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Take my life: Bill H. Ritchie’s autobiography

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Y2K Printmaking: 2001-2010

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Take My Life: Bill Ritchie’s Autobiography Volume 7 2001 - 2010 – Y2K Printmaking First Draft 2017


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Take My Life

Bill Ritchie’s Autobiography

Volume 7

2001 - 2010 – Y2K Printmaking

First Draft

Ritchie’s Perfect Press

Division of Emeralda Works

500 Aloha Street #105

Seattle WA 98109

Copyright 2018 Bill Ritchie


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Disclaimer This is a first draft version and is currently in its first re-write. I uploaded this version

despite errors, omissions, improper punctuation and sentence structure. Where names of people

are included, I did my best to get them right. Where there is repetition of text or images, I am

sorting these out. Where the text is too long or confusing, I’m rewriting it to make it leaner and a

better reading.

When I began this project in January, 2017, I estimated it would take about three years. In

January, 2018, I had assembled material for five of the eight volumes I planned. Putting the text

online despite its flaws, is my way of finding out if one’s autobiography can be creative and, thanks

to technologies, such as online reading and print-on-demand services, perhaps interactive.

Maybe interactivity as is possible this way I can engage the people whose pathways have

intersected mine and I acknowledge made this book interesting for me to write. Note that this PDF

version cannot be edited by the reader, however.

Readers who wish to comment, correct, suggest or expand, i.e., interact can do it by sending

email to me and are welcome. My best email address is [email protected].

It may interest readers to know that, for the first draft, I am using the Lulu.com printing

option and, if requested, I can toggle the switch at their site to enable purchases of hardcopy, black-

and-white hardbound books at $20 per volume, plus tax and postage. If you want to buy this first

draft—in spite of its being the first draft, an unedited, hardbound version and now being

rewritten—send email to me and I will make it so.

mailto:[email protected]


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Acknowledgements The following people contributed to my story, not by their writing but by having been part

of making my life story have more meaning than it would have been had I not known them directly

or – by their support of my productions – indirectly as owners in some part.

Dr. Steven Albright, Pat Austin, Professor Walt Bailey, Jennifer Balisle, Linda Bandini, Phil

Bivins, Deborah Block, Nancy Bonnema, Greg Both, Christine and Cary Brief, Carol Brozman, Billie Jane

and Eric Bryan, Matilda Bryan, Barbara Buech, Tom Blue, Ron Carraher, Carol and Patrick Carroll, Carl

Chew, Paula Cipolla, John Cogley, Kevin Collette, Sam Davidson, Nick Dellos, Nicole DeMente, Sylvia

Dillon, Phoebe Dylan, Michael Emory, Dennis Evans, Janet Fisher and Darren Mitchell, Christopher Fraker,

Ali Fujino, Elmer Gates, Jeff Geib, Gerry Giorgio, Kathryn and Ron Glowen, Joan and Pete Grimord, Pam

Gunn, Cheryl Hall, Ai Hayatsu, Kim Joo Hee, Len Heid, Randi Heinrich, Lane Hill, Mina and Hide Horiuchi,

Kirsten Horning, Gwen Howell, Jeremy Joan Hughes, James Jenkins, Marvin Johnson, Sarah Johnson, Richard

Kehl, Julianne Kershaw, Kathryn Kim, Billy King, Dave Klugman, Elsbeth Knott, Amanda Knowles, Tom

and Margie Kughler, Izumi Kuroiwa, Curt Labitsky, Maggie Larrick, Brent Learned, Mark Leonard, Frances

Liao, David Lotz, Norman Lundin, Eleanor Matthews, Jane Mau, Janice and Keith McGraw, Nancy Mee, Wil

Moore, Mark Mueller, Christine Müller, Ron Myhre, Roger Newton, Mark Nowlin, Oaksen Marta, Natalie

Olterman, John Overton, Lane Parks, Michael Peterson, Peggy Phillips, Mark Pinkerton, David Prentice, Carol

Puri, Kathleen Rabel, Teresa Redinger, Marjorie Reynolds, Randi Burke Riggs, Lynda Ritchie, Eloise Romais,

Stellan Schedin, Shirley Scheier, Scott Skinner, Daniel Smith, Carol Summers, Constance Speth, Larry Stair,

Barbara Stanton, John Stinson, Melissa Strawser, Nellie and Mike Sunderland, Lois Chichinoff Thadei, Michele

Thomas, Frank Trueba, Richard Trujillo, Anne Van Oppen, Preston Wadley, Catherine Watkins, John Weaver,

Holly Welsh, Letitia Wetterauer, Dave Wilburn, Jenny and Jeffrey Wilkson, Ann Williams, Peggy Wilson,

George Woodall, Megan Yee, and Carl Youngman.


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2001 By December 24 of this year, I will be Sixty years old

Photo: Artistamp based on Bill Ritchie’s

concept for a cover design, Passing Ferries.

Odyssey Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind. Somehow the imaginings of Arthur

C. Clark, who conceived the plotline, were off although we did achieve a degree of space travel

by this time. For me, 2001 had several turning points in my quest for the Perfect Studios.

Earthquake! There occurred a major earthquake, the Nisqually quake, of a magnitude 6.8 struck near

Olympia on February 28, 2001. I was in the back of the gallery doing some woodwork on my

storage drawers and my project started jumping around! I thought at first I was using a little too

much force, knocking things around; but in the minutes that followed I realized an earthquake had

struck. The quake—known as the Nisqually Quake of Richter 6 in strength—did a lot of damage

in Seattle and in the region. Even down in the basement levels of our condo where I had built

stackable drawer units those heavy units had moved an inch. Even today, in 2017, they still are not

in line with each other, a reminder of the quake in 2001.

Professor’s cabinet Early this year, in the spare bedroom of our condo which made into my studio, I started a

series of videos on the theme of The Golden Cabinet, based on a mysterious missing professor’s

drawers and closets. He filled these storage spaces with his art and memorabilia. Playing the role

of this imaginary professor’s assistant, I made videotapes of myself in the role, sometimes as Dusty

Cann, sometimes Harris MacRitchie, and sometimes as myself standing in for the ghost of myself

on my videos I made twenty-five years ago.

These videos are short—usually under three minutes long. The collection was like Legos—

building blocks of a turn-based game or scavenger hunt. The players search for the missing

professor—myself—as I provide the content of a back story. Hints are given as the main studio

contents are identified and their uses explained by the videos of the missing professor.


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My lifetime goal is a gamified teaching method for printmaking, a blended learning experience. Honestly,

I worked blind, not really knowing what I was doing; but I love to improvise and craft stories and make

videos on the fly. I thought, “Who knows?” From this method there may arise a pattern and structure for a

new, patentable method for teaching printmaking online.

Photos: (Left) Ritchie’s Video Archive as it stood in 2001.

(Right) Screenshot from Printmaking Asia Style, 2001.

Partly inspired by the video game and TV Show, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?

So, one back story of my game was that the missing professor’s art was stored in his cabinet,

storage drawers or a closet. The object of the game was the identification, control (or ownership),

evaluation and dissemination of his legacy. The process of identifying, determining control or

ownership, evaluation and dissemination is, in the art valuation nomenclature I adapted and call,

ICED: Identification, Control, Evaluation and Dissemination.

Photos: (Left) Screenshots of shower scene from 2001 video series,

as the avatar assistant introduces the 1973 Intaglio Platemaking video (Right).

The videos traced the procedure of going to the Islands-of-domains-of-expertise, passing

security by showing electronic passports, and meeting up with the resident-in-stay or, if he or she

is absent, their assistant or avatar introduces the video. The assistant would explain what the

professor was doing, elsewhere. In some of the videos these served as leaders into the instructional

videotapes in The Ritchie Video Archives.

We held on to that commercial space for six months, but our condo Homeowner’s

Association had won the five-million dollar lawsuit against the construction company and

subcontractors, the restoration contractors were chosen. Word came that they would need a jobsite

office and we had to give up the gallery to accommodate them.


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The construction meant that we would have to move out for the duration. Our next door

neighbor, Kari, was getting married and ready to move so we offered to buy her condo, which was

adjacent to ours. We closed the deal on June 21, 2001, and, piece by piece up the stairs from the

lower-level commercial space we moved the contents of what had been our gallery—including the

video and computer system. Now, unit 106 would be my studio for the few remaining months until

we must vacate. We planned to leave all the domestic necessities in place while I used the space

for my work.

In addition, we could put up our east-of-the-cascade family members, Billie, Eric and

Matilda when they decided to hunt for a home closer to Seattle. Within months, the entire

condominium building had to be reconstructed inside and out. I specified upgrading the floors of

our spare unit to hardwood for a studio floor. Aside from that, nothing changed lest we wanted to

sell the unit after I found a new place to work—if such a space could be found in time.

Studio 106 as a video studio My long-held dream is to do for printmaking what Julia Childs and other TV cooking

personalities did for culinary arts. One time, for example, Martha Stewart had a woodcut artist on

her crafts show showing printmaking in the Japanese manner. Friends in the baren.org group (an

International Woodcut Aficionados) commented that Stewart did more for woodcut in that short

broadcast than our efforts for promoting our craft in combined lifetimes! To make videos, though

they were not with high production quality of course, I often played the role of, Dusty Cann. One

I made in 106 was a tongue-in-cheek how-to video called Kitchen Papermaking.

Photo: Screen shot from the video, Kitchen Papermaking,

which is a joke lesson given by the curmudgeon Dusty Cann.

The one on papermaking is one of my favorites. As Dusty I said this method of recycling

paper and making new sheets for your art was especially good because you could take a bad review

and grind it up in your blender. Or you could grind up a print that had not turned out well and make

it into paper for a new artwork. In Dusty’s droll manner, he carried it off; I wish I could be like

Dusty!

Studio 106 closes temporarily Once the reconstruction of the building began, everyone had to move completely out for a

year. Even before we had to vacate, we suffered in the gloom of a plastic-wrapped building with

scaffolding and demolition noise going on all around. The five-story building was going to be

stripped of its outer sheathing, rotten joists and studs would be replaced, all the walls would be

cleared, and shear walls installed for earthquake reinforcement. Everything had to go.

Including us! In August we moved one block up 5th avenue to an apartment building called

Aqua Terrace. Besides our essential furniture, we took with us the basic necessities to continue


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my work—the computer with the peripherals I would need to continue editing and working on my

Web pages and my new project, Living Prints: Printmaking ‘Zines on DVD.

Living Prints My outline for a software product called Living Prints had been my objective for many

months before. I designed it to be an interactive game with purpose.1 First I would make DVD

versions, calling them Printmaking ‘Zines. For these, and for the game design I would use my

alter-ego, a bogus character which I had been playing for years. As Dusty Cann, a curmudgeon. I

could role play and dull the edge of my academic past.

It so happened, that I was found to have symptoms of Hashimoto’s Disease unbeknownst

to me. Men who have this often take on a symptomatic gravelly quality to their voice. Hashimoto’s

Disease is merely a slow thyroid—hypothyroid disorder and is not life-threatening. It is remedied

by taking a relatively cheap pill for the rest of your life. Anyway, it turned out it was fun to give

my alter-ego Dusty a growly, raspy voice along with affectations and an accent of a southwestern

country-boy.

Having a character to introduce the titles of the Living Prints Printmaking ‘Zines gave the

laborious job something of an entertaining aspect. The collection is hundreds of titles on the

complicated aspects of printmaking and multimedia arts I taught at the UW. There was the back

story, too, of Emeralda Region, with its ten islands-of-domains of expertise. In five-second intros

and farewells, I made videos of Dusty as if greeting visitors on each island in my alternate-world.

This old man was to be the guide by the visitor’s side in my game, Emeralda.

Photo: (Left) Screenshots as Dusty introduces video about the artist’s history with miniature

etchings, artistamps and mail art (Middle). Jewel box cover design (Right).

With volume and issue numbers attached to each ‘Zine DVD, I was laying the foundation

for what I hoped would be a complement to whatever form my dream of a method for teaching

print making online might take.

Artist as screen play writer In my college days at the UW, there was a period of interest in film making at the UW Art

School, and my experiments with video made me a part of it. Or, so I wished. Richy Kehl, who

also had experimented with video, Ron Carraher and Bob Sperry led the way and formed an ad

hoc committee to bring photography and film into the art school. Some students were excited, and

Carraher began offering special studies in the basics of film making.

1 Game with purpose was a designation given to video games that were for training and education. Besides

this, the genre had been promoted as “Learning Games,” “Edutainment” and “Serious Games.”


