
stone, woodblocks, and combinations of these.
The outcome, currently, is video games – a long, twisting path that started
with the handprints on cavern walls, the easy way to make one’s mark – traversing
time and space with ever more complicated, interwoven systems of technology, science,
engineering, and math. What we call STEM today in education may be the only enabling
principle left for printmaking teachers as the fortress no longer ensures them
there will always be students to pay them.
About me
I was blind to all this when I started teaching college. At 25 I thought I
would continue what my teachers had started. It took me almost twenty years to
realize the institution was not for enabling students but for enabling
professors. Those students who were able to thrive did so by conscious acts of
taking what they learned in college and applying it to the world that only
rewarded the time-shapers who could keep an audience interested a long time.
Most of them were not Baryshnikov’s or Rembrandts, of course, but good
enough to make their art, crafts, and design work for the long haul. And me? I
used the system I found myself working in at 25 – a system that said if I could
teach, then I could stay out of the military and the Vietnam – the American –
war. When it became impossible to teach, I left, but with a stipend that helped
keep my family going.
That’s my story. How can I now, in this imperfect world, develop a MOOC for
printmaking? I think I can do it by shaping time not as an art of the kind
consumers love to have free of charge – like streaming free, feature-length
movies in months of isolation like prisoners – deluding themselves in the
powers-that-be will save them from working for Earth’s human and other life
forms’ sustainability.
No. It has to be taking on the work.
Artsport in five minutes.
I have it on good authority, from my teachers in Russia, that a MOOC
affords the teacher only a few minutes at a time to make the point of their
lesson. My MOOC teachers (How to Make a MOOC MOOC) assumed their students would
have institutional facilities with crews and money to make their lessons and broadcast
them.
In the course of events, this will not happen for me. Like the great
artists and other time-shaping survivors in history, I must work alone for the
present, shaping my 50-year career into five minutes of fame. If I can hold my student
audience’s attention for thirty-seconds or more, I may progress.
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
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.
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
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.
Saturday, August 15, 2020
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.
Friday, August 14, 2020
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.
Tuesday, August 4, 2020
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.
[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.
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