141222 An unusual artist  

While a 19^th Century artist like Turner would spend time perfecting a color for the illusion of light and mist, or a few seconds as portrayed in the movie this year, I am an artist who spends time poring over the events in a young girl’s life in Latvia, and others in her community with whom I became acquainted by a printing press.

The total value of Turner’s paintings today are probably in the billions, thanks to avid art collectors, historians and publishers. I wonder, what could be the value of a 12-year old girl’s experience in winning a bronze medal for prints she made in Riga’s Grafikaskola? Her name is Evita, and this I know from a Google Circle announcement placed there by the graphic school’s director—Ieva Helmute.

For about an hour today I studied many aspects of this event—a girl winning a prize in a Polish art contest for kids, a fundraiser in Riga to benefit a children’s emergency healthcare program, and side trips to explore (virtually) Riga’s famous Rīdzenes street shopping arcade.

This is the work of art—to be part of the effort to help youth. Turner may or may not have had the same idea in mind. We will never know. But our little Halfwood Press, which—with the help of a neighbor upstairs from my studio—traveled halfway around the world to Latvia to be used by kids at Ieva’s school is a story to remember.

An old dream of a printmaking tour  

There is an idea I put on my bucket list back in the ‘80s. I was still at the University of Washington and in the School Of Art I had the freedom to work with students who wanted to start up projects like the idea I had. They were students from the Industrial Arts program, and they came to me with a request for a special studies group on sketching up ideas.

They claimed there was no opportunity to explore different media in their sketching projects, and mediums like printmaking, for example, monotypes, had them curious. I said to them, “I happen to need someone to sketch up a concept called the Print Circus—a cross-country tour bus for printmaking students,” and I made a deal. I would sign their special permission slips if they would sketch up the tour bus.

By the end of the quarter, they presented me with their sketches, and they were pretty good. I still have them in my storage room. I was reminded of this when I thought about going to Knoxville, Tennessee next March to attend the Southern Graphics Council International Printmaking Conference.

“Why not restore that idea?” I thought. Today you can hire a tour bus, get a couple dozen people to sign up—perhaps run it with a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaign—and make this trip. Right away I went online and saw what the tour industry offers.

When I thought more about it, it became another one of those items I put on my bucket list—the list of things a person wants to do before they kick the bucket. The original idea I had, back in the 1980s, was that the tour was for students to get a bigger picture of what printmaking offers. We would have had an itinerary to visit printmaking workshops across the USA; not only that, we would also see what forms of new technologies were developing, such as video and computer graphics.

I was, and still am, convinced that printmaking has a close association with new electronic technologies which, if incorporated into the printmaking students’ curricula, would enable them to do much more with their education. As it was (and still is) the college was in a sense locking the students in to their professors’ world of printmaking, not with the printmaking world that was coming into being.

Weavers and Painters  

Reflections on diligence  

He considers his digital work to be the same as that of the weaver or a painter who works diligently on detail-intensive tasks, only instead of threads-per-inch or hairline-thin brush strokes, he elaborates on the fine detail of Internet web pages’ links.  

Model ship 

Two things I want to do when I retire is, one, build a model of the Emeralda, the ship of my vision and, secondly, write the saga of the Emeralda—the mythology of my art and craft. Until the time I can feel good about the daily grind of starting the Seattle Printmakers Center on firm ground, however, I will continue with the means to this end.

Painting 

I have thought, too, of going back to my roots in visual art and making a painting or two in the manner of classical work. For example, I could enroll in one of the Ateliers at Gage Academy and get good instruction about the methods used by painters in the 19^th Century, and apply these methods to a great maritime painting of the Emeralda under the great wave.

As I work on a web page today, making sure every link within the page is correctly named, and the images of the correct resolution and reasonably sized for speedy downloads, or going back to an image to slice and dice it for a smaller bit count, I think about painting with the same arduous and detailed work.

Weaving 

Or, I imagine myself as a weaver or working on a needlepoint canvas, choosing the right thread weight and color, fiber, etc. so it will make a beautiful piece based, perhaps, on the voyage of the Emeralda. There are other fiber-based art forms, like embroidery and tapestry art from which to choose. These all require the hours and months of careful, detailed work and result in a fine, finished work.