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Never losing sight of the fact that film was the most important art form of the 20th Century,

I was nonetheless living in the wrong place—Seattle. I could not participate in the industry, really,

being so far from Los Angeles and New York. There were very few people in the Seattle area who

could, and if there was a person living here, he or she was probably a commuter—flying back and

forth to Hollywood and Los Angeles while enjoying living in the Pacific Northwest hinterlands.

In addition to this handicap, California already had the best film schools with connections to

Hollywood.

It is always possible, however, to dream and imagine what part, if any, a creative person

might play. “Content is King,” saith Bill Gates; writing and storytelling are essential to film

making and television. Back story is important to video games. So in spite of my isolation from

mainstream film and TV, I role-played and turned my writing skills toward fiction and screenplays.

Ignoring the futility of making it commercially, I focused on the form and mechanics of story and

screenwriting. Secretly I hoped the game industry, which, by comparison was overtaking the film

industry in magnitude, might mean my stories would be useful in some surprising way in a local

production.

Actually, back in the late ‘60s I bought a 16 mm camera and exposed a few reels but I

quickly realized that the cost of film and processing was prohibitive—especially since video

afforded a cheaper and recyclable recording medium. In the 1970s, art students were doggedly

pursuing the independent filmmaking dream, and I joined a co-op called Impote Eight, consisting

of Rhea Bark, Dennis Evans, Larry Stair, Michael Peterson and I. We did a few shoots in Super-

8, but we decided film was not for most of us; only Michael Peterson carried on.

When I developed a video art class in the early 1970s, I recycled some of the footage from

my 16 mm reels and I found a surprising, new life in them. They didn’t yield video art per se, but

some interesting, highly processed screenshots.

Photos: (Left) Screenshot from video special effects over a 16mm film.

(Right) From the same film footage, Merry, can be discerned in the upper left.

One of the reels of film documents a weekend spent with Norman Lundin and his former

wife, Merry Hart. Merry preened dramatically for the film, and when I took the film to my video

art class to experiment with film-to-video transfer on the film chain, I applied effects for some

unusual results. Those were the days when such images were new, and I made many black-and-

white snapshots.

Thirty years later, starting in 2000, I decided storytelling was within my capacity, and my

first attempt at writing was a screenplay titled, Passing Ferries. Some of the loglines I tried are:

“A washed up art professor masterminds the theft of classified material from

his university to as a means to save his family.”


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“An embittered art professor discovers a stranded alien family and helps them

get classified material for them from his university.”

“An artist loses a lawsuit against a university and, during rehab, he discovers

he had unwittingly participated in an experiment in mind control.”

“A blackballed art professor is transported 100 years into the past and is

embodied in that of a sculptor who befriended a mad scientist gleaning gold

from sand.”

“H. G. Wells, on a speaking tour, triggers an idea in the mind of an American

scientist who is experimenting with the brains of dogs to ‘grow mind’.”

It would be ten years before I finished a truly complete screenplay, which included going

through the process of registering it with the Screenplay Writers Guild West in California. Over

this decade, I attended lectures and events at the Seattle Film Institute, read books on screen and

stage play writing forms and styles. Every year, when we watched the Academy Awards, I tried to

imagine Seattle having been the setting or the home of a screenplay writer of a nominated film.

And, like any good dreamer I thought, “Maybe my story!”

Naturally I thought about my favorite films and how I might build from them a story line

and it would help me settle on a genre. One favorite, a science fiction film that had fed me images

and ideas since it was released in 1968, was the first Planet of the Apes. This film gave me the

scene for my space-ship crash series in the 1980’s. In 1976, The man who fell to Earth got me

started on my Fleurian theme, i.e., The women who fell to Earth.

In keeping with my dream of being a great teacher someday, I like teacher films: Paper

Chase, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dead Poet’s Society and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, for example. In science

fiction and time travel (besides Planet of the Apes) it’s Forever Young and Awakening and, of

course the classic Time Machine and the newer slant and funny Kate and Leopold.

On 9/11 On September 11, 2001, we were still living in a rented apartment one block north of our

condo—which was undergoing reconstruction—when the Twin Towers fell in New York City.

Lynda told me the news when I returned from my early-morning work in what remained of Studio

106. The aftermath meant different things to me than I found expressed by others. Many of us had

strong reservations about President George W. Bush. I had been bitter all the years going back to

his supposed defeat of my favorite candidate, Al Gore. Our reservations were justified, as history

has regretfully borne out.

On television I saw a video of Osama Bin Laden talking, and he said the way to beat the

USA was to destroy the US’ economy. He meant not by direct intervention in the way of trade

sanctions, of course, but by forcing Americans to take drastic and expensive steps—in money and

lives in a war against terrorism. Maybe he observed that, throughout the 20th Century, our country’s

people and our leaders seem always to choose the route of the reactionary—not that of the pro-

active, considered and deliberated way. He was correct, again, as history is showing us even now

as I write in 2017, with the nation in an undeclared civil war and on the verge of reverting to use

of nuclear weapons again. Bin Laden was right.

There was a good side effect of the attack, temporarily, in the nationalism that sprang up

overnight in America. It seemed quieter because the skies were empty of planes for a while; we


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had forgotten how nice it is not to have jets coming and going from SeaTac International airport.

Sales of Americana boomed. Patriotic signs were everywhere, flags flying on cars, stickers in the

windows and bumper stickers. Ironically, the petroleum fueling this show of patriotism was, and

is part of the reason we were attacked. I think cars are the real weapons of mass destruction.

Community groups sprang up in our neighborhood. One of them used a highly structured

method called Conversation Café, and attended these. I stopped, however, when it seemed to me

that people really didn’t want to think that perhaps there are plausible reasons why people in some

foreign countries hate the USA—as later on I read in a book by that title. Others in these meetings

began coming for therapy. I stopped going after one member burst out that if she wanted to have

an SUV so she could ferry her kids to soccer, that was no one else’ business. She became emotional

and defensive. I could see that I was an outsider.

DVD and online art education How did I carry on with my mission after 9/11? Lynda and I were living in the rental north

of our condominium and work on its reconstruction progressed. She went to her work at the Seattle

King County Dental Society as usual. I often would walk with her to her job, and I would come

home. At noon I would make a sandwich and take my lunch up the hill at Bhye Kracke Park and

contemplate the state of the world’s affairs and what my work should be.

Photo: Many Bills at Bhye Kracke Park, photo assembled in 2003

In order to reflect on the aftermath of 9/11 in my little world, I search my handwritten

journal and I find an entry I wrote on September 21, 2001. Referring to one of my remaining

publications from my academic aspirations, I wrote:

“It’s going to be a while before a publication like the Chronicle of Higher

Education gets hold of my idea. It’s still being formed. It’s one of those instances

we read about of an innovation needing to come from an individual, not a group,

team or committee. How I proceed is based on motivation. People, especially US

Americans who are—for the first time in most of their lives—experiencing history-

in-the-making.

“What motivates people? Two forces are uppermost: fear and faith. I think,

for example, of the six fears that Napoleon Hill listed that poverty was the first.2

So, any kind of assurance that, ‘You will not experience poverty,’ would be a strong

magnetic and motivating force. Wake up in the morning and there is a golden egg!

“If you choose, instead, natural living, to breathe, to see beauty within

yourself and in things surrounding you, then I believe you would feel riches. These

2 Hill, Napoleon. Think and Grow Rich. Op. cit. He listed fear of poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love,

old age and death in that order.


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riches are, to me, the gifts of life. A heightened awareness, focus, and attentiveness

undiluted by media (such as radio and TV, newspapers and other mass media). As

for media, you would want something directed to you alone, like a personal letter.

That letter might have clippings, stamps, snapshots—but the core of the letter

would be one-to-one. And it should assure you that poverty, and the other five fears,

cannot overtake you.’ – My journal.

The next day found me asking myself about my role in the old tradition of art education in

light of the terrorist attack. I wrote in my journal: Art education will change for good.

“After September 11, 2001, art education is changing for good. I’ve been

wondering, since that day, ‘What is there for me to do now?’ Today, for example,

I thought about my long-term roles and how, now, I must change them. If I were

asked, ‘What would you teach if you were asked to pick any subject except art?’ Is

art teaching, specifically or generally, all that I know? Certainly not! I began the

list in my mind: Communications. Then: How to promote better eating and other

better lifestyle habits?

“Is there no need for art education, now that the United States’ American people

have had their first encounter with a major, successful terrorist attack? The answer

is, Yes, but not the kind of art education that most people think of. A reformed art

education, perhaps, is needed now.

“When I was in graduate school, an essay came into my hands titled,

Eviscerating notions of art educationists. I read it with interest, and I suppose it set

me on edge for it was the first time I found another person who was suspicious that

my art education might need to be re-examined. Maybe that’s why, 19 years later,

I lost my job at the UW art school.

“If I were to find a job in art education today, you wouldn’t even call it a job in

art education. For one thing, there would be no institution that would hire me for a

job in the old sense. I concluded that there is no sense in the old now.” – Journal.

By the end of the month I was telling myself that the way forward was a Saturday

printmaking show on TV like the very successful Bob Ross’ Joy of Painting classes. I wrote that

I could be the Mr. Rogers of The Uptown Printmaking Neighborhood, or start a cable TV series

called Ritchie’s Joy of Printmaking!

2001 ended with my parents’ passing My mother passed away in a nursing home in October, 2001. It was the end of years of her

grievous experiences and strain on everyone in the family. For the previous month, one informed

her about the terrorist attack on September 11; it would only have added to her stress.

My father was stoic about her passing. After all, he had been caring for her night and day

for years. She wanted to stay home until the worst of her condition made it so stressful on my dad

and us that there was no recourse. She had lost her ability to talk because of a stroke—or strokes—

and could not walk. It was the talking that was the hardest to take. We tried devices you could hunt

and peck words, but she had no patience for these. Lynda and I made trips from Seattle to Selah—

where her nursing home was located. It was always hard to take leave.

The last trip I made to go see my mother, I went by my folks’ home first to check to see if

my Dad was home or if he was at my Mom’s; I found there was no one home. However, I could

hear a high, whining noise coming from the back of the house so I went to see. That’s where my


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dad had set up a woodshop under a lean-to. It was the chop saw, left running. My Dad’s hearing

was virtually gone and it was apparent that he’d been using the saw and went away with it still

running—unable to hear it. I shut it off and went to Mom’s, thinking he would be there.

When I went into the room and my Mom saw me, she began to wail and scream, out of

control. I tried to calm her, explaining that I had come to see her—why was she so terrified of me?

Honestly, all I could l do was leave, I was upsetting her so badly.

As I drove back to Wapato to get Lynda and go back to Seattle, I figured out that she

probably was expecting my Dad to walk in and when I walked in instead, she expected the worst

had happened—that my Dad must have died. Poor woman. She didn’t want to burden him.

Years later—it would be 2010—I took my mother’s memoir to the next level, the best I

could do, which was a paperback and audio book titled, An Unusual Childhood: Growing up in

Montana. What a gift she had left us in this memoir! And, for me it was especially rich because I

could—as I had to do as editor—go over and over her words. The wish she wrote is my favorite

sentence, near the end of the book, as she concluded her story:

“I believe I had an unusual childhood and in this rushed and harried day of

civilization, I wish my own daughters and sons could have had a part of our life on

Eagle Creek, in Montana.”

Audio books were around for a long time, and when a very aged woman in Montana

expressed, through her caregiver, that she would like to get the book from the audio library—could

I make an audio book? I looked into the technology and gave it a try, using my computer. Now I

could read, aloud, my mother’s words. But the company that produced these in audiobook format

for the PC—Audible—warned that without a professional voice and technique, it would be a

failure. I found a professional reader named Mary Kaye White, whose voice was of the right kind

to be similar to my mother’s. We made the book. I knew the woman who made the request did not

use a computer, so I send CDs to her.

The passing of my father I believe that I have read that couples who marry, grow old and who love each other deeply

and with devotion, will sometimes die within a few years of one another. My father had been

caring for my mother for years as she suffered. He had been under medication, too, because he had

a few minor strokes—there is a name for them—stroke so tiny that they have only mild effects. I

remember how he started crying when he told me he was outside one day, and he could see a bird

on a branch singing away and for him there was not a sound. Another time he cried because his

vision, too, was affected by a tiny stroke and he couldn’t see the fruit on the trees from his window.

