mr160415  Promoting the Printmaker’s Tale:  Pitching the book

The Printmakers Tale:  

The Printmaker’s Tale is a legend behind an etching press from its inception in the 18^th Century and how it changed peoples’ lives. Follow the story and see how it was conceived, how it change hands and touched the lives of many, including a Jesuit priest, a Spanish beauty, a Basque navigator, a Russian castaway and an Aleutian hostage.

Once this small press was unearthed in the 20^th Century from a grave on Guemes Island. It came up as evidence in a Bellingham trial, and it even triggered a hunt for a lost ivory treasure which had belonged to Richard Dana. Think of the movie, “The Red Violin,” a beautifully designed instrument for art and picture, if you can, a printmaker’s dream, a designer’s press.

As I designed and built almost two-hundred of these Halfwood Presses, while cutting, drilling, sanding, finishing and etching decorative brass touches, this tale came to me in installments - like the parts of the press itself.* Ten years ago I began writing down each one. Some I published with on-demand services.

My first, in 2006, was a mystery, “Hunt for the Emeralda Treasure.” The next year I wrote a mockumentary, “Halfwood Press: The Story,” and sent paperbacks with each press. Then came a screenplay titled, “Swipe,” the press redeeming an outcast teacher. The latest is a time-travel historical fiction, “Rembrandt’s Ghost in the New Machine.” Stitching these all together, the Printmaker’s Tale (a working title) will be a high-profile, worthy production.

It’s a saga beginning in the 16^th C. when the original Spanish frigate – the Emeralda – was designed, then succeeded in the 18^th Century by another to carry the beautiful Halfwoods to China, but doomed in the San Juan Islands by a great wave—a tsunami in 1772.

There is a real etching press behind the story, and you may already have visited our Mini Art Gallery and Halfwood Press show room. Or, you may have chanced to see the press upstairs, as Ethan Lind is a vendor (most Wednesdays) as “Busker Etcher,” printing on a Halfwood Press.

I am passionate not only about printmaking, prints, and printmakers, but I am also passionate also about these back stories; and I will see this printmaker’s tale realized within the next few years. I will no longer be working alone quite so much. As the Northwest Print Center Incubators evolves, I will work with more professionals in different fields.

*This is why the story of the press will become a printmakers’ game—the components being like parts of a board game or a collectible card game. The Printmaker’s Tale then becomes the back story of a game.

ap160213  Alice in Emeralda:  A program for teaching printmaking

Reading Randy Pausch’ book, “The Last Lecture,” this art professor came across “Alice,” the program for helping kids learn code. The professor thinks thought about using this method for teaching printmaking, a software product titled, “Alice in Emeralda.” 

Alice in Emeralda

Reading through my tears Randy Pausch’ book, The Last Lecture, I came across Alice and I thought about using this method for my Printmaking teaching method, a patentable software product with the title, Alice in Emeralda.

Could a team use Alice? Could they collaborate to tell the story of the player in Emeralda Region, traversing the Great Lake, visiting Islands, and collecting things for printmaking?

My memory of the work of Janet Fisher came back to me. I can play the video she made using objects from Second Life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2OL66R5UBQ

The same could be done with a game, Alice in Emeralda, I think, and be one of the products of the Northwest Print Center & Incubators inspired in part by Rosabeth Moss-Kanter's idea of Advanced Leadership Schools.

Advanced Leadership Schools proposed by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

For an an Advanced Leadership School, Rosabeth Moss Kanter advised six steps:

·         Design a foundation. (this would be the Ritchie Foundation)

·         Create a new social enterprise or a business venture with a social purpose. (this would be the Northwest Print Center & Incubators).

·         Prepare a plan to take a nonprofit to the next level of effectiveness. (this would be the dissemination of the Ritchie Family Art collection to support the NPC&I)

·         Plan a run for public office, with positions on major social issues. (not for me, but someone experienced with both political and artistic processes—Joby Shimomura comes to mind)

·         Write a book that can initiate a national awareness campaign. (an outdated idea, but social networks and games come to mind, such as Proximates).

