Perfect
Storm of Printmaking
Conditions for Seattle Printmaking Center
©2014
1282 Words
3 Page(s)
Filename: ap140325 Perfect Storm of Printmaking.docx
In 2000, a film, based on a book by the same title, Perfect Storm was released and the
expression perfect storm has become popular. It means any event where a situation is aggravated drastically by an
exceptionally rare combination of circumstances. It can mean, for example, a
list of meteorological factors that lead to a flood. I am using the expression
to describe a series of seven factors spanning fifty years that may bring about
a new printmaking center in Seattle.
While I am not the smartest person you will meet, I have been one of the luckiest. Starting my life as a farm boy was a positive factor in my ability to study my way off the farm and use artistic skills I inherited from my mother. My father taught me discipline and with these i was able to get my bachelor’s and master’s degrees and—what is factor 1—a college teaching job.
In the nineteen years that I was a college teacher I went from a naive 26-year old instructor—the lowest rank on the academic ladder—to a naive 43-year old full professor with tenure. In my naiveté, I carried my first impressions of what higher education means all the way to my resignation from the University Of Washington. It was my belief that the system was corrupted by a few university administration people, some faculty, and some students.
It is said in Sayre’s Law, that "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter." My bitterness in resigning was not so much the fact that my research in art, technology, and emerging globalization was stymied by art school politics as it was in the opportunities that were showing up all around the Pacific Northwest. From Oregon to British Columbia, new technologies useful to artists were inviting and open to exploration.
In the ten years before I resigned, I had a decade to work with students who, like me, frustrated with the art school dogma, nepotism, male chauvinism and rigid curricula. It was the height of protest in the United States with issues that included civil rights, the Vietnam conflict, assassinations and government corruption. The fourth factor in my “perfect storm” was the intellectual and ethical expressions my students were involved in; I was swept up in their curiosity as to what the new technologies and new artistic movements might offer them for their careers in art. They graduated and went on to prove their point by being successful on their own terms, not the terms of the schools of art.
For ten more years I struggled to find ways to make a living for my family by applying what I had been teaching in college. The system was against me, however, because technology continued to be anathematic to the existing art museum and gallery atmosphere. For awhile, alternative art galleries gave artists some space and time—notably And/Or and COCA—but the art medium I believe to be the root of all new art and technology developments (which is printmaking) continued to be restricted to traditional printmaking, thanks to the UW School Of Art, which was putting printmaking back in its pre-war level as being a minor art.
The internet opened up in 1994, and my cocoon period ended because with the internet I could apply what I had learned in college. The globalization I witnessed when I went around the world on my fact-finding mission of 1983 could now be realized. I took what I learned in school from my students, who by now were successful mid-career professionals, and architected a curriculum around printmaking as the nexus of new technologies. I put a high value on the intellectual side of artistic creativity, discovery, imagination and invention and made it an imaginary place I named Emeralda, referring to the emerald region spanning Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.
Researching the term perfect storm in Wikipedia, I found: “The first use of the expression in the meteorological sense comes from the March 20, 1936, issue of the Port Arthur News in Texas: "The weather bureau describes the disturbance as ‘the perfect storm’ of its type. Seven factors were involved in the chain of circumstances that led to the flood." (My italics). Seven is a good number to stop on, and Factor 7 is the press I designed I call the Halfwood. By shrinking my press and adding the flash memory drive, I could put the ghost of myself in this new/old machine. Thus, it is more than an etching press; it is a platform, a term used in digital technology and applied to what this etching press really is—a platform for both intellectual, artistic, learning and communal use.
Since 1966 when I came to Seattle, I have wanted to be part of a printmaking community which is both a clear benefit in Seattle as a fluid, creative time/space. It was from the span of two years, 1966-1969, that the Northwest Printmakers Society was shutting down—for reasons I am still not sure of. Probably it was a lack of money. The organization was restored and re-emerged in Portland later because the late Gordon Gilkey—the city’s most ardent advocate and patron of traditional printmaking—cultivated the idea with success.
Traditional printmaking clubs and workshops are located in major cities—and some out-of-the-way places—around the world. However, when I visited them in 15 countries on my travels in 1983, they were moribund, often empty rooms with plenty of space and equipment but few people actually working in them.
Sometimes, but rarely, I found foreign printmaking workshops were dabbling in things like video and computer graphics and this gave me the evidence I needed to transform printmaking back home in Seattle.
It is not only money that keeps printmaking organizations from becoming important community centers, it is a backward-looking policy, a too-tight grip on old timey crafts; such printmaking centers are similar to what you see in weaving, ceramics, and other crafts centers. However, they lack cash flow. Tourists visit these centers to see how things used to be done, and they come to appreciate them more. Clubs take form around the arts and crafts, even resurrecting the old days of war, agricultural practices, and entertainment. Experience is key to the success of these centers—that, plus things to sell and exchange.
A Seattle Printmaking Center would combine the seven factors above, which would culminate in the printing press platform for using digital technologies to be both teacher and stage for the artists who use the Halfwoods. The Halfwood Presses are gateways or portals to bigger worlds, yet they are simultaneously a right-sized, beautiful functional instrument for the art, craft and design of printmaking for the 21st Century.
Best of all, the Seattle Printmaking Center would also be a factory school located in a place like the Pike Place Market redevelopment where people learn all about printmaking while they produce the cash-cow of the center by producing Halfwood Presses in the School Factory for Printmaking located within the Center.