I need to say that my father and I had a tense relationship. I had respect for him, but when

I was young I didn’t know whether it was respect or fear. He was one of those old-school fathers

who kept a belt hanging in the closet, next to his shotgun and rifle. If I was too tired getting home

at night and didn’t feed or water some of our livestock, I really got a strapping!

With Lynda—when we got older—I shared some of my growing up stories. My belief is

that he did me well because I eventually displayed self-discipline that probably save my life and

made me who I am—such as I am. My father always seemed a lot smarter than I was. It seemed

that it would turn out he was right even when I thought he was wrong. Actually, I thought he was

the smartest man I knew. The trouble is, when I did something stupid, he’d call me something like

a knucklehead.


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Maybe it was good for me; maybe it kept me from becoming too big for my britches. It

was during one of our talks after my father passed away that I said to Lynda, “He had a philosophy,

I think, that he believed if he called me stupid, it would make me try harder to be smart.”

Lynda said, “Well, in my opinion, if that’s what he thought, he was wrong.”

“Yeh,” I said. What a good wife, that Lynda. “It didn’t do any a good.”

“No, it didn’t,” and she added, “You’re still stupid,” Then, “I’m kidding!”

My father had a sense of humor which I inherited—and I think my brother and sisters also

inherited a funny streak. In fact, my mother’s family, the Reeves, had good humor, too; must have,

because Mom played some tricks on me. One time I was sitting in our living room reading before

dinner and I heard a crash in the kitchen—like my Mom must have dropped a glass. Then I heard

her call, so weakly I could barely hear: “Billy. Help.”

I jumped out of my chair and ran to her. She was leaning on the sink holding up her arm

all smeared with red. I grabbed a towel from the bathroom but when I got to her she was laughing

so hard tears were running down her cheeks. She had broken a bottle of catsup, but she wasn’t

cut—she just smeared on catsup to scare me. The temptation was too much to resist pulling a

Reeves-style joke on me.

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Photo: J. Harlene and W. D. Ritchie, parents.

At the time I write this, 2017, I love to write about my father and my mother, even though

gone all these years. In fact, when I get up in the morning and turn the light on in my bathroom, I

look in the mirror and I see my father’s face, his baldness and my mother’s laughing eyes. It cheers

me to see the resemblance. I think of myself as one enduring product of their love.

Whistlin’ Jack’s Lodge There were still occasions, in spite of the world situation, when we could indulge ourselves

in pleasure trips. We had our favorite places, such as Lake Quinault Lodge not far from the Pacific

Beaches. Inland our favorite was Whistlin’ Jack’s Lodge. We liked partly because we could

sometimes extend the trips we made to see our parents—both Lynda’s and my folks while they

lived—east of the Cascade Mountains in the Yakima Valley. We liked to go there in the autumn,

especially, because the colors of the turning leaves are spectacular.

Whistlin’ Jack’s Lodge (named after a burrowing varmint that lived in the area which made

a whistling sound to warn of danger) was along the way over the Chinook Pass, a less-used

highway that passed within view of Mount Rainier. It had been there for a long time. It had a two-


17

story lodge overlooking the Naches River, and the sound of the river, with the breeze that

constantly blew down the steep hillsides of its ravine, was a pleasure to experience. In those days

the restaurant served very good meals. Their breakfast specials include giant cinnamon rolls, which

we bought and which we took home and which would last several days.

Paper to Technology In November I designed a printmaking class suitable to offer to teachers who need to gain

Continuing education credits to maintain their certification. It was partly a reunion with one of my

former students, Marta Olsen, which inspired my design for the class. I called my project, Your

Printmaking Class: Paper to technology. In Unit 106 I made videos I thought I could use to make

a distance learning class.

Photos: Two screenshots from the 2001 beginnings of an online printmaking

course for middle and high school teachers.

I thought I could fund the course by calling on my former students. I visualized an

organization called Former Students in Business and Professions (FSBP), and draw from them

advice on best practices for fundraising and management. I would get approval from a sponsoring

university somehow. Once again, I saw a way to restore my teaching mission.

This was the first attempt I made to design an online course around the theme of my fantasy

world, Emeralda. In the narrative of five minutes of video in the Ritchie Video Archive, I refer to

the challenge of designing a course of this kind, and that the challenge would be met by using my

fantasy world, Emeralda, with its ten islands-of-domains-of-expertise. Also the notes in my

journals regarding these video sketches were the first references to Proximates in the context of an

online video-assisted teaching method for printmaking.

Videos from 2001 The advent of several kinds of software for my PC gave me a boost toward the two ideas I

loved most: teaching printmaking at a distance and bridging old printmaking technologies with

new ones—and doing this through the magic of video. These were the days long before streaming

video, fast Internet speeds and social media. However, the games industry was fueling all these,

and Moore’s Law predicted faster, cheaper chips and cheaper storage, too.


18

Photos: Three screenshots from the video, Golden Cabinet, about the missing

professor’s storage drawers which contain his legacy.

My videos included Artist’s Stamps and Mail Art, and Dusty Cann, a description of, my

alter ego. For my idea for a game I made clips of Emeralda gate keepers, the Agents who allowed

entry into the ten islands-of-domains-of-expertise in Emeralda.

Emeralda Revealed is a slow zoom of my Emeralda Poster with crawling titles that describe

Emeralda Region and the hidden emerald. Golden Cabinet is an experiment in appraising the

missing professors’ storage of his artworks. Open Studios gives a quick definition of this island,

and Kitchen Papermaking features Dusty Cann giving a demo on recycling paper.

In my NPC - Hawaii (Northwest Print Center) I imagined ways to help the SS United States

Conservation Society, videos about The Big U cruising the Hawaiian Islands. Several in a series

titled Professional Assistant, I role-played the professor’s helper and explained to visitors the

whereabouts of the missing professor--including a shower scene!

In another I introduce myself as Harris MacRitchie, and I explain how to use the Videozine.

An instructional video is on the traditional paste method used in Japan for Transferring a Design

from paper to woodblock. Your Printmaking Class: From paper to technology was my beginnings

of a teacher certification hybrid course.

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2002 By December 24 of this year, I will be sixty-one years old

Photo: Artistamp based on the

multimedia work on paper, Homage to Hayter.

Professor’s cabinet continues Last year I bought video editing software and DVD-burning that I could run on my PC and

I started a series of short videos on everything from whimsical selfies to printmaking how-to. The

disruptions—the 9/11 terrorist attacks and especially my parents’ passing—slowed down my

projects, of course. Life-changing events like these have a way of making one’s art and teaching

seem puny and self-indulgent.

The Return of Dusty As 2002 got going, however, I started using Studio 106 in earnest. Dusty Cann—my old

make-believe friend—re-emerged in my life, this time as a character in a screen play I would write.

After all, in my role-playing of Dusty, it seemed he was an actor.

March I bought a book by Rob Tobin titled How to write high structure, high concept

movies. He had the formula down, he thought—a sure fire method to write a commercially

successful movie. Section by section I studied it closely and, page-for-page penciled my notes

according to his method.

One of my favorite videos was about papermaking. Dusty, like Martha Stewart, is in the

kitchen of Studio 106 in his signature bowler hat and mustache. With his western, gravelly drawl

(with a hint of Jack Nicholson) he explains recycling paper in a blender to make paper pulp.

Constantly losing my place between Rob Tobin’s book and my notes was frustrating, so I

cut the binding-back off his paperback with a utility knife, punched the pages for a ring binder,

and began interleaving my homework and my treatments in the appropriate places.


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Photo: Collage of the assembled parts of the 2002 ring binder

holding the beginnings of the first screenplay by Tobin’s method.

Beginning with the Logline and going step-by-step through Objective Storyline, Subjective

Storyline, and the Hero I made good progress. However, I set aside any commercial intentions of

writing a movie; I let my experience at the UW be my source and I let Dusty Cann be my

protagonist. I couldn’t help but to make the story autobiographical even if it wouldn’t be

marketable. My life is, after all, the subject I know best.

Or, so I thought! I read and wrote daily through March and April and then a funny thing

happened. The Hero—Dusty—whom I could not keep out of my writing was a chameleon. The

instructed to look at all the angles and think of different treatments looking for Tobin’s idea for

character development, Dust. I wanted him to be likeable, a nice guy; but he took on multiple

personalities! In this worst characterization of Dusty, for example, I wrote from the point-of-view

of another faculty and penciled:

“Dusty is my hero. He’s more interesting than I am. He’s someone who gets invited

out more, like my former students, most of them were more interesting than me. I

was hired because I was obviously second rate, or third rate! My father said so. I

was no threat to anyone.

“Not Dusty. He was flawed, yes, he had a terrible self-image, don’t you know? I

think it was better off for humanity that he ended up a Molly cobbled art professor.

He was like Hitler, except they discouraged Hitler from being an artist or architect.

Look what happened.

“Dusty was cruel. There was this one student who dropped out of his class to save

his girlfriend experiencing a suicidal episode. Dusty flunked him! Wouldn’t even

consider giving him an I for incomplete. He was a real Nazi; he wouldn’t go against

the rules.

“For someone who claimed to be a creative artist, he was extremely left–brain, you

know: logical, systematic, compulsive. I don’t know why people acted like they

thought his art was any good. I think it was because they knew he was a pawn in a

game that they gave him tenure. Or, they were afraid they’d have to hire a feminist

if they fired him.

“Well, when he was no longer any use, they got rid of Dusty. And the student he

flunked? He turned out to be crazier than Dusty! He took Dusty’s own twisted


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philosophy about ‘concept art,’ and turned it around and shot Dusty. Didn’t kill

him, but when he got out of the coma he thought he had muses who got him into

prison, tilting windmills.”

The above is one example of insertions in my ring-binder of my first attempts at writing a

screenplay. Tobin’s book was my tutor this time. Other entries filled the binder, but the above, a

rather dark description, surprised me when I re-read it fifteen years after writing it.

I kept writing for months; and I downloaded many screenplays, printed out hundreds of

pages to read them. However, the screenplays I started during these months fizzled. On the other

hand, as I look back on this period, there appeared a pattern in my life like that of a high structure,

high concept life story, as it were.

If I am a designer, artist and craftsman, then it may be that my most important tools—

intuition and faith—play roles in having made my life more interesting than if things had gone

picture-perfectly. In other words, if it takes structure and impact to make a good movie, then why

not write a movie with elements borrowed from a structured and impacted life?

Neighborhood outreach Since we first moved to Seattle in 1966, we lived in the area they call Queen Anne Hill,

one of the seven hills of the city. In 1993 we moved from our initial home on the north side of the

hill to the south side. This neighborhood was north of downtown Seattle, so a group of community

activists—business and property owners—banded together and named it Uptown. To fortify

themselves to get control of things like real estate development, traffic, safety and services, they

formed the Uptown Alliance, and I joined in.

My plan was to represent the interests of artists. Some of my former students had shown

me how important it can be to have artists on city councils and in advisory groups to the Mayor’s

office and offices in city planning. When the Uptown Alliance was loaned rooms in one of the

surplus City Light buildings in the neighborhood, I decided to contribute free art talks.

Photo: (Left) Pictured in the neighborhood newspaper article. Photo by Brad Enghaus.

(Right) Screen shot from a video of tracing the design to woodblock.

My first presentation was the printmaking project I was currently working on—which was

to be the print for the next baren.org print exchange. I was carving the woodcut portions in Studio

106 and by the time I gave my talk I had everything I needed to give a talk and a demonstration

on Japanese woodcut methods. The neighborhood newspaper published an article, Technology

puts its stamp on art in Bill Ritchie’s work, by Maggie Larrick and her first line was, “Queen Anne

Resident loves to teach.”


22

Another Exchange print with Baren.org The renowned artist and teacher, Stanley W. Hayter, was the subject of a print I made to

participate in the exchange portfolio with baren.org. This the group is devoted to relief

printmaking, with an emphasis on wood block printing. Artists using relief printmaking collaborate

in the making portfolios if about thirty in number. The print I made this year was the second time

I participated in the baren.org print exchange.

Photo: (Left) Homage to Hayter, a print

made for the 2002 baren.org print exchange. (Right) The folio of 29 prints.

The exchanges are usually thematic and this time it was music. My thoughts turned to

Stanley W. Hayter, who used music composition theory in teaching visual art composition at his

international studio in Paris, Atelier 17. From a videotape of my meeting with Hayter in 1983 I

captured a screenshot to incorporate in my work.