·         Create plans to reshape a city by working on health, education, and jobs. (The core purposes of the NWP&I relate to this)

I read Moss-Kanter’s advice ten years ago when I was proposing a way to reshape higher and post graduate education. I set my sights on Ellensburg and Central Washington University. Like all my efforts—past and present—to restore and extend the benefits of having spent my first college years at Central, my work came to nothing and, apparently, such will always be the case with state-run institutions.

What Rosabeth Moss-Kanter left out in her six steps was branding. Branding is a powerful element in all the points above. For example, “CWU” is a brand, as is “UW”—instantly associated with institutions of higher education. The trouble is, these branded institutions lack the leaders and are poorly educated—framing solutions with the same frames that caused the problems. Einstein warned against this.

Design a foundation

For step number one, Design a foundation, the brand will feature my family name simply because I own my name, and my family owns it, and they own everything I made under my name. Therefore, all the property under my name can be used to finance the NPC&I. It is my signature. True, Central (and the UW) helped put my family name where it is and, attached to it, all my productions and intellectual property. These institutions, however, have shown they are not interested in my property, nor are their leaders capable of conversing about solutions.

Create a new social enterprise or a business venture with a social purpose

Step number two, to be funded by Ritchie Family Foundation, is the Northwest Print Center and Incubators, a B-corporation. Rosabeth Moss-Kanter wrote her AARP article about Advanced Leadership Schools around 2005 (before B-corps were developed under the JOBS Act under the Obama administration) the idea of a social enterprise and business venture with a social purpose were new.

Prepare a plan to take a nonprofit to the next level of effectiveness

The Ritchie Foundation is the nonprofit—and the way to take it to the next level of effectiveness is the current phase—forming the B-corp (or Social Purpose Corporation, as it is called in Washington State) concurrently.

Plan a run for public office, with positions on major social issues

Here I hesitate—I shrink from the idea of running for public office. I know a leader must act like a leader in a social-political arena; however, much of our nation’s public policy is muddied by an ongoing, undeclared civil war and a hundred years of poor educational performance. Our forefathers warned that you can’t have a democracy without an educated populace to vote for it. I think those who stick their neck out today risk being shot. Even little children going to school risk being shot.

Write a book that can initiate a national awareness campaign

At the time Moss-Kanter wrote her advice, 2005, books were only one of many ways of raising national awareness. Al Gore, for example, got a bigger boost from Hollywood than from his book and slide shows in the 1990s. Writers like Tolkien and Rowling got where they are by multimedia—everything from movies to videogames and, of course, the Internet.

Eventually Gore was nudged by friends in Hollywood to try movies, and he won an Academy Award. Too late, however, as the Inconvenient Truth was told to blind and deaf-eared Americans who can’t handle the truth.

The entertainment and experience world in general is too huge for most individuals to contemplate, but groups of people can, if they can work hard together with focus, initiate a national and international awareness campaign.

Acting alone, I’ve written a number of books and screenplays, and when I do I always have parallel thoughts about how my writings can be hybridized with board games, collectible card games, video games, movies and the Internet. When I make etching presses or prints, I’m ready to make a video for YouTube, and every time I do I add value to the Ritchie brand.

A national awareness campaign today depends on social networks, and its best if, while you design your campaign, you also design a social network around the brand, i.e., the Halfwood Press with a network like Proximates—a narrowly-focused kind of network—the equivalent of a niche market and, unlike most social networks that are virtual, Proximates is both virtual and real, space/time based.

Moss-Kanter is right in showing how national awareness rests partly on a book, but the foundation and its allied B-corp is more likely to succeed if attached to a press that prints itself with human aid. One that does the following—reshaping a city (or a part of it) by working on health, education and jobs—can be part of national awareness campaigns that work toward solving big problems.

