sp150411 Printmaking school reboots for 21st Century

Copy written over medical school education article the author heard on NPR on April 9, 2015

Thirty years ago, this article—which the author copy-wrote over another article heard on National Public Radio—would have been appropriate to describe his experience when he was a professor in a university which happened to include a major medical school.

Preface

Copy-written By Bill Ritchie over the article, Medical Schools Reboot for 21st Century by JULIE ROVNER, broadcast on PBS radio station KUOW. The original transcript was copyrighted and provided to the public by NPR. If article about changing art school printmaking curricula were created and broadcast, this would be the revised transcript. Unfortunately for printmaking students, the curriculum was not changed.

Printmaking School Reboot for 21st Century

REPORTER: (The imaginary reporter here might have been hosted by one from Seattle’s member station KUOW. As it stands, the only tape I recall was made in 1980 for radio by Angela Henrick.)

REPORTER: The art of printmaking has changed a lot in the past 100 years, but art school training hasn't kept up with modern needs. To equip artists for the 21st Century, a printmaking professor at the University of Washington wrote up a new curriculum and started teaching differently. Reporter (Fictitious) of Radio (Fictitious) paid the professor a visit.

REPORTER, FICTIONAL BYLINE: In a bright, cluttered corner art gallery in Seattle, I sat with a 70-something professor watching videos about his teaching of printmaking. These are not traditional classroom recordings, but vintage, black-and-white. They show students forty years ago polishing their management skills. In one video, students report on safety and security measures in the etching studio. Their teacher is Bill Ritchie, and he’s showing me the video now, in 2015.

STUDENT: (In the video) “I want to point out that the fire extinguisher . . .”

REPORTER: It may seem like an odd way for art students to have been spending their class time, but the students appear to have taken it a seriously. They will have to practice safe procedures during their careers, especially in printmaking. Etching is a process that uses acids and hazardous solvents.

RITCHIE: I was piloting some new approaches to management and leadership, and that was one of the ways. Students got credit for attending to the management part of the course. The video, by the way, was made by a student on camera.

REPORTER: It was a far cry from how art students were traditionally taught. The longtime model for art classes was the Master’s atelier, in which students spend years in classes following the directions of art professors and studying pictures of how other artists worked—19th Century methods adapted by art educators and applied to college. Bill Ritchie architected a new curriculum in the 1970s. He says the atelier model persists even as art has changed. Classes stayed the same for generations chiefly because of painting.

RITCHIE: I think the vast majority of art schools still use a 19th Century painting atelier model, but printmaking has different qualities than those of other visual arts. It is not understood very well by most painters, and printmaking teachers seem to feel bound by the rules of painting—as if painting were the only visual art form.

REPORTER: Ritchie says the painting studio model simply doesn't work when it comes to his favorite art, which has always been printmaking. For one thing, there's so much science, math, and engineering in printmaking—too much for anyone to learn in just a few years. And the field is constantly in flux. What Ritchie started in the 1970s at the University of Washington School Of Art was to prepare artists for the inevitable changes they would see over their practice lives that technology would cause.

RITCHIE: I didn’t try to predict what art was going to be like in forty years and teach my opinion, but I wanted to give students the tools to be adaptable, resilient, to problem-solve, to focus on some things, accept new things, and change other things for good.

REPORTER: Ritchie says he succeeded for a short while. He saw his former students do quite well. Yet, despite that, faculty saw Ritchie’s innovations as disruptive. Since printing, according to Ritchie, is the ancestor of all technologies, he stressed learning how media systems work and he benefitted because he had to learn right along with the students about some of the possibilities on the horizon.

RITCHIE: It started when I made teaching videos live—like a cooking show—right in the class. Right away students saw video cameras and monitors as sources for art ideas, and they mixed the media. They took video’s special effects and made electronic prints off the video monitor!

REPORTER: And sometimes it wasn’t the art professor who was the best teacher about making interesting art. Professors in the performing arts came to his classes.

RITCHIE: If I hooked the art students up with music and dance professors and their students, all of them together playing with live video—then we all learned about improvisation and what teams can do.

REPORTER: Printmaking art students learned to work as part of a team, rather than be like the painter, who often is an innovator working in isolation. Printmakers share the printing press for etching, for example, and, later, shared video studios with medical students. Next came the computer and networking. These added layers of interaction revealed new relationships among students, engineers and people outside of the university.

RITCHIE: Our work went global. Students were getting invited to international shows, and people were making the UW a destination, visiting us to see what we were doing with video and computers.

REPORTER: It’s obvious from watching the old videos that Ritchie was more guiding than teaching, but he says he didn’t learn that when he was a student.

RITCHIE: I was not taught this in school. My teachers didn’t teach how to work in teams, how to communicate with peers and colleagues and how to communicate to the general public about what art has become. As far as I know, they still don’t. I wish they would. I owe it to printmaking that I see and enjoy the difference between the arts of the past with what art has become today.

Back story copyright 2015 Kaiser Health News. To see more, visit http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/.

pp150408  Value Back Story: Analyze this  

He attended a lecture on the valuation of art based on its monetary worth in the eyes and hearts of art collectors and their asset management experts. A casual reference to back story by one of the speakers cracks a door to a different view of media arts.

Emeralda means asset management and legacy transfer

Emeralda is my structured asset management and legacy transfer system. In a meeting with Kevin Collette (Ryan Swanson & Cleveland) in the 1980s, I introduced Kevin and one of his associates to my plan to team up with software engineers and design an algorithm[1] for artists’ families to identify, control, evaluate and disseminate the artist’s legacy. The objective is artistic legacy transfer to the advantage the family and society. At that time I was to begin by applying for a trademark, “Living Prints.” The USPO mistook my application for hardware design and I could not afford to reapply.