Thinking I could relate music into the digital age I printed the screenshot on antique piano

roll paper. Janet Hollander—another participant in baren.org and who studied with the great man,

added her recollections, and I included her text in the print. Then I uploaded the whole story to my

website.

Photos: (Left) Working proof, rubbing from the carved blocks.

(Right) Silverpoint drawing over the digital print, collection of

Glen Spaulding, Seattle.

For the woodcut portions I carved two blocks for color based on jigsaw puzzles. That’s

because one journalist said about me, Bill Ritchie’s work is a puzzlement and I always liked that

comment. As often happens, one thing led to another throughout the making of this print—

including graphite rubbings and a silverpoint drawing over one of the digital print studies.


23

Bad luck, good luck In June, 2002 I turned on my computer and saw there was a name in my email that appeared

to be from one of my best old friends. I won’t put her name here because in this context she might

think she was to blame. She got phished! These were the days when trolls were a new method for

virus infection. Without thinking twice (she hadn’t sent me an email for a long time so I should

have been suspicious) I clicked on it and my screen. The screen went black! The computer made

a sound something like the sound of crumpling paper. Then, on the black screen was a box outline

and, glaring in white lettering, it said:

Photo: The virus on the screen.

It was heart-stopping, I felt sick at my stomach! In my twenty years of looking at computer

screens I had never seen anything like it. I knew about viruses and about the importance of backing

up files on discs, but I hadn’t been vigilant. The thousands of text files, graphics, emails, databases

and spreadsheets flashed in my thoughts the way they say watching your life passing before your

eyes just before you die.

That obscene message on the screen was true, or at least I felt like it. There was nothing to

do but call a guy who had been helping me with my computer upgrades.

“Yup,” he said, “Shit happens. Ha ha. Bring it over.” Two weeks later I had my computer

back with my data salvaged and a bill for $1,800. It was a lot of money, but in those days—2002—

recovering infected hard drives was a new business. I paid the bill with credit card.

In a few days I was saved by my old friend, Carl Chew. It happened in a roundabout way.

Peggy Phillips, the CFO of Immunex, went to Sam Davidson about commissioning artistamps. Her

company had been sold, her team was breaking up, and she wanted a sheet of artistamps with the

team members on them—a farewell gift. Sam recommended Carl Chew, of course. Carl gave my

name to her, and she commissioned me to do the job for $2,000.00. It saved my neck as I could

pay off my hard drive restoration debt.


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Photos: (Left) The Peggy Phillips stamp from the sheet she commissioned/

(Right) Full sheet of Peggy’s stamp with her teams’ faces.

It’s funny how things turn out sometimes. First, a disaster with a virus; then a savior from

Immunex comes in and pays me what I spent to save my data. Faithful friends can be like virus

protection, in a roundabout way. Still, to this day, when I’m doing my digital archival work, once

in a while when I look for files from ‘way back then, I discover a file with that message embedded

in the heading, and hundreds of pages with lines of garbage breaking up the original text. It’s

salvageable.

Uptown Alliance outreach Still in pursuit of becoming a neighborhood artist worthy of the title (and practicing my

love of teaching) I gave my fifth art demonstration at the Uptown Queen Anne Community Center

on July 8, 2002. This one was titled, Games artists play and I talked about my game, Emeralda:

Games for the gifts of life.

Still another talk in the series was on my silver point drawings—a technique that predates

the invention of graphite and lead pencils. Many of the old masters used silver point and among

the most renowned is Leonardo da Vinci. The silver point method of drawing requires preparing a

paper or wood surface with a gesso coating, which is a kind of white paint made for fine art.

Photos: (Left) My Father’s Farm, silver point drawing.

(Right) Target Heart Coat with Wavy Square, silver point drawing.

The graininess of the gesso, and the fact that it is either zinc or titanium white pigment,

gives a tooth which catches the point of the soft, fine silver drawing tip. The silver oxidizes and is


25

known to change from cool blue of the original and then, in time, becomes warmer in tone. Other

soft metals work, too, such as copper and nickel. What I like about silver point is that it is the

slowest way to draw—at least it is in my way of using it. The methodical way in which I approach

silver point drawing is meditative.

Lisel Salzer wins the gold On August 9, 2002, the Seattle Times ran a story about Lisel Salzer having been

“discovered.”3 Austrian art historian Dr. Christina Steinmetzer flew to Seattle to meet Lisel, who

she'd been tracking for years. During all Dr. Steinmetzer’s sleuthing in basement archives and on

the Internet [where she found the page I made for Lisel years before], she never really expected to

find artist Lisel Salzer still alive. Lisel was 96 in 2002.

The background for this event lies elsewhere in our story. I described how Mark Leonard

and Izumi Kuroiwa, who had been my students in the early 1980’s, contracted with Lisel Salzer, a

well-known artist. It was in 1986 and she was in her ‘80s. I took up the distribution of the video

for her—her IT guy you might say. In the 1990’s In the course of time I urged her to try more

channels of distribution, such as book-and-tape packages. I showed her how the Internet worked,

and I made a web page for her as an example. Little did I know what this simple plan—make

copies of her videotape and send them to buyers—would lead to. Lisel didn’t know, either.

This happened because I had put those web pages for Lisel on the Web and that’s how Dr.

Steinmetzer, far away in Austria, found Lisel. She wrote a letter to find out if she was still living.

Lisel answered, indeed she was! These events would lead to final, wonderful chapter in the closing

years of Lisel’s life. Later, I was called to make an addition to her original video—which, that

video I had upgraded to DVD by now.

In the few words below I tried to transcribe Lisel’s speech in order to tell how she was

found on the Internet. The audio is saved as audio file on Lisel’s directory under

video/services/distribution/salzer]. In part, she’s recorded as saying:

“Thank you thank you thank you everybody. Like everybody else I get a lot of junk

mail and it is my silly habit and put it in the basket . . . . and she made a little

drawing on the back of the junk mail . . . Liesel, that letter looks important it comes

from Austria and she brought it . . ..” – Lisel Salzer (approximated transcript)

In giving her account of how she was discovered still alive, she described how the letter

from the Austrian museum was put in a scrap pile. Along came a 7-year old girl and, while her

mother visited, the girl used it on which to draw. Her name was Lisel Perrine—named after Lisel

Salzer. Little Lisel’s drawing went home with her; but her parents noticed the letter looked

important, so they returned it. The letter was really important.

3Farr, Sheila. A find from the 'lost generation': Austrian painter Lisel Salzer. Seattle Times. August 9, 2002.

Lisel Perrine, age 7, does a drawing that leads to amazing things.


26

Photo: Lisel Salzer’s hand-painted electrographic

which she gave to Bill Ritchie in 2004.

To me this episode in my former students’, in Lisel’s and my life stands as an example of

how an artist’s legacy can be impacted by new technologies in a most surprising way; and it’s a

story in which I’m proud of having taken part decisively. Lisel said in her speech that someone

(she seemed not to know who it was) had put her on the Internet. In fact that someone was me; and

I know it was Izumi, Mark and who I helped Lisel be discovered alive and still painting in Seattle.

Re-writing Reinventing Arts Studios On August 25, 2002 I made another attempt to finish the manuscript for the second of my

trilogy, Reinventing Arts Studios. As yet there was no just-in-time publishing service like Create

Space or Blurb, and amazon.com had not yet released its Kindle eBook.

An Artist’s Last Love Letter drafted The original idea for the Artists Last Love Letter was ignited back in 1992 when Lynda

brought home from her work a pamphlet with a similar title, The Last Love Letter. Since Lynda

worked at the Seattle King County Dental Society, anything having to do with her member dentists

came across her desk. The essay she showed me was by Linda Ginsberg, a lawyer who specialized

in dentists’ asset management and legacy transfer. Ginsberg’s was a personal story. Her husband,

a dentist, died suddenly and she had to put her life back together from scratch. Not only did she

manage, she went to law school and specialized in asset management and legacy transfer—

marketing mostly to dentists. Hence, my wife Lynda had her brochure!

Being friends with Dr. Steven Albright and his wife/office manager, Paula Cipolla, I was

familiar with dental practices—even having gone to the length of volunteering to help them with

getting a computer and using it for their practice. That pamphlet by Linda Ginsberg was like a

wake-up call for me, because artists and their families face a similar situation as regards their

artistic productions and their inevitable passing.


27

Photo: On the Dreamer image (Left), a target-heart image

imposed over it (Right) originated in the Colorline Project.

It was compelling to begin accumulating essays and notes about artists’ assets and legacy

transfer methodologies. Collecting these over ten years’ time gave me enough to consider making

it into a book. In addition, I had a talk to two attorneys—Kevin Collette and _________--about

writing a computer program interface to make it easier, compelling and fun, if possible, for artists’

families to manage their creative members’ productions.

It seemed to me, as computer games were filling the air and proposals for gamifying almost

every imaginable task were entertained that the answer might be gamifying artists’ assets and

legacy transfer processes. This great notion as stayed with me, even now in 2017, as I am writing

my autobiography

Seattle Independent Mall – the SIM On November 1, 2002, I signed on to be one of the vendors at the Seattle Independent Mall,

a startup located on another one of Seattle’s seven hills, Capitol Hill. The building was huge. It

was formerly a furniture store, but like many retailers of this kind it had closed. The plan was that

each vendor of a craft, art or service was contracted to pay a monthly rental fee for 100 square

feet—a ten-by-ten foot space. I took one in a corner of the store which happened to include a big

closet where I could put my computer and peripherals.

I hauled in my paper storage drawers. With hollow doors I cobbled together a counter on

the top on which I could work, set up easels and hung artworks on the walls. In ten days I had

acclimated to my new venture and in my journal I wrote:

“November 22, 2002: We call this the Seattle Independent Mall, but to me it’s

actually Interdependent Mall. We really are depending on each other to make create

our success stories. Sure, we’re our own bosses and our own experts, but we would

probably not get the exposure we want and need if we were each working alone.

I’m discovering so many new things, too, and that’s making me excited and

enthusiastic. Also I’m finding out that the more I learn about the others here, the

more helpful I am to people who come to the Mall, those visitors who are the

potential customers. But I’m also finding that my presence here as a professor is

confusing to some, and that’s why I decided to sit down and write down my story.”


28

Photo: (Left) The Four Bills altered photograph at the Seattle Independent Mall.

(Right) The following year’s 2003 Artistamp commemorating the SIM.

In 1982, that would be ten years before I invented Emeralda, I wrote about teaching art in

shopping malls because I had learned, An uneducated market will not buy. Smart entrepreneurs

and inventors of cookware, sewing machines and cross-country skis learned that their products

sold better when shoppers could learn how to use and enjoy those things. That’s usually the job of

the sales team in retail stores. I thought the same should be applied to teaching printmaking.

Retailers took up education for their own good. Why not do those for art? I wondered.

Shouldn't an art teacher get out and try that, too? Believing that art materials need more

demonstrations than art students get in school, Daniel Smith, who Seattle’s best art supply store,

rewarded artist to give weekly art technique demonstrations. He published an informative

newsletter, too. In a way, the Seattle Independent Mall was my sandbox to test my offerings. A

month into the SIM experience, I wrote more reflections:

“November 27, 2002: Strolling around the Seattle Independent Mall is like walking

around my neighborhood, only it’s smaller. All the small businesses are

compressed into 100 square feet each—a fraction of the size of shops along my

street. SIM is a new idea and it's a good idea. I’m banking on our success—

literally—at least for my six-month stay. When, however, the vendors aren’t in their

spaces, then my memory goes back to my neighborhood and those empty stores

and parking lots. When no one’s in their spot, then SIM is surely as boring as an

empty parking lot. Also, more costly, in more ways than one.”

Surprising things happened during my six months at the SIM. Sure, I sold art and that

meant I made new friends, as I think people who buy my art are my friends and patrons. Also, I

made new friends among the other vendors—that’s what we were. The shop was cosmopolitan,

with people from Thailand, Taiwan and Canada working in their little shops. There were tea

experts selling tea and also wood carving from Taiwan. Chinese people who had migrated to

Seattle had a booth where they featured live, curly bamboo and other Taiwan imports. The owner,

Frances Liao, and her friends and I became well acquainted. She commissioned me to create an

assemblage of artistamps, and her friend helped me with calligraphy for a linoleum print I made

there. I was inspired to make a small painting of a lotus blossom because of our conversations

about Buddhism.


29

Photo: (Left) pr807rit-gold, linoleum cut. (Right) Linoleum block for pr807rit-gold.