Create plans to reshape a city by working on health, education, and jobs

This is the Northwest Print Center and Incubators—its nineteen divisions addressing health, education and jobs concurrently—an engineering feat involving arts, entertainment and manufacturing.

ps151205  Gamify your press: 

Building community for the NPC&I 

Is it feasible to start the Northwest Print Center and Incubators with a printing press? Could the Halfwood Press Line be the beating heart of this enterprise? Are manufacturing and customer support the keys to successful, job-creation and sustainability? 

Is it feasible?

In my excitement to fulfill an order for a new press—this one a unique, white Galleon Halfwood—is rather like a fifteen-year slow burning fuse lit in the year 2000. It was about that time I lit out on an effort to take on the world. I started with an art gallery in our condo. This game me space to meet the public, plus room to organize and show our art collection.

The next year I moved my space to a unit text to ours—a 600-foot space I converted to a mix of art studio, video production and display area. We sold that in 2003 and I moved to Captiol Hill to participate in an experiment called the Seattle Artists Mall, which lasted six months.

Immediately after leaving the SAM, I rented a 300-square foot space at SMJ Studios. I wanted to get back to my roots in printmaking, so I put pencil to paper and drew my perfect press—a beautiful press half wood and half steel. In a few months—it was now 2004—I had it made. As an afterthought, I asked for a miniature version of the original Halfwood.

The Mini Halfwood let flow a new current in printmaking for me. Although I was to continue my printmaking, I discovered that people were hungrier for printmaking experiences than they were hungry for my art.

My art satisfied me and a few art patrons (as it always has, and continues to satisfy) but then—as now—I learned that a more true artistic interaction with people lay in sharing the experience, not only the art.

This was proof of a theory which I hatched when I was still teaching college: Printmaking is a performance art as much as it is a visual art. As the ancestor of all technologies, the value of printmaking experiences is greater than as an art form. Print spawned numerous arts—photography, cinema, video, computer graphics and interactive games.

This is all fine and good, but can printmaking create jobs? What America needs now is meaningful, sustainable work for imaginative, creative, discovering and inventive people. Productivity is the key to sustainability, and it must not help ending Earth’s human life sustainability as many other products do. Press production, education and business development must bring about another age of reason.

I produce etching presses called the "Halfwood Line," and variations on the theme of the printmaking experiences that open up when there is a press handy. Now I am startingup the Northwest Print Center and Incubators with the Halfwood Press line as its cash cow Can the manufacture, sales and support for the Halfwood Press Line—and the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press—create jobs for other people as it has done for me?

A feasibility study is the only way to find out. However, there is a condition to meet: It must be a feasibility study that uses new ideas, like Concurrent Engineering, Lean Startups, and Gamification.

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About the Author: Bill Ritchie plans that printmaking will be taught, researched, and practiced in a community of practice and blends traditional printmaking and new technologies. His press designs and videos are for printmakers globally while he builds local teams to develop the Northwest Print Center and Incubators.

ps151114  Values and Valuation: An ambiguous pairing in art  

Moving toward the Northwest Print Center and forming the corporation to build it, the author examines the two meanings of value as they apply to his plan to use his family art collection as seed capital. Putting education before art has importance to him.

Illustration: Sandbox stage of building the Northwest Print Center and Incubators

College experience

The most profound experience I had as an undergraduate in college in 1962 was the Symposium in American Values. As a farm kid I never thought about the meaning of the word, values. We were not well off, financially, as my mom and dad eked out a year-to-year, season-to-season existence between the bank, the Native Americans, weather, and diseases that could wipe out livestock.

When the colloquium was announced, I had several questions: What’s a colloquium? What are values? What distinguishes American Values from, say, Mexico’s migrants’ values? Value, in my mind, went no further than the income from a ton of potatoes or corn, or the price-per-pound of beef on the hoof. Monetary value was everything. Moral values were vague, fuzzy notions having more to do with the heart than the mind.