If I were retired, I wouldn’t have a care about what became of the finished product, because I would have been enjoying the process all along, in my retirement, my retreat from the need to build the Seattle Printmakers Center and, of course, the rapid prototyping of the twenty startups that will finance and sustain the overall enterprise.

So it goes 

Moments ago I was adding a few words and links to a page on my latest creation, a prototype for the Rembrandt and Wine, and, as often happens, I saw myself like the painter of a highly detailed, classical narrative oil painting or a fiber piece. Now, it’s back to my digital art.

For, in today’s world, the artist’s function is not to make paintings and weavings such as I have in mind (unless he or she has abandoned the need to feel useful to society and culture, as I will feel when I retire) but the artist’s function, or value to society and culture, is to work partly in the digital media and partly in the real, physical mediums at the same time. It’s my joy to have come to a place—Seattle—and a time when it is possible and enjoyable to be able to work this way on the Seattle Printmakers Center.

I signed up for a webinar  

. . . and wrote this instead  

When I filled out the form to register for a webinar produced by the OneVest information service and had to describe with my plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center, I was asked to choose one or more industries I aim for. The ones I chose were Education, Media and entertainment, and Consumer products industries.

Each industry (there were about fifteen listed on the OneVest website) stands on its own, but there can be overlaps, as the planners of these webinars give everyone wiggle room.

The Seattle Printmakers Center is a “cloud” kind of concept, with many small, interrelated sections making up the whole. You might compare this to making a painting. You might start (startup) with broad strokes with a very wide brush. The brush may be loaded with one color, or—by clever manipulation of pigment and vehicle—a rainbow of colors.

The broad-brush may be the background for what comes next—the details. If the painting is to be representational, then the artist may use perspective and overlapping shapes to indicate the subject, the story, the beauty, or whatever the painter has in mind.

Now, switch to the printmaker. He or she may have a painter’s background, but the printmaker may add something to the repertoire of tools the painter has learned.

The brush, for example, has little use in printmaking. More often it is a roller—which only a house painter has any use for—that the printmaker uses for broad color areas. It, too, can carry a rainbow of colors.

But, aside from the different tools, there is a more important difference. The painter will usually work alone, and what becomes his or her painting is their creation. The printmaker may work alone, too—and often does work alone at the outset of a project—but sooner or later there are others involved in printmaking.

For example, a printmaking studio requires more than the painter’s studio. Printmaking techniques may require silk screens, for example, or an etching press. Things start to get complicated. Many printmakers find it is better to share these with other people. It’s cheaper, for one thing, and safer. It’s more fun if it is done in the right way. Developing and sustaining a printmaking studio is like developing a small community.

That’s why I include EDUCATION in my list of what characterizes the broad, overall industry of my choice—in the paragraphs above, I have stated the differences in my domain-of-expertise, printmaking, compared to its closest neighbor in the cultural list, which is painting.

Painting, however, is more popular, and that is why the Seattle Printmakers Center is needed, whereas we do not need a Seattle Painters Center. When painters do get together to set up a “center” of some kind, it is only to pool their rent allowance and get into industrial real estate so they can get out of the house. Such as center is composed of walled-in studios, and the only interaction among the occupants is by chance meetings in the halls or kitchenette.

MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT, on the other hand, is closer to the printmakers’ domain. In fact, printmaking is the ancestor of all media and entertainment industries. Therefore, a Seattle Printmakers Center will manifest most of the qualities of the media and entertainment world. For example, sharing the expenses of a printmaking studio is like sharing the expenses of a film makers’ facility, or working as a group to make a film.

Technology has made it possible to work alone in making a film, but it is rarely profitable and a sustainable model. A graphic designer, for example, can work alone in the home and be fully employed and well-paid by using the digital technologies and the Internet. But the kind of artist who inclines toward using technologies (descendants of printmaking) is a social creature—like most people.

As one person, a web designer, told me as she was putting in an order for an etching press, “My press will be a reason to have gatherings at my house.” She enjoys linocuts and even uses the old mediums to achieve effects in her graphic design which are hard to get in digital media.
Now we come to the secret ingredient for success of the Seattle Printmakers Center—CONSUMER PRODUCTS. It’s no secret, actually, because we have been designing and producing consumer products for a decade: The Halfwood press line.