My computer know-how was enhanced, too, because the guy from Thailand (selling

handmade paper which include paper made from elephant dung) introduced me to the thumb drive

and other time-savers. With my software and camera I contributed a newsletter for the SIM. Some

of my former students came by to visit me, too. I could not help but feel a little uneasy, since it

may have appeared to some that I had fallen on hard times if I had a part in this hodge-podge,

lowbrow setting.

Photo: Kite, mixed media on panel.

It was here that I was able to advance my interest in giant Japanese kite designs. An

architect from down the street came in. She considered commissioning me to design a giant kite

for her condo—which I recall had a very high wall on which she planned to display it. The linocut

I made was one of the studies for the kite—which, by the way, didn’t get beyond the discussion

stage.

In all, at the SIM I made my rent and then some. Also, I got a lot of exercise because I

always walked from our home on Queen Anne hill to the store on Capitol Hill. Toward the end,

however, things took a bad turn, we supposed it was problems we vendors had with the manager.

She was wonderful at first, sweet, supportive and enthusiastic. Over time, however, she became

suspicious and spiteful. For example, she made a big deal over someone having gone an inch or

two outside their allotted space. She would patrol from time to time, carrying a measuring tape

like some kind of enforcer. She began to make up rules on the fly that troubled some of us. Things


30

got so bad at one point that she said she was going sue us! She even had summons delivered to

individuals whom she believed had crossed her.

I was glad when my contracted time was over, and I could go back to Queen Anne Hill.

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2003 By December 24 of this year, I will be Sixty-two years old

Photo: Artistamps based on Bill Ritchie’s

linoleum cut print, Six Elements (left) and

a kite, Year of the Rabbit (center) and a commemorative for

SIM the Seattle Independent Mall (right).

Emeralda Defenders As part of an artist’s collectible trading card I wrote text for the Emeralda Defender last

year. That is, in October, 2002. The description was inspired by a card I found on the sidewalk

from the collectible card game, Magic: The Gathering, which had an illustration of a guard

defending a fantasy world. I wonder where that card has gone? The MTG website has a search

feature, however putting in the term Defender (I do not recall the full name) does not yield the

image I recall. In my wildest dreams, I think of parallels to the fantasy figures in MTG and how I

might cast figures in Emerald. It’s going take me a long, long time.

My fantasy world is Emeralda, and a parallel universe, a world for playing a serious game

called Escape Emeralda. In its back story, a band of guerilla artists are working to overthrow the

master of the world, a dark figure known as the Emeralda Magister, a sorcerer descended from the

evil member of the family who came to earth 30,000 years ago. He is planning the end of Earth’s

human life sustainability by asphyxiation in an atmosphere heavy with carbon dioxide.

In 2002 I wrote the description of the Emeralda Defenders as the Guerilla artists.

Emeralda, is a kind of art colony, a paradisiacal place patterned after Hesse’s Magister Ludi: The

glass bead game. Newcomers to Emeralda are warned to be on the lookout for these miscreants.

They are referred to in the game as Emeralda Warriors, as the notion of defending would clue in

the newcomer as to the true situation in this otherwise perfect world. The original description:

“Emeralda Defenders are committed to lifelong teaching and learning, research,

practice and service (the TRPS Principle) and the good of the community through

service. They maintain the core of their utility value to themselves and give to

society as they are able. They address fundamental questions faced by artists and

poets throughout the centuries-such as how to balance creative impulse with need

to communicate broadly, intelligently and responsibly with their audiences.

“An Emeralda Defender is effective to the level that he or she strives to use

their human structural intellectual capital to seek the common good. They do so by

balancing, as they stride their locus of action, their needs and interests with a

capacity to serve others and the needs of larger entities. Communities, schools,


32

states, their country, and even God or an intelligence above and beyond their own

are their intended beneficiaries.

“They balance these interests over the short and the long terms. They look ahead

thirty years, into and through the lives of their grandchildren. They look to short-

term periods of 10 to 21 days, or a month, or a quarter or a year or three years. The

look back only to avoid repeating mistakes.

“They adapt to existing environments, or they shape those environments, or

select new environments to achieve ends that include, yet exceed, self-interest.

Because they gain a perspective both on themselves and on others, they are less

likely to fall prey to the four fallacies of egocentrism, omniscience, omnipotence

and invulnerability.”

As 2003 began, I was in my third month at the Seattle Independent Mall. As my computer

and inkjet color printer were part of my tiny studio there, my tasks included making new, ten-day

little books. These followed the ten-day cycles the defenders spend, going from one Island-of-

domain-of-expertise to the next island. On the pages of these shirt-pocket books I made notes, or

I took down phone numbers of people I met and jotted down flashes of insights. The pages were

decorated with diagrams I was trying make for Escape Emeralda, including images of my artist’

stamps.

Photo: Composite image of the cover (left) and sample contents

of the shirt-pocket booklets that served as journals. ep021215_YOLC

In the course of the six months I was at the SIM, these little books served as tiny journals

and their form evolved in ways I thought might be useful someday in designing the user interface

for my game, Escape Emeralda.

Closing of The Gates As noted above, since the previous November of 2002 I had been working as a vendor with

a half-dozen other artists, crafts people and designers. We rented our ten-by-ten foot spaces at the

Seattle Independent Mall, which, later, I referred to as The Gates, a name I made up which I

thought would have been the alternative to the SIM. I was thinking of branding. Imagine saying,

“This, oh, I bought this at the Seattle Independent Mall,” compared to “I bought this at the Gates.”


33

Photo: Self-portrait as four Bills at the Seattle Independent Mall.

Over its first few months of existence I built up my shop, met old friends and made some

new ones; and I sold some artworks. However, by the time the month of May came, the good times

had tapered off—gradually at first and then steeply. The SIM honeymoon had run its course. My

six-month lease was up, and I was glad to take down my shop and go back to our condo. For

several of the vendors, including me, the manager of SIM proved to be difficult to work with;

rumors spread that she “had a history.” I moved my shop back to our home on Queen Anne’s

Uptown Neighborhood—glad to be off Capitol Hill and back on Queen Anne Hill.

When I returned to our condominium, I had nowhere to go because we had sold Studio 106

in mid-March. From my real estate friends on the street level I begged for a little space for my

workstation one of their spare offices. Over the summer months cocooned, licked my wounded

ego and began recovering our finances in any way that I could and working out where to go next.

Madrona Art Center In the summer of 2003, Lane Parks invited me to come up to Guemes Island—where his

home is—to give my views on Artists’ Books in the Digital Age. His invitation was a welcome

opportunity for me to address both the traditional, paper-based artist’s book and a few of the

aspects extending books by video and computer systems. I brought most of my electronic studio

with me: A video system, computer, and printer so that I could print out the little book of program

notes on the spot, ask the participants to fold and staple them as I do. The gathering took place in

the island’s community meeting hall.


34

Photo: Homage, the print which Lane and Susan own.

Lane’s hospitality made Guemes Island an abiding attraction for me, with its close access

to Anacortes by a private ferry boat, its close-knit community, and of course the support, Lane and

his wife, Susan gave me. They bought a print of mine and even as recently as 2107, commented

that, “The artwork has place in their AirBNB.” The event came to mean even more: When I wrote

my first novel, Hunt for the Emeralda Treasure, I used Guemes Island as the place where the

stories unfolded. In Halfwood Press: The Story, again I had Guemes in mind; my screenplay,

Swipe, is also sited at Guemes. The names of the island, the places around the island and the town

were changed in all these instances to names like Punta and Puntaville.

Teaching at Shoreline Community College August came and brought another thing—I got a call from a student at Shoreline

Community College who needed a short video of woodcut carving for printmaking. Enrolled in a

web design course, she was doing a video for a Web project on Japanese printmaking, and she said

my live video would help. I agreed to let her use some of my video and as we continued to

communicate, she invited me to visit her with her instructor at the college—Dick ____. I was

surprised to learn that he knew me from years back when he had put together a show for Everett

Community College, and I was in the show.

One thing led to another, and for the autumn quarter I taught beginning drawing as an

adjunct to the faculty. I enrolled for Dick’s computer classes because, not only was I self-taught

and knew there was much to learn, also since I was over sixty years old, under their policy for

seniors 60 and up, I could enroll for only $5.00! What a deal!

The course was tough for me partly because Shoreline Community College was all

Macintosh-based. Also I couldn’t get used to their file structure and online college security

protocols, I struggled. The woman who brought me to Shoreline tried to help me, but I did badly

in the courses. About two-thirds of the way through I flunked myself out. Thus ended my student

days at Shoreline, but of course my teaching continued.

My drawing class was a strange experience for me. In the first place, I found it odd that in

the nearly twenty years since I had left the UW art school, nothing had changed in the way the

drawing classes were set up. On the day I walked into the drawing classroom I felt like I was in a

movie set for a drawing classroom of the 1960’s—right down to the cow skull and white-painted

cube, cone, and sphere. A human skeleton completed the feeling of Déjà vu. For me, was like the

art school drawing course that time forgot—perfectly preserved. It even had the same smell.


35

I’d learned in teaching video production at Highline Community College in the year

______ that the students were not at all like those I’d known at the UW. Community college is

another world, a parallel universe where the students, faculty and administration live a different

reality compared the university. The students were mostly fresh out of high school or they were

people coming back for a new start at life after getting laid off or leaving military service. Some

of those I met were looking for an easy class—an easy A. But there were a few gems among those

students at Highline—mostly older women with worldly experience and they valued what I was

attempting. It was a little like that at Shoreline, too.

October retreat We were feeling a little better about our financial situation, thanks to the Shoreline job. We

took a retreat and gave ourselves a holiday at our favorite Washington Beach resort, Iron Springs.

It had seen better days, but we still liked it despite it’s becoming a rustic and primitive-style place.

Photos: Drawings in pen and ink made at Iron Springs Resort

on October 30-31, 2003.

I brought along my sketchbook and also my current reading about video game design. It

was two days of leisure, and Lynda made authentic cinnamon rolls—despite having to do battle

with the oven range which tended to run too hot.

Our first multimedia portfolio One student at Shoreline, a woman named Michiko who aspired to transfer to Western

Washington University, was so attentive and skillful in her art that she volunteered to go further

and to test my idea of a digital portfolio. In fact, it so happened that Western required it! For me

the challenge was welcome. I had never had this kind of request from a drawing student, and I

figured I probably never would again. We worked quickly, making a few digital snapshots in the

hall, and in the computer lab created a PowerPoint, a PDF version. At my home office I burned a

CD/ROM for her application to Western. It was a multimedia electronic portfolio. Unfortunately,

time passed and after I left Shoreline I never learned whether or not she was successful in her

application. I hope so. She was good.


36

Photos: (Left) Dale, 2003 drawing in my journal at the Caffe Vita.

(Right) Dale, a 2004 drypoint print.

With experiences such as that, the gains for me went beyond the salary. Also, I had not

been drawing for its own sake for a long time. I made it my practice to draw every day, just as I

had required of the students. Mostly I went to the Caffe Vita, the coffee shop across the street from

our home and I sketched the customers and the baristas working. One of the regulars, Dale, was

the most frequent figure in these drawings. He worked for Krekow-Jennings, a construction

company, as a driver for their dump truck. It reminded me of Barbara Krekow, Carl’s former wife,

and Barbara was a student in my etching class at the UW. Dale died a few years later, and I made

a drypoint print based on my sketch. It’s in the _____ collection today.

On days when our class went outdoors, I drew outdoors also; and indoors, I did the same.

I thought I was balancing my time looking over their shoulders with my own drawing. It was a

way of putting myself in their shoes, doing what I required them to do, and also doing

demonstrations for anyone who wanted to watch.

There was one thing that distinguished the drawing class that made it different from the

drawing classes I taught in the 1960’s and 1970’s—there were rooms full of computers nearby. In

the short story I wrote in the mid-seventies my protagonist (brought back from a cryogenic state,

frozen in time) he tours the 21st Century art room and sees huge inkjet prints, and so it was at

Shoreline. Here is an excerpt from that 1975 short story which shows I saw large-scale digital

prints in our students’ future:

‘‘He saw something that he could hardly believe he was seeing, but it fascinated him and

he moved closer to watch what was emerging from a long, narrow groove just below the

phone jack panel under the edge of the top. Several cords ran from the outputs, and two

students were holding them up slightly so they would not hang over the sheet that was

coming out of the groove. The sheet was a drawing that was similar to the composition on

the door of the room to which Gayrord had been attracted. The sheet seemed to be a plastic,

yet more rigid like the quality of paper.