For several days while the colloquium took place back in that time, I was immersed in the questions and answers from our invited speakers. Those days had a profound effect on me; half a century later, I still consider that experience as I proceed toward the building of the Northwest Print Center and Incubators. I have to decide how to turn straw into gold, you might say, to get the money to start it happening. I have to turn art valuation into something other than what it has become in common terms—make the value of my art more than meets the eye.

Values and education

Fifty years ago, Vietnam was not a front page item. The cold war, the rise of Castro in Cuba, assassinations of the Kennedys—these were emerging events. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, TV, and folk music were uppermost on the minds of many college-age people. All the while, in my ‘twenties, the specter of being drafted into the army was omnipresent. When, in 1964, it was time for me to move on from undergraduate school, what I wanted most was to be an art teacher, get married, and get a Master’s degree and, hopefully, teach college art. I did all three—I got married to Lynda, got a Master of Arts degree, and got a job teaching printmaking at the University of Washington in our home state. Life was good.

Looking back, I wonder if the exposure to the Colloquium on American Values had a subtle effect on my choices. What made me put being a teacher above being an artist? Or, did my attitude come from earlier experience—farming, and my parents’ influence? They were exemplary people. They never got rich, but they had a rich life in the sense of living pretty well and living long—though, sadly at the end, not in the best of health.

Something made me say I wanted to be a great teacher when the art department chairman at San Jose State University (where I got my MA) asked me, “Well, are you going out to become a great artist now?” He was set back, I remember, and seemed a little let down. Maybe his years of teaching art history, and being chairman of the art department, had jaded him.

Institutionalized artists

Many teachers in our educational institutions will agree that it is difficult to achieve your teaching goals in American educational institutions. It is confusing, for example, to teachers with education in their hearts and minds to be asked to spend time on non-educational efforts. Sitting in committees, for example, or calling roll, giving tests, filling out forms, reading the latest orders and changes to the rules and regulations of the institution. Then there are is the competition for wages, promotions, and the question of what to do if teaching doesn’t pan out.

Art teachers seldom have a high place in American educational institutions, but we seem not to mind because we not only love teaching, we also love art in all its varying manifestations—performance art, crafts, design, fine art, art history, experiments in art and technology—it’s possible to see why art teachers get by on the meager budgets allocated to their domain of expertise.

The difference might lie in the different meanings of value when applied to art and non-art. Training to design cars, for example (a course which I came very close to taking) is different than learning to make art using creative, inventive, and imaginative, discovery research. Car design comes from without, from corporations and stockholders who have one thing in mind: valuation by money, or some equivalent of economic and political power.

Today, the influence of incorporated economic and political power on American educational institutions is profound—to the point of eliminating concern for American values. This is not good, because the founders of our experiment in government made it clear that the experiment depends on education. Without an educated voting population, we will fail as a nation, and knowing values and valuation in art is, to me, key to our survival—of any nation’s survival and, ultimately, Earth’s human life sustainability.

ap151010 STEAM Printmaking  

Illustration: WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press “steampunked” by Ron Myhre for the 2015 Port Townsend steampunk event. Ric Miller used CNC routing for manufacturing the press; Miller and Myhre collaborated with Bill Ritchie, who adapted the design after a 17^th Century etching press typical of Rembrandt's time.  

S

“S” is for science—how science and printmaking are related. Think of the big picture—how it was the science of pigment and templates that constitute the invention of printing. The hand is a template, and science is described in terms of exactly repeatable signs, symbols and the makeup of atoms, molecules and the forces that bind and split them.

T

“T” is for technology, the result of the joining of science and templates. Making an exactly repeatable image was decisive in communication over wide spaces and time. We have the prints on the walls of caves—a broadcast of hundreds of centuries. That’s pretty good, isn’t it? Try to describe a hand print with words only. Sure, letter forms are great and words are great, but had it not been for their being exactly repeatable as templates, you’d have no written or printed language. Printing is the ancestor of all technologies.