However, experiencing the startup stage in the development of the Seattle Printmakers Center reveals that we were actually testing the worldwide market for the presses so that we could pay for the Center from this income stream—and the Halfwood Press is only one of twenty income streams that combine to support the Center programs.

That is why I complete my list of industry choices with consumer products. Not only is there a proven global market for Halfwood Presses, there is also a market for peripheral things that go with the art and craft of printmaking. Things such as the furniture for a printmaking studio, or accessories that let the printmaker go mobile—the busker etcher.

At the beginning of this essay I used painting as an analogy to the education portion. The analogy goes farther because the three industries—education, media and entertainment, and consumer products—are like the primary colors on a painter’s (or printmaker’s) palette. They can complement and contrast with one another, and in no other segment of the Seattle Printmakers Center is this more perfectly balanced than in the Rembrandt and Wine startup I am working on today.

As for the webinar, something went wrong and I didn’t get online. Probably there was a glitch somewhere in the system. When we have our Seattle Printmakers Center and there is a webinar on an element of this field (history, technique, business, etc.), we hope we team up with a great webinar service!

Yenta wanted  

A matchless printmaker in Seattle seeks a Yenta  

Having won an appointment with Seattle’s technology startup liaison he finds that she is a Startup yenta—matchmaker among entrepreneurs and he wonders if she can find a match for the technology sector of his ten-year plan for a Seattle Printmakers Center. 

Reaching out 

What the art schools overlooked was that printmaking is a performance and social experience. The experience of printmaking involves more than merely producing prints or a sideline to painting and drawing. Printmaking involves mechanical and technical skills, equipment, chemistry, photography and—today—computers. To call it an art-form is to miss the point. Hand printmaking reduces the technological expectations of the user so printmaking does not need to match the look and feel of magazines and mass-produced books.

Where does this bring us, today? In a roundabout way, the failure to catch the meaning of a performance and social art in printmaking, we have Seattle’s numerous incubators for tech startups today. The city’s technology initiative, Startup Seattle, is part of it--a city government belief that new businesses, not business as usual, will help Seattle's economy grow.

Is there a new business in the missed opportunity—when the UW printmaking department was deconstructed in 1984? Instead of being transformed for the coming digital age, the printmaking facilities at the UW (also in other state-run art schools) were folded into an extension of design area. Instead going for a curriculum for a reinvented printmaking in which majors could have practiced video, computer graphics and laser technology, they came up with a substitute cocktail of communications and design theory classes.

The word “printmaking” was relegated to catacombs of dead courses—alongside art education, interior design and weaving. This is a key to understanding why a new business startup, based on a transformed printmaking, is timely.

Printmaking always attracted a big following at the UW art school and it was partly because of the tumult of developments in the 1970's that made it so. Off-campus, you had a booming economy. There were jobs for printmakers who could work in the fine art publishing houses. There were jobs for graduates who wanted to teach college and in schools. On campus, you had experiments in art and technology, and printmaking was one of the portals that could lead students to film, video and computer graphics.

The best part of it was that these forays into new technologies (and associations with new people and new jobs in technology) was a double-door: You could spend mornings doing computer graphics and afternoons making woodcut prints.

Death of academic printmaking

It’s just as well that printmaking at the UW should end the way it did, because as long as printmaking was yoked to painting and drawing, printmaking could not be anything but a substitute for those mediums - in multiples. Colleges are restricted by national federations dictating what qualifies for student loans, grants and credits.

For example, there are no credible business classes for art majors, but there are classes that teach art majors how to land jobs in the museum and government arts agencies. It would appear that innovation has no place in a system of state-run higher education. The opposite is true off-campus, in a world economy helped by incubators for start ups.

Released from the art schools, printmaking can fulfill another mission—that of offering an experience not enjoyed by painters. Printmaking is experience more like the performing arts in their communal and collaborative nature than painting and drawing. Printmaking is a social art and rich with innovative potential and the potential to attract money.