“Three more students moved in closer to look as the sheet slowly emerged. It

flowed, thought Gayrord, and it soon was lying out on a table top below the console.

“‘That's Carlson's work,’ whispered the Dean. ‘There'll be about twenty of these

by the end of the week, because he's having a show in the City Museum. One of the things

we like is for the students to be involved in the creative research of the teachers. We feel

they get a better feel for the profession this way, so they can produce on their own.’

“‘When is the show?’ Gayrord asked. He definitely planned to visit the Museum

on this trip, and immediately was interested to see if the one man shows he knew had

changed at all in the years since he had known the art field.”


37

However, the course structure hadn’t changed, and graphics were designed to produce

industry-grade graphic artists, and fine art was not something to consider in the present digital age.

Photos: (Left) Yogi, drawing, colored pencil on paper.

(Right) Little Yogi, commemorative Artistamp for Artist Trust, 2005.

The last few weeks of the quarter were a grind. I was tired and disappointed that my efforts

to organize a student drawing exhibit at the Student Union building got nowhere. On the other

hand, it was an experience that taught me I’m not suited for institutional teaching—not when it

felt like having gone back in time.

Flooded! The rains were especially heavy in November this year, and one morning I returned from

walking Lynda to her job downtown and when I entered the back room to do my writing there was

water running in under our sliding glass doors from our little paved garden area as the rain was

coming down in torrents! Under the pavers the drain was plugged. Faced with this I didn’t know

who to call or what to do. The drain had to be unclogged, and right away. Over the ensuing hours

I called emergency water abatement companies, a plumber—anyone I could get hold of and who

was able to come.

These crews were getting calls from all over, so I was lucky to get anyone. The first

responders set up a pump and began shooting the water up and over the retaining wall as our back

is ten feet below grade. Water was an inch-and-a-half deep on the carpet and was spreading slowly

into the other rooms as we worked. The plumber put a snake down the drain (that twisting cable

device they use to clear drains), but the snake hit something hard and could not break through. All

we could do is pump water out faster than the rain was was filling in.

The rain eventually let up and the slow process of restoring our home began. We stacked

furniture, desk, and the computer in the dry areas. The insurance adjusters came to assess the

damage. The question was: Why did the drain fail? What plugged it up? As this is my

autobiography, not a place to go further into the subject, but in the end we were made whole again

with only a couple thousand dollars out of our pocket. The condo paid $15,000 for the damages it

was the Association’s drain that was plugged. It took a month to complete repairs.

Over the years the cause came to me, and it was surprising. I remember noticing that

hundreds of earthworms were on the walls of our deck, carried there by the overflowing water

from the retaining wall. Those worms lived in that soil and, when worms are drowning, they

surface if they can. The water carried them down into our deck area and then into the drain. I

remember that during construction a year ago seeing that the contractors didn’t cover the drain

hole and pieces of aggregate and construction bits probably got in the drain pipe. These bits of


38

gravel and sand would catch those worms until a ball of worms the size of a golf ball would jam

the pipe for sure. That’s what I think. The unusual quantity of worms caused it. Who could know?

My sketchbook fills with pictures The sketchbook I carried from September to the end of this year has many of the drawings

I did in connection with the drawing class I was teaching at Shoreline Community college. For the

price of a coffee I could sit and sketch the baristas and their customers. Sometimes I would also

bring my current reading with me—mostly about interactive game design for video. I had assigned

daily sketching to my students, it’s a good regimen and, for this group, a completely new

experience and difficult to habituate.

As a teacher I do as I say, therefore it was incumbent on me to follow my own advice—

draw every day. In truth, I do not normally draw every day. In fact, leafing through my journal as

I’m writing this autobiography, I came across this:

“I have a romantic idea about drawing in the age of digital reproduction. It’s

really a reflection of Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The work of art in the age of

mechanical reproduction,’ and his conclusion that art has become, in that age, a

political action once the work I stripped of its authenticity, i.e., the presence of the

original. Origin is everything. In the digital age, can the digital image restore origin

and authenticity? I didn’t sleep well last night and it’s because my muse is mad at

me for turning my back on creativity. Her name is Media and she knows that

drawing leads to politics, not art, that art is needed, and media art is the art that’s

needed now. Is drawing really a core value of media art as it is today—that is, game

design or game art?”

Photo: Caffe Vita Sept. 20. Drawing in a journal.

Long after my stint at Shoreline, I went back to my journal and made prints from the

sketches. One of them brought me back to soft ground etching, which was tricky because I wanted

to have the effect of pencil—which is not difficult with soft ground. However, writing backward

is not easy. Another thing that’s tricky about soft ground is how delicate the ground is—every little

touch, intentional or not, makes a mark. I figured out how to minimize the accidental touches and

smears that are inevitable with a book-like cover that kept accidents away.


39

Clay time Another good thing about my time at Shoreline was the fact I could, as a faculty member,

have use of the pot shop. This was my chance to get my hands dirty with clay. I didn’t want to

make pots, however, but rather I wanted to make the tetrahedrons that obsessed me. For years I

had been finding ways to make the tetrahedrons in paper, and now I had an opportunity to make

them in stoneware and porcelain.

Photos: (Left to right) Tetrahedron, porcelain; Four tetrahedrons, stoneware;

Four ashtrays, stoneware with copper labels on their undersides.

The art professor at Shoreline who taught ceramics was generous to me, accommodating

every whim. All I had to do was buy my own clay, but I could use the studio’s glazes or, if I wanted

to, make my own. There was a slab roller, so it was easy to roll out uniform slabs of clay. I’m not

sure—it was fourteen years ago—but I think I made a plaster block with spiral designs carved in

it. I would press the clay into these designs as if I were printing the clay.

These I cut into equilateral triangles and fitted them together, using slip to glue them

together. It was tricky business, but I loved the improvisation. Some of them fell apart in the firing,

but these I thought were interesting, too. The porcelain one was interesting because I learned about

ceramic pencils and I bought one and drew on the white surface of the bisque piece before glazing

it. I have always loved ceramics, thanks to my teachers, John Fassbinder and the late Richard

Fairbanks; had it not been for the Vietnam conflict and my eligibility for the draft, I might have

been a potter still.

The Art Gallery on Taylor Avenue North Late in November day this year, 2003, on a whim I walked over on Aloha Street to Taylor

Avenue North and to to say hello to a friend who owned one of my artworks, Mark Mueller. Mark

was doing some gold gild work on frames for Tom Carol at his shop called Frame Guild. I figured

I could catch Mark on a break. I had an idea I wanted to run by him. Mark had gone to the UW art

school in the 1990s, in printmaking, so we had a lot in common. I was fascinated by his gilding.

He did beautiful work. I asked him to gild a woodblock from my collection. He agreed to gild my

woodcut for a trade for a print.


40

Photos: (Left) He Explained, We Listened,

intaglio and pencil on paper, Mark Mueller Collection;

(Middle and right) Gilded woodblock and the print.

On my way back from visiting Mark, as I passed by a window I noticed a hand-written sign

that said, For Rent—inquire next door. It was such a small sign it’s a wonder that I saw it, but fate

was with me that day—it was to be a life-changer! I went next door and went in. I was directed to

see Sarah Johnson, the owner of S&J Studios, a soft-goods designer studio where she and her crew

manufactured her creations. This was to be quite a lesson for me, and we became friends.

Sarah leased the entire building (I think about 5,000 square feet) and that small room with

its own entrance where I saw the sign was of little use to her. She told me that the space was $350

a month, so I said I’d be right back and I hurried across the street to our condo. When I told Lynda

about it, without hesitation she said: “Take it!” This space, despite it was only about 300 square

feet, opened up a whole new episode for me—far better for me than anything I had ventured into

since the days of Triangle Studios in the 1970s.

My rent period started in December, 2003, a year from the time last year, in 2002, that I

signed a lease with the Seattle Independent Mall. With help from Lynda and my sons-in-law, Eric

Bryan and Mike Sunderland, in a week or so they had me moved in and set up. Besides his labor,

Eric donated a heavy-duty countertop salvaged from his construction dumpsite.

Another stroke of good fortune was that it so happened, in the next block over, a product

photography company had shut down, the building gutted and flat file drawers were discarded in

the alley stacked up and waiting for the garbage collection truck. It took us a while to dismantle

the cabinets and carry them and the drawers, one by one, two blocks to the Taylor Avenue place.

Photo: Artistamp by Mark Leonard, Izumi Kuroiwa

passes the Taylor Avenue Art Gallery.

I shared the news of my boon with all my friends, and some of them came to see my new

digs—notably Mark Leonard and Izumi Kuroiwa, who used their pictures of the shop in a series


41

of artist’s stamps. The spot was to be my work place, woodshop, printmaking studio and video

studio until 2009. You might say Christmas came a month early for me that year, true, I had to pay

rent, but it was like a gift in so many ways.

For example, not only was the rent was bargain—far below the market price—but it was

next to woodshop run by Nick Dellos, a designer who was to become a good friend and mentor in

wood craft. He let me use his machines, didn’t mind if I dug through his scrap box for exotic pieces

for my presses and boxes, and—for starters—when I finished my first edition of my CD/ROM

Stamps and Stories, he bought the first one! Eventually he commissioned me to make a suite of

paintings for one of his clients.

I was on a roll! The next door down was the Frame Guild, and Tom didn’t mind my

scrounging in his scraps for museum quality rag mat board and foam core. I got used frames from

him for bargain prices, and when cleared out his inventory and set it out on the street, I couldn’t

resist collecting some of them to recycle in my shop. My old school days of dumpster diving were

still with me, a habit hard to break.

Sidewalk craftsman There is about eight feet of space in front which belongs to the building. That meant I could

work on that space in addition to the space that I was renting. It was like working on my front

porch.

Photo: Working outside the doorway of the Taylor Avenue

workshop and gallery.

On nice days I could hump my table saw outside and do the dusty, noisy work of cutting

parts for my projects. The area is zoned light industrial, anyway, and no one ever complained.

My teaching days end, again At Shoreline the days got longer and my drawing class worked its way to its logical end.

They combine beginning, intermediate and advanced drawing students into one room—like the

old-fashioned one-room schools of yore. That meant that most of the students were beginners, with

two or three being intermediate, and one or two being advanced. For me this posed some

difficulties in trying to have both simple and challenging lessons going each day at the same time.

However, I challenged the advanced students with the idea of forming a drawing students’

club. They would be given the task of structuring an exhibition program set for the school’s Student

Center cafeteria. I drew up the plans and specifications for re-loadable frames and hanging systems

for the walls. I had done the same thing when I taught at the UW, a kind of “pop-up” art show

method that was relatively simple and cheap. Unfortunately, the students weren’t up to the task, I

guess; the idea went nowhere. Once again, I learned where the limits lay.


42

Photo: Seen at the Caffe Vita, drawing in a journal.

It was a benefit to me that I had my journal going all the time. It turned into a kind of

exercise for me because I was constantly trying to invent an art course that used my fantasy world,

Emeralda, as an interface so that the course was imbued with the spirit of online games—making

it contemporaneous—and yet was grounded in real, physical materiality.

Therefore, the notes scribbled in with the sketches of baristas and their customers at the

Caffe Vita reflected this dual reality. For example, the date of the drawings often included

reference to which of the Islands-of-Domains-of-Expertise I was visiting that day, following the

Year of Living Copiously structure I used. I imagined that each island had a coffee shop like the

Caffe Vita, and this shop would be designed in keeping with the culture of that island.

The text in the illustration above, for example, says:

“October 17, 2003: It is real – unlike the Journal in Myst. In Emeralda Region the

players are unaware they’re being watched. The most desirable of their output is in

the form of tangibles they create. The trail, or pathway, to these is digital artifacts.

The players fashion their digital legacy into various forms – the e-folio being the

elementary one.”

43

2004 By December 24 of this year, I will be sixty-three years old

Photo: Artistamp commemorating the

introduction of the first Mini Halfwood Presses.

Settling in to the Taylor Avenue Studio In January of 2004, having located a studio space I settled in. My journal for this month is

full of thoughts about my uncertain outlook, with sketches of how I could furnish the studio to be

like a shop and gallery in one. Getting my new space happened so fast!

Photo: Assemblage of pages with studio sketch plans and notes.