E

“E” is for engineering. We started with the science of paint and template, came up with technology, and now we mechanize the procedure and that takes the wile and way of engineering. Engineering is practically an art in itself but requires following the laws of science to make technology workable. Making a printing press—whether old world style or with laser light—requires engineering.

A

“A” is for art, and this has been left out of the STEM programs about organizing school and training institutions. If you leave out the A-word, art, then you have training. You can train a robot by science, technology, and engineering, but you can’t “train” art into the robot. Don’t be fooled into thinking a machine that makes designs that stimulate the five senses to pleasing effect is an artist. Humans own the art field. The five senses as a robot sees them are not the same as being human. A robot can design weapons of mass destruction and put an end to Earth’s human life sustainability, but an STEAM-educated human can change the course of the trend.

M

“M” is for math; we come to the interesting part because mathematics figure into all matters in education, whether it’s finding the area of physical space needed to have an art studio, or rent it, or for how much finished artworks must sell for to meet expenses. The more amazing mathematics express theories of relativity, black holes and the exact course for putting a rover on Mars. Math is essential to economics, the vice-regent to social and political science, which brings us full circle back to humanities.

Conclusion

The case for making printmaking THE art, craft and design to stand up for art in the STEAM proposition is that printmaking engages all its four neighbors in the STEM proposition - always has, always will. The same is not true of hand-painting, drawing, and sculpture; connections with STEM are somewhat true of the craft  and industry-oriented arts such as ceramics, weaving, paper making for example.

Proponents of STEAM should study this deeply with me, as I have studied and applied the principles of STEAM; and balanced the printmaking world that I made. For example, apply math to the economics of making presses in order that more people can have a printmaking experience.

ps150519 Personal Positive Experience with Cultural Arts Technologies 

How I survived the University of Washington 

His experiences with technologies have been positive, and it is a certainty that technologies played an important role in his professional life. The experiences are the foundation for the Northwest Print Center and Cultural Arts Technology Incubator plan.

Personal Positive Experience with Cultural Arts Technology

My experiences with technologies have been almost entirely positive, and it will come as no surprise that technologies played an important role in my professional life.

My wife and I moved to California from Washington when I was 24 so I could work on my Master of Arts in printmaking. Due to our country-born-and-bred backgrounds we were perceived as different, and my art was different from that of other graduate students.

This, coupled with the strong sense of displacement that we felt at such an abrupt change in place, made it very difficult to make friends. Often I found I had nothing in common with the other students, and as a couple we felt like social outcasts.

That all changed in the spring of 1966, when I was hired by the renowned printmaker, Glen Alps, to teach at the University of Washington School Of Art. Despite my good fortune, I was still an outcast, it seemed, but I forged ahead and taught with dedication.

I worried about the possible ramifications of rumors—that I was hired not for my strengths but for my youth and pliability, as Glen needed a protégé. There was no choice to make the best of the situation. If I held out for three years, I might be promoted to Assistant Professor, gain time to avoid the draft into the Vietnam Conflict, and maybe start a family.

Without even realizing it, I started to use technology as a facilitator for printmaking in 1968, when I tried photo-etching. Furthermore, I was successful in art shows and winning a few small grants and prizes.

Technology provided a way for me build confidence as teaching printmaking came easy for me. Among faculty I began to make friends and print their art in a collaborative way which helped my social interaction, and a sense of self-value and self-worth.

I had no fellow outcasts except among students who were having difficulty reconciling their needs with the allegiance Glen Alps expected of them. I quickly developed a shared enthusiasm, not just going by the books, but also for the interpersonal connections that good teaching provided.

Of course, at the time I didn’t know the significance of the split that brought my students and I together and widened the gap with Alps. I saw my teaching and research simply as a fun game to play. When Stephen Hazel moved to Seattle, he added his enthusiasm to the technology experiments and shared his knowledge with me like a teacher.