My plan went back into its box, which is a casebound trilogy called the Perfect Studios Series—and I carried on with R&D for the asset management and legacy transfer algorithm. Then, last night, on the occasion of a presentation by Dave Buck (Riddell Williams) and Michelle Dunn Marsh (Northwest Photo Center), I gained a fortuitous insight into art valuation and my dream of Emeralda was awakened.

The insight came in to stages: First, when I walked into the lobby of Riddell Williams, I saw two artworks facing each other across the seating area—a work by Dennis Evans’ and, on the opposite wall, Norie Sato’s. Dennis and Norie spent time with me at the University of Washington, where they were getting their MFA degrees in the School Of Art and where was one of their professors.

The second thing that awakened my Emeralda dream happened during the course of Dave Buck’s discourse on factors that affect the value of artworks. He mentioned “back story.” This piqued my interest because back story is an essential element of Emeralda. In the arts, back story is a literary tool for fiction, poetry, and screen play writing. Back story functions too in day-to-day social intercourse and personal relationships. In the age of digital communications, back story is finding its way into our lives in ways we could not have imagined except in science fiction, mainly through social networks.

Following the talks I related my delight, speaking up to the gathering and telling them my experience, and so there is another aspect to valuation of art, one which I experienced when I saw the art of Dennis and Norie in such a fine setting as these law offices. I said, “Value works of young, unknown artists you like or believe in, despite that young, up-and-coming artists (and the down-and-going and the down-and-out) are not famous, or that their art is cheap.”

“Lend a hand,” I said, “because you never know what a difference your purchase can make.”

To which Michelle Dunn Marsh, added, “Also older artists.”

Press Ghost Investor

The trilogy that I showed Kevin Collette that time many years ago was the beginning of my writing practice. The first book of the trilogy was the “Art of Selling Art: Between production and livelihood.” After the rejection of this tome by the first publisher I offered it to (and, later, seeing the same title published soon after by someone else!) I swore off big publishers and took advantage of an element of my algorithm, the technology of self-publishing.

An example of this is my paperback “Press Ghost Investor: Art crowd sorcerer’s guide to investing in a new school of printmaking.” I gave a copy to Mr. Buck, encouraged by his wife Chris. In this book, I suggest that—within Washington State—equity crowd funding may be combined with using artworks as preferred stock. At the time I wrote “Press Ghost Investor,” I was focused on developing a new school of printmaking and technology. This became one of nineteen startups I work on in my current ten-year plan—the Seattle Printmakers Center.

Call to action

Valuation of art in the age of digital reproduction is a deeply fascinating topic. Moreover, I appreciated the chance to revisit artwork by Dennis and Norie and meeting Dave Buck and Chris. The Seattle Printmakers Center will be the end my quest for the Perfect Studios—possibly sooner than my target year of 2023—and my quest will be the back story to the physical structure of the Center. If you, who read this essay, can join in the quest, please indicate your interest and how you can help.

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1.      [1] An algorithm (pronounced AL-go-rith-um) is a procedure or formula for solving a problem. The word derives from the name of the mathematician, Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi, who was part of the royal court in Baghdad and who lived from about 780 to 850.

es150115 Hacking Rembrandt 

Thanks Pablos Holman  

“We’re using the brain for the wrong things,” said Pablos Holman. It’s an important natural resource. Discovery is fundamental to innovation, and you can’t skip it. “Humans are trying to figure out how to keep more people alive on just one planet, and the only way we can do this invent our way out of this question.”

What happened to me was, in taking apart a toy truck in 1949, I discovered it was made out of an American coffee can. Probably it was part of the reconstruction program after World War II, probably the United States was sending shiploads of scrap metal to Japan and one of the cans came back and ended up under the Christmas tree.

Before long I had my truck all apart and that’s when I learned about the surprises you can find when you hack it. I took apart clocks, car engines and sometimes I’d turn parts of things into things like a crystal radio or a rocket.

“Our imaginations are not keeping up with technologies. We have a supercomputer in our pocket and we’re using to play FartAss or Dots or something,” Pablos said. “We try to take on the biggest problems we can find. We don’t need more APPs for the iPhone. What we do need is to take on the bigger problems facing human kind.”

Rembrandt was a hacker

At the height of the Golden Age of the Dutch Empire, when Rembrandt lived and worked, he was surrounded by a boom in technologies of all kinds. Not only painting technologies, which was what Rembrandt knew best, big things were happening in medicine, shipping and shipbuilding, manufacturing, optics, navigation, publishing, international trade, the sciences, philosophy and education.

He was a great painter, one of the best, but I believe his fame today owes partly to his use of the technologies of printing—or what we artists like to call, “printmaking” because we make the plate and print the plate ourselves. That’s what Rembrandt learned how to do by hacking the printing industry and doing it his way.

He took apart the process, in other words, that all the other painters were using, and made the process do things other artists hadn’t tried. Other painters were not hackers like Rembrandt—they took printing as it was and did not change anything—it was just a way to make reproductions and promote themselves.

In my humble opinion, by hacking printmaking, Rembrandt got one up on his contemporaries. When I started out in art school, I discovered that my childhood hacking days—taking apart toys and such—helped me master the technology of printmaking. Then, when video came along, I found I could hack video, too, and the same with the university’s mainframe, the mini, and the microcomputers that were just coming out.

It wasn’t programming and writing code that I needed—I just needed a different use for the computer. Like all innovative artists—like Rembrandt—we take existing ideas, technologies, ways and means to express and communicate and we see what else we can make of them.

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!