In my journal entries—each one set according to the ten Islands-of-domains-of-expertise,

as in Emeralda Region—I describe my eagerness to start over, yet with the wistfulness of the

missing professor that I am. Confucius is said to have advised, “Better to play games than do

nothing at all.” But I added, “Better to make up games, or make life a game and improve it than to

do things that amount to nothing.” In recent months I had been reading about video game design;

currently I was reading Marc Saltzman’s 1999 book, Game Design: Secrets of the Sages and

dropping in opinions.

Last year’s book, Dungeons & Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek

to Chic, written by Brad King and John Borland, was tops of my reading now. I was inspired by

the story of Richard Garriott and John Carmack, who invented games such as Quake and DOOM.

Their early days of playing Dungeons & Dragons reminded me of the days when UW students and

I were building the rudiments of video games as a learning experience. I thought I had found the

https://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dreamers-Computer-Created-Community/dp/0991222725/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1508880725&sr=1-1&keywords=Dungeons+and+dreamers




44

portal to a new kind of art school—or school between art and technology—but it led to a dead end

on campus. Now, with my return to an art studio and art gallery, I was starting over. I lamented

and asked my journal:

“But I don’t have a press; and if I did have a little intaglio press, would I be

better for it? Who would care? So many of the things that motivated me in the past

seem less interesting to me today. Is there something different about me, or my

physical health (Hashimoto’s disease, for example)? Or is it that I’m wiser than I

was. College no longer appeals to me. I no longer see it as a bastion of hope. I don’t

feel the critical intellectual ferment that I need and want.”

Is retirement for me? In February I decided it was time to start my Social Security income—my age, 62, qualified

me. There were some who advised that we should wait. It was a juggling act—if you waited there

might be an advantage. But I remembered the book I read some years ago by Craig Karpel titled,

The Retirement Myth.4 The rest of us have to begin planning now for significant reduction and

postponement of our own Social Security benefits. Karpel thought the Federal Government of the

future isn’t going to be able to guarantee us a “life of golf, motor homes and cruises to Alaska.”

He quoted Robert Butler on the subject of lifelong working: “The longevity revolution is

one of civilizations most extraordinary achievements. But it means that when we're older we're

going to have to continue to contribute to society, not just make claims on it. People are generally

underestimating the number of years they're going to live, and what those years are going to cost

them financially. The result is that they're under funding their old age. With all this increased life

expectancy, why not an increase in work expectancy?”

Karpel’s book was a huge influence on my thinking about retirement. Also, there’s an

observation you frequently here that artists tend to have long, productive and interesting (if not

happy) lives. So went the Social Security office and got in line. It was sad place, that room

Afterwards I went over to the Cornish College of Art, which was nearby in what used to

be the Lenora Building. There I spent some time with Preston Wadley, Kathleen Rabel, John

Overton and Heather Oaksen. These were my old acquaintances and some of them former students.

They showed me around the building, which was still a new building to them. I’d been in the

Lenora before when I worked with Dennis Mashek at his design company, Devereaux Design.

Halfwood Press is born I wished I had an etching press once more since I sold my Sturgess Press in 1982 in order

to take my sabbatical study for the UW School Of Art. To print after that I had to borrow time on

the presses of former students and the open studios at Daniel Smith’s. The press I wanted—the

Kasten-Berglin which I used a few times at the Daniel Smith store—was out of my reach, costing

over $8,000.

The Kasten-Bergelin was an engineer’s achievement to be proud of. Maybe that’s why they

had, literally, put it on a pedestal. Compared to my old presses—a Sturgess etching press and a

Griffin Lithograph press—with these press’ boxy, angle-iron and tubular steel frames, the Kasten-

Bergelin looked like a work of art. Looking back, I think it was over-engineered. True, it had a

4 Karpel, Craig S. "The Retirement Myth". Harper-Collins. NY. 1995


45

unique pressure system I call the “nutcracker” because it used a leverage device instead of a screw-

down method that is common.

Photos: (Left) Bill’s former press; (middle) Kasten-Bergelin etching press

(Right) Pencil sketch of one idea for a press with an esthetic character.

In March I found the site of the Canadian Doug Forsythe, founder of Build-a-press, on

which he offered plans for making your own press for a few hundred dollars—plans which required

a minimum of equipment and tools—a drill press and little else. After paying the $25 and

downloading them, I printed out the plans. In April I wrote in my journal:

“I’m building an intaglio press. Actually I’m building a wooden prototype

first. I’m thinking of making it functional as a linoleum block press with wood and

plastic parts. This is a way to bootstrap my way into press printmaking. I’m also

making to show as work of nice craft. Some might call it art! I’ll use pretty wood

and brass. I’d like to learn electronic etching to go with my other e-work and

eliminate hazards. Also I can etch the brass parts and brass-plate parts for more

beauty.”

Photo: First sketch of the Halfwood Press concept, April, 2004.

There was a time in the early days of printing press designs, before iron and steel were

commonplace, that etching and lithography presses were made partly in wood combined with steel

parts. Woodcraft is one of my loves, so I designed the press to be “half wood and half steel.” It

would be intended as “art that makes art.” In my mind this compares to self-replicating robots—

machines that replicate themselves.

Thinking about about presses of the old days, which were sometimes made partly of wood,

I sketched some ideas for beautifying my press. Esthetic considerations reminiscent of the Kasten-

Bergelin were on my mind. I penciled the structure of my ideal press to be graceful, not boxy.


46

Musical instruments sometimes combined wood and metal, and the shapes were pleasing to the

eye as well as serving a purpose. These, too, I incorporated in my press design.

From machine part stores around Seattle I bought essential, off-the-shelf parts (bearings,

threaded rod, etc.). The wooden prototype I cutout of plywood and put together had these built in

and it was starting to look like an actual press. This prototype I would put in the back seat of our

car and take it to machine shops in South Seattle to see if I could find anyone who would look at

it and give me a price. I needed to find someone copy the prototype of the press’ core structure in

steel. After that I would build the wooden pieces to affix to the sides and a molded top across the

press—what I eventually called the crown of the press.

Photos: (Left) Bill made a wood prototype was the first step in making

his first Halfwood Press. (Right) Margie and Tom Kughler made the

actual working press from Bill’s model.

Going around to Seattle’s fabricators looking for prices was discouraging. The managers I

talked to would hardly talk to me and brushed me off. The job was too small, I suppose. Finally I

looked in the Yellow Pages and I called Kughler Company, which was, and still is, in Seattle’s

north side, the Ballard neighborhood located along the ship canal. The mockup I showed Tom was

my boxy frame of wood parts bolted together which I made according to Doug Forsythe’s design,

a design intended for those who had only a drill press—no welding required. It called for a chain-

drive for mechanical advantage like many etching presses.

Unlike the other shops’ managers, Tom Kughler—who, with his wife Margie, owned their

own company with only themselves as employees, listened patiently as I described my press. I

explained how I wanted it to be different in appearance than regular etching presses, a thing of

beauty, grace and style—like a work of art or a kinetic sculpture for the purpose of printmaking.

If musicians had beautiful instruments, then why not printmakers? Actually, this was all new to

Tom, although he had an uncle who was a well-known painter years ago.

But etching presses were unknown to Tom, but he said if I showed him the drawings and

explained printmaking, he could build it. Fortunately, my boyhood training in drafting came out

and I unrolled my drawings. Tom agreed to build it for under $1,500.


47

Photo: (Left) The finished, first “Century” Halfwood Press, named

after a classic line of speedboats (Right).

That same month, April, 2004, Tom and Margie Kughler delivered the first completed

Halfwood Press to my shop on Taylor Avenue North; and over the next few weeks I completed

the mahogany veneer cladding that covered the sides and extended the bed supports. It was quite

satisfying, and it met needs for a unique and beautiful press. After all this I had run out of money

for my press project, so I improvised the final, finished parts—a crank to turn the gear-driven

rollers, and the press bed itself. In the store room of our condo I found a discarded piece of one-

inch melamine MDF, and it fit perfectly! It’s funny how often it has happened that something I

needed appeared, like magic. Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Greg Both

related that to me.

Now came the month of May, and now the test! Actually I had been anticipating the time

when I would be making plates and printing again, and the combination of wood into the press’

design rekindled my old theme from my graduate school days—trees. My engraving showed the

halfwood press growing up out of the roots of trees’ roots, and branching out at the top into the

trees’ branches.

Photo: The Halfwood Press of Emeralda, print from copper engraving.

As it turned out, over the coming years, my first owner-designed etching press was going

to inspire a story which I could not have imagined—stories of sailing ship sagas, historical fiction,

art history, and was spiced with modern-day technology. Bits and pieces of the story came to me

over the years that Tom Kughler and his wife, Margi, and I worked on over two-hundred Halfwood


48

presses. My stories—all connected to or inspired by the Halfwood Press—were going to get better

with each iteration.

The end of printmaking at the UW Sam Davidson called me one day in April to ask if I knew the UW Art School was

discontinuing the printmaking major and the graduate printmaking program. I had heard a rumor,

in fact. He asked if we could—or should—try to do something to save it. Of course I thought we

should, but how? Neither of us had a clue. I had plan when I was there to make printmaking the

basis for a curriculum in media arts—in total. That would mean interdepartmental collaboration,

and include distance learning—as I had proposed in 190. I had the the big picture.

I wrote a letter to Shirley Scheier to offer my help. I also wrote to Larry Sommers and

Chris Ozubko, the head of the school. I heard good things about Larry. I felt sorry for him, working

under Curt Labitsky. I also wrote to the Seattle Times. No one ever replied. I drafted a letter to the

Dean, but it took me a long time to send it. Actually no one from the school ever contacted me. I

suppose I am stigmatized. Who knows? Who cares? I care. A lot, and I still do and I act like it. My

journal has page after page of my lament over the change at the UW—even on into May and June.

Then, finally, Dean Halloran invited me to come and discuss the program, but I did not

take him up on it. I wonders why? I called it a refusal to attend the funeral; but by not going in, I

may have helped nail the coffin lid. The entries about this continued in my journal for weeks and,

finally, I concluded that any action on my part would entail confronting the same faculty and

administration in the art department that had forced my resignation. Even the Dean—for all his

supposed authority—would not be able to change the course of the art department. As Norman

Lundin had said—back in the 1970’s when the State Legislature mandated the UW to do more

innovative teaching (with a half-million dollar incentive package): “No f___ing around with

academic freedom!” The situation is the classic indispensable enemies’ syndrome, pure and

simple.

The first Mini Halfwood Press During one of our conversations (after Tom Kughler had built the Century press and set it

up for me) I was admiring it and I mentioned to Tom that it was so beautiful that I wished I had a

model to show off the design. It would fit on my mantel, even, the way some people display model

ships. He responded that he also made models because, in his business of machinery handling

manufacturing, he needed miniatures to use for trade shows. To be honest, I didn’t take him

seriously. I could imagine a beautiful little model, but for what purpose? To decorate my home?

A month later—in June 14, 2004—Tom showed up at the shop with the core of first Mini

Halfwood Press. He was walking up, swinging the thing at his side like an attaché case! I had to

laugh. He fitted it with a plastic bed, so it was lightweight.


49

Photos: (Left) First Mini Halfwood Press without wood cladding and base.

(Right) Mini Halfwood Press completed.

He said, “Can we try it?”

As Tom watched I dampened paper, and then scratched out a quickie drypoint plate. It

might have been the first time he’d seen me do my thing. With C-clamps I secured it to the bed of

the Century. I put the plate on the bed, the damp paper on the plate and the felt blankets over all.

Clamping a vice grip on the shaft (the press had no crank nor wheel yet) I turned it through. The

little press worked just as well as the big press!

However toy-like the Mini appeared, it worked like a serious press. It should not have come

as a surprise—the mechanics were the same. Over the next week I crafted wooden cladding be be

like the wood features on the big press. It turned out as I hoped, a beautiful scale model of the first

Halfwood Press and, as a bonus, it worked.

Later in June my family decided to pack a picnic and spend the day at nearby Lake

Sammamish State Park. I was engrossed in my press-making project, but I saw the picnic as an

opportunity to try printing outdoors—plein air printing—the way painters do. While my family

played on the beach nearby, I set up my press on a picnic table and made a drypoint print.

Photos: (Left) Printing on a picnic table at Lake Sammamish State Park.

(Right) the drypoint print printed on the first Mini Halfwood Press.

People passing by turned their heads and looked; a little kid came running over and asked

me what I was doing. That day at the park I made several proofs of the trees; and this experience—

a day of plein-air printmaking—planted the seeds for a new venture which was to last until the

time of this writing—2017—and probably beyond.