Convinced of these other sides of fine art printmaking, a business start up is possible if it is one that serves both the old notions of prints made by renowned artists like Rembrandt and Warhol and the new kinds of printmaking done with laser engravers and 3D printers.

Central to the success of this kind of start up is communication - presence on the Internet and a subscription online magazine. Alongside it, the production of spin-off games, apps and equipment for printmaking can be the work of young people who want to work with hands in both worlds—the world that has died a hundred deaths and the world that is being born hundreds of times a day.

Life after death

A born-again printmaker needs to find a co-founder, an angel and an incubator in which to take the initial steps to produce an online magazine for the Printmaking World.

Or, an angel who wants to start the incubator, the Seattle Printmakers Center.

Digging for treasure  

Allusions to solutions    

While updating one of the web pages of the owners of his press design the author is beset by a vision of digging for treasure—a childhood fascination with lost treasure which is symbolic of what he lost when he was forced to resign from his treasured job.  

Picture me digging  

“Drilling down” is a current expression used by people in the IT industry when referring to digging into computer code. Computer code is the machine-readable language people must use to make all computer devices functional.

For me, drilling down has a visual quality like digging down into the earth. Maybe if I had been born into a family of a well-driller, it might have been a different image. I was born and raised as a farmer, so “digging down” makes more sense.

As a kid, I loved stories of digging for lost treasure. Sometimes I would bury something with the purpose of digging it up later on. In fact, somewhere along the road between Wapato and the Yakima River in central Washington State, there is a fruit jar buried and it contains treasures I put there in the 1940s—a fake ruby and a mummified chameleon, as I recall.

Today I was drilling down, as information techies call it, into the information about Josef Beery, one of the owners of the Galleon Halfwood Press I designed. Josef bought the press from me earlier this year, and now a photo of it is on his website. I was looking for more information to put on his web page on my website—a listing of all the owners—and this meant “drilling down” with Josef’s name as the search term.

Parallel drilling

While this is happening, I’m also beset by another topic, which is whether or not to go to a barbecue being held by the local printmakers club, the Seattle Print Arts. This club has a peculiarity about it for me. I am probably the only one who has ever attended their meetings and joined—for awhile—as a dues-paying member.

As a print maker who has lived and worked in Seattle for almost fifty years, you would think I would be a member, but I am not, currently, a dues-paying member. It is odd, and you would think I would go to the barbecue, naturally.

The trouble is, I am miserable when I go to their meetings because I am like an outsider. Maybe it’s because I’ve been around for almost fifty years and I can see through every facet of the club—who founded it, why they started the Seattle Print Arts, when, how, etc. Also, I saw the predecessors of this club—the Northwest Print makers for one—plus the other printmaking clubs around the USA, of which there are almost one-hundred.

Printmaking is one of the art forms which naturally attract people into a social group. The members benefit from the organizations’ work for education, training, exhibition and community activism. There are art clubs for almost every art form and technique, the crafts, and new technologies. Printmaking is a social art form, and a performance art with a strong technological element about it that makes a club almost a necessity.

So, why the hesitation to go the barbecue? That’s what I wonder every year since I first learned they had barbecues. It is odd. As I drilled down into Josef Beery’s presence on the web, I pictured digging for treasure. What was I expecting to find?

When I found the image of his Galleon Halfwood Press on Josef's website and read his comment, I saw why I don’t want to go to the barbecue. With the “treasure” of Josef’s comment online, who needs to go to a printmaking club barbecue when only one member among the 100 or so who belong to it owns one of the presses I designed?

From around the United States and in a dozen foreign countries, almost one-hundred fifty people own presses I designed; but here, among the members of the city’s only printmaking club, only one person has come forward, talked with me about the press, bought one, came to my studio and tried it out. She would not mind me giving her name—Lu Mcbride.

I’m not going

What I remember most from past visits I made to the barbecue was like being a wallflower at a high school dance, where no one would offer to dance with me. If there is going to be a conversation with someone, I will have to initiate it—with the exception of Sheila Coppola, the hostess and owner of Sidereal Press where the barbecue is always held.