 Printmaking and technological things that are involved in it was more than just a means to making prints to us, it became the focus of our friendships. Printmaking was the basis on which an ever-expanding social group was slowly pieced together. Daniel Smith and Keith Achepohl came. I traveled to Europe and worked briefly with Rolf Nesch, who exemplified for me the artist struggling to make new graphic art against greater powers.

When I returned from Europe, I wasn’t alone anymore. I was still low-ranking and strange in my interest in technologies like photography, film and video, so had to endure the indignity of academic bullying. But with a group of students who shared my interest such issues seemed less important; and the prizes and grants kept coming.

As we—the students and I—grew, the technology thing grew with us, and we began to expand our interests in other directions, such as performance art, music and dance. Gradually, our group evolved from being based simply around printmaking in the University’s closed-circuit studios into a campus-wide network linked by a shared interest in a wider world of new art forms.

Students graduated and some of them were immediately snapped up by young, aggressive art dealers with new galleries to stock. A group formed a co-operative studio called Triangle Studios, and I was invited to join. It wasn’t until years later that we realized the full significance of our early days, and how the technologies had aided in creating an entire social network of peers with similar beliefs.

I was often faced with censure from other faculty and passed over at promotion time. I fought back, which only worsened my relations with other faculty. Ostensibly this was due to my involvement in students affairs and my perceived battle with Alps.

I had experienced the indignity of collegial politics for most of my career and knew that playing with my own cards, as it were, was just another excuse to get picked on. I was getting a reputation nationally, and my students were doing well. This made life at the UW tolerable.

Besides, the UW was larger than the art school taken by itself. At times I felt like I had the run of the whole campus! A phone call would get me thousands of dollars worth of video and mainframe computer services. Engineers were there to help me with anything I needed, and more grants came to me than I can remember.

If anything, technology helped with the bullying and faculty censure, and with my former students I developed a strong group identity that lasted for years.  Well along in my career I still maintained contact with most of the members of this group. Needless to say, I continued to develop ways to use technology as an artistic and cultural tool despite the potential risk they posed my university job.

Eventually, I could no longer tolerate the demeaning nature of the art school—the ways the faculty manipulated the code of ethics, the out-of-date curriculum, and using students as hostages in their internecine shenanigans.

During my nineteen years, I met thousands of students, visiting professors and off-campus artists and made countless acquaintances, rivals, and friends, and while we all have different life experiences, I’ve found that many artists have similar stories.

Technology, instead of having an alienating influence in art, contemporary technological cultural arts have been an inclusive experience, allowing me to make friends, bridge gaps, and meet new people outside my circle.

Instead of making me feel like a loner and a weirdo like my affinity for things mechanical and my country-boy mien, technology for culture helped me to create a positive self-identity, helped me develop a much-needed sense of self-confidence during the difficult early years of teaching at the UW.

es150803 Paraphrasing Rifkin 

If I had told my UW colleagues 30 years ago, in 1985 when I walked away that, by 2015, one-third of the human race would be communicating with one another in huge global networks of hundreds of millions of people simply exchanging audio, video, and text on a device in the palm of their hands, and that the combined knowledge of the world would be accessible there, that any single individual could post a new idea, introduce a product, or pass a thought to a potential billion people simultaneously, and that the cost of doing so would be nearly free, they would have shaken your head in disbelief.

As it was, they would not speak to me, let alone listen. All the things I forecast, even as early as 1972, are now reality. This has come to pass, and with benefits that a teacher can continue teaching after he has passed away, and students, too, can live in the virtual, virtuous world of the teacher.

For example, Maury Pepin was a student of mine, and he passed in 2004, too young. Yet it happens that I have a print he made, and his family may still own a print I made and which Maury bought when he was a student at the UW. Maury, in my memory, was inclined to science and engineering, and helped me to add another element to my game, Emeralda.

See his page at http://www.printmakingworld.com/emeralda/ps/psserv/patronage/pepin.htm

The first paragraph above is my paraphrasing of Jeremy Rifkin's article in Huffington Post.