So, I will stay busy digging in the data of those people, like Josef, who have shown me they value what I do and do not ignore my effort to be a part of the greater community of printmakers, designers, students and strategic partners.

Like the storied “lost treasures” of my boyhood reading, I will find my treasure close to home and where the treasure is most likely to be found.

What Innovation?  

Listing my innovations for fun 

Reading a tome of a book titled, “Diffusion of Innovations” by Everett M. Rogers, this artist/teacher must pause and ask himself, “What, if anything, did I innovate?” and, then, “Why was any one of these adopted and diffused?” The question bears thinking. 

It started with a trip to Europe

If I “innovated” in any pursuit, it probably started with the trip Lynda, my wife and I, took in 1969 to work in Europe with Rolf Nesch in Norway, and some follow-up visits to Stanley Hayter and others on the continent.

My pursuit was an unanswered question: “What was it like before WWII when it appeared that printmaking innovation was diffused?” Such diffusion of the inventive printmaking that Nesch and Hayter—to name only two renowned artists who helped make printmaking a fine art form in its own right—is an example of “Diffusion of Innovations” which Everett M. Rogers wrote about in his book of that title.

At 72—the same age that Rolf Nesch was when I went to work with him and see his technique he called, “material grafiks,”—I look back almost every day and wonder why my innovations were not diffused. Or, the most important ones to me, the innovations in printmaking as the art is taught in college.

Rogers’ book is helping me understand why my innovations weren’t adopted in college art and why I continue to see my innovations slow to be diffused to the degree that I wish they would.

A current example is my proposal for a Seattle Printmakers Center—I find very few people interested. Rogers might tell me why. Thus far his book has taught me the truth that even though an innovation might be a good thing for many people, not many people will take it up.

Those who do are called “early adopters” of the innovation. Their number is small at first, but it grows over time and then it soars—providing the circumstances are right for it.

What did I do?

This morning, as part of my research, I thought it would be instructive to list what I think are my innovations—the ones that have not been diffused. Uncertain whether to start at the top—the Seattle Printmakers Center—or at the early innovations of my career, it’s hard to choose.

The old innovations are easier to understand—starting in 1969 in other words. My innovation that year was that printmaking shares with painting, drawing and sculpture certain creative processes. I was steeped in creativity theories, not only in art, but in science, mathematics and music. What is the creative process, anyway? Whatever it was, it seemed to be the key to success for artists. Whether it is innate or if creativity can be taught—these are the questions that motivated me to go to Europe in 1969.

And the question was specifically grounded in printmaking, because printmaking is not a creative process itself, but a repetitive, mechanical process that lent itself to non-human production. If printmaking were to be valuable in the humanities, or if printmaking were to be justified as material for higher education, then creativity might be the only question to study.

Creativity in printmaking was the only thing that interested me after that epiphany, and might save me from a long, dull career in teaching college. If I could share with other university teachers a kind of research, worthy of the name, then it would be to find the keys to creativity in this otherwise mechanical reproduction process called printmaking.

Creativity denied

I learned there are many people in secure positions, socio-economically speaking, who deny there is any such thing as creativity—that there is nothing new under the sun. When Glen Alps, whose innovation was the collagraph name twenty years before I came to the UW School of Art, began his push for diffusion of the process, it took ten years for him to enjoy the recognition of having named it.

It was what Rolf Nesch called “metal grafik” or “material grafik” but the name collagraph (collage graphic, and also collograph, with an “o” referring to gluing) was more popular in the United States printmaking nomenclature. It was an innovation, but to me it was not important that a person used one technique over another to make a work of art that had something about it that was creative and important.

Technique can be learned by machines. I was looking for the human element that must be part of the experience. Besides books on creativity, I also read books like, “Mechanization takes Command,” “Prints and People,” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Paralleling this literature I read books on education; one that sticks in my mind is “Art on Campus,” because it is here that I learned the history of art becoming a topic worthy of university-level study, research, production and services.

My first innovation

That must be my first innovation—that the four cornerstones of university work are teaching, research, production and services. Not really an innovation when you realize that these are the basis of all great universities for hundreds of years, actually, but my adoption of this as my mantra (signified by the acronym, TRPS) was innovation enough to keep me on course for fifty years.