Stamps ‘N Stories It took more than three years—from 2000 through 2003—to assemble my forty artistamp

images spanning 1960-2000 and the stories attached to the artworks represented in the artistamps.

I called my project, Stamps ‘N Stories and by December, 2003 I had arranged them in hypertext

markup language (HTML) to burn the stamps and their stories on a CD/ROM.


50

For a few of the artistamps I continued from the story of the origins of the artworks—their

back stories—to the methods I used to make them. I used true/false questions; and since most of

the images were prints most of the lessons were about printmaking techniques. The methods then

became printmaking lessons. Nick Dellos, neighboring my new digs in Sarah Johnson’s on Taylor

Avenue North, bought one of my discs, despite knowing nothing about artistamps or printmaking.

Photos: (Left) Wrapper for the CD/ROM case for

the 2004 edition of Stamps ‘N Stories. (Right) Banner for

the interactive CD with aerial view of Emeralda Region.

The viewer is meet with these words:

Your story begins in Emeralda City, gateway

to the Isles of Emeralda Region

You are a short-listed candidate for the Gates Prize. Yet you must qualify further

to win. You have two tasks: (1) To be able to tell the story of media and (2) apply

techniques of media to art. You do this on your visits to Emeralda Communiversity

Islands, the Domains-of-Expertise in multimedia.

Ten islands exist where media art is miniaturized and imbedded in electronic

stamps so that the Masters' secret art imaging techniques and stories may be hidden

in them. You'll need this knowledge to help you move to other islands and higher

knowledge. These stamps become part of your passport. They may also be needed

to escape Emeralda.

You may remain in Emeralda City, and from here you may explore the islands

of Emeralda Region in their virtual form. You'll find Emeralda City is pleasant,

unlike the other three cities on the lake's shore. Its library and archives are open to

you.

The gateways to the ten virtual forms of the Island Domains-of-Expertise and

the Master's electronic stamp galleries are accessible by choosing from the list at

the left.

Candidates who gain the Master's knowledge rise to higher levels toward

winning the Gates Prize. If they fail, they're sent to a shore-side city, and this can

be very unpleasant (not like Emeralda City). In the three shore-side cities,

candidates risk losing what they gained.

Read and heed the warning! Others have tried to make artist's stamps on their

own, without the knowledge that comes from the Masters. Their names are

unknown, so complete was the secreting away of their assets and legacy.

Emeralda Region is described: “Thirty-thousand years ago four spacecraft from the Flower

Planet crash-landed on Earth. One went to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. A second one


51

landed in what’s known as Emeralda Region, creating a huge lake. It is guarded over by three

mountain peaks. Ancients describe mysterious events happening there. It was destined to become

a haven for artists, crafts people and designers in modern times.”

Billie Jane hosts me a show Our older daughter Billie Bryan chose a career as barista and coffee shop manager for a

time at the Hot Wire, north of Seattle. She invited me to set up a show—this must have been my

first coffee shop show—a popular venue for younger artists.

Photo: Hotwire, graphite drawing.

I installed prints and drawings and made myself available as often as I could. It was great

fun and I met new people. The next artist to show there was Nicole DeMente, and we would cross

paths many times in the future. She had been at The Evergreen State College when C. T. Chew

and I stage our Lunch with C. T. Chew.

Our 40th Wedding Anniversary For eight days, from June 19th to the 27th 2004, we celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary

on a road trip. We drove north to Canada as far north as Jasper, Alberta. We visited many of the

places we had been hearing about, like Banff and Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies. I took my

press with us and I kept a journal, one entry which was a plan involving the Mini Halfwood Press:

“June 21, 2004: The longest day of the year and we are in Alberta on Mountain

time. Were at a cabin at Storm Mountain Lodge. I flashed on an idea! The Halfwood

press as part of an extension of the Minidemo idea we—Lynda and I—entertained

a few years ago. I even registered a website, minidemo.com.

“The concept is a Mini Halfwood press people can buy that includes a DVD,

which is a collection of everything you need to make intaglio prints on the Mini

press. I could spend the next year—June to December of ‘04—creating the DVD

and, concurrently, the one-minute lessons. I could lay it out in HTML first,

envisioning it as the Internet part of the course. Obviously a diamond in my

backyard!

“And how does this connect to Emeralda? Because Emeralda is “Games for

the gifts of life.” I’ve had this gift in my backyard (in my head) all this time although

I seemed unaware. I even went around the world searching for something worth

believing.” - Bill Ritchie’s Journal


52

Halfwood on an art walk In August, 2004, our neighborhood activist group called the Uptown Alliance (this part of

Seattle to be known as Uptown) put on an Art Walk. It as an opportunity to show off the Mini

Halfwood Press. The artists had to arrange with a merchant on the main street to work outside their

store and make art all day for passers-by. The organizer said words that I thought to be tactless and

insensitive to artists’ needs: “Let’s put artists out on the street!” I felt a little uneasy about this

because it sounded like artists were to be evicted, put out on the street. She required that we wear

funny hats so people would know we were the attraction. These she bought at a costume shop—

glittering red top hats they were.

Photos: (Left) The Mini Halfwood at the neighborhood Art Walk.

(Right) Two sides of the postcard commemorating the 2004 Uptown Art Walk.

I didn’t want to be a party-pooper or seem too high and mighty, so I set aside my ego,

donned the hat and marched along with the other to our agreed-upon stations. My spot was in front

of a boutique by the name of Paper Source. By this time I had assembled a pretty nice portable

standing bench to which I could attach my Mini Halfwood Press.

For this event I made a quick etching in the form of a postcard so that I could make souvenir

give-away prints to interested people, with commemorative, color laser-print stamps included and

a rubber cancellation stamp. The postcard’s back showed my imaginary Islands-of-domains-of-

expertise from Emeralda. The postcard was laminated to the prints. It was quite an operation. It

made a nice little show and the people passing by enjoyed my spiel.

Halfwood on Guemes Island In July, 2004, Lynda and I spent the day at Lane Park’s Guemes Island farm where he

planned to develop an alternative school based on conservation, organic food cultivation and

papermaking. It was to be the Madrona Art Center, situated on five acre farm home site site on

Guemes Island. He invited me to come, as he had invited me before in 1992, to be one of the

featured guest artists.

This time I was to demonstrate printing on the Mini Halfwood Press which I had been

bragging about. Under an old plum tree I set up my traveling printmaker chest and workbench. On

a copper plate I drew a drypoint of the tree which was shading me overhead, and then turned to

printing the plate all day. I gave away the prints, but I also had a little print bin handy with matted

prints from my studio. No one purchased any art.


53

Photos: (Left) Printing at Madrona Art Center on Guemes Island.

(Middle) Print made at that day on the Halfwood Press;

(Right) Lynda waiting and watching.

I was surprised when one of the visitors—she happened to be from New Zealand—said she

wanted to buy one. This was the first time it occurred to me to make Mini Halfwood Presses for

sale, and I certainly hadn’t thought of selling to people outside the USA. Months later I told Tom

Kughler about this incident, and he immediately set about making some to sell.

Lane also planned to have an art auction to raise money for the Madrona Center. I brought

with me a lithograph trial proof I printed in 1970 for Jacob Lawrence. It was one of four I

discovered in my print drawers which was on the back of subsequent trial proofs of my own works.

As it turned out that summer day Lane decided there were too few remaining guests by the time

auction was scheduled so he called off the auction, but he kept the print for the next time.

Late in the afternoon we enjoyed an impromptu country music concert by the local band

members, with singalongs to songs like, I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee. They substituted

a few words to give it local color and teased Lynda and I about being from the Big Bad City,

Seattle.

Small is Beautiful at Daniel Smith, Inc. After I told Tom Kughler about my Guemes Island experience and my upcoming

demonstration at Daniel Smith’s, he had made up four more Legacy Mini Halfwood Presses. By

November, 2004, Tom had finished four more Legacy Mini Halfwood Presses and I arranged to

bring my Legacy Mini Halfwood Press and set it up in the demonstration room in the back of

Seattle’s flagship art supply store, Daniel Smith, Inc.

Daniel Smith grown his company in the basement of a HUD house in the Greenlake

neighborhood—a fixer-upper which he bought and remodeled—back in 1976. By now the Seattle

store had grown to be huge, with over a hundred employees and with a branch in Bellevue. From

that achievement, Dan had always been an inspiration, as he showed me how a creative artist could

also be a successful entrepreneur. And now, here I was almost thirty years later launching my own

version of a business startup.

Although his company had grown, it still followed Dan’s original policy of hosting artists

doing demonstrations of art techniques using the brands of materials sold there. For years, the

company sponsored these educational demonstrations on a regular weekend basis. My first

presentation was titled Small is Beautiful, and I used papers, inks, tarlatan and other supplies all


54

available in the store—except the Halfwood Press. In my heart I hoped that, someday, our Mini

Halfwood Press would be included in their colorful mail order catalog—but this was never to be.

For my demonstration the the presses were boxed-up, sitting in my shop on Taylor Avenue

and ready to sell. Not having made detailed agreements to sell my presses in their store, I put one

in the trunk of our car just in case someone at the event wanted to see a sample that would be for

sale. Honestly, I hadn’t mentioned it to the store manager as retailers are territorial when it comes

to outsiders marketing their own products. But I went prepared to show my one sample.

My demonstration was to be given twice—one at eleven and then at one o’clock. By noon

the first demo was over. I was cleaning up getting ready for the next demonstration after lunch

when a young man approached. I remember him as being kind of shy. He asked if he could buy a

press like the one I used.

“Yes you can,” I said, “Do you want to come over to the shop tomorrow?”

“Well,” the guy said, “I came all the way from Cosmopolis—on the coast—for this demo

today. It’s a two-hour drive and it’ll be awhile before I can come back to Seattle.”

I wanted to have the sample press for the afternoon demonstration, but here stood a buyer

right now, getting out his checkbook! I said, “Don’t tell anyone, but I have one in the car!” We

went out to my car and opened the trunk. He wrote a check for $500 and away he went. He was

my first customer for what was to become a new enterprise for Tom Kughler and me. The guy

from Cosmopolis’ was Hans Nelson. He took Legacy Mini Halfwood Press No. 2—the second

press Tom made after the prototype, which was to be mine.

After Hans and I said goodbye that day, the afternoon demonstration went well and, after

that one, the same thing happened! A woman said she wanted to buy one. I didn’t have one—it

was on its way to Cosmopolis—but she said she would come to the shop the next day. And she

did. Over the next several weeks I sold two more Legacy Mini Halfwood Presses to people who

saw me demonstrating at Daniel Smith, Inc.

Photos: (Left) After-demo chat at Daniel Smith, Inc.

(Right) During a demonstration in the back room of Daniel Smith’s store.

As for Hans Nelson, he and I exchanged one or two emails, and then I heard no more. I

continued to send newsletters until, two years later after I sent him my holiday card, someone in

his family sent me a note to tell me Hans had died only two months after he bought the press. It is

still a mystery to me as why Hans died. I didn’t ask, but I wrote to the sender to say that I would

buy the press back if the family wished, but she answered, no, they wanted to keep it for his kids.

Someday when they’re old enough, they might want to have it, she explained.

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2005 By December 24 of this year, I will be sixty-four years old

Photo: Artistamp based on the drypoint

print by Bill Ritchie entitled, Matilda.

New Year’s in Bellingham New Year’s Eve and we drove up to Bellingham thinking we would have a good time with

a special dinner. It was a spur-of-the moment so, of course, the best restaurants were booked solid,

so we were out of luck. We had fish and chips. We were lucky to find a hotel room! For my

birthday a week before, Jane, Eric and Matilda gave me a new journal, and on New Year’s morning

I wrote on the first page of this journal:

“January 1, 2005: Bellingham – Hotel Bellwether. This will be a very good year.

On the art, craft and design front the Mini Halfwood Press will be the kernel of my

work. On the learning community front, Cornerstone Condos will be my study hall.

On the Web, emeralda.com will be my game. I know in my mind and in my heart

that Emeralda is my endowed gift, and I will pass it on.” – Bill Ritchie’s Journal

At breakfast while browsing in a Bellingham community newspaper and found an article

about a mysterious discovery. Someone found a marble frieze in a bank of clay along a beach front.

It appeared to be European-made and quite old and badly eroded; but they could not find anything

about it, neither how it got here nor from where it came. This incident actually happened. Over the

ensuing months, it inspired my story about my having seen, not about discovery of a marble frieze,

but a discovery of a mysterious brass or bronze disc with an etched image on it.

Photo: Fake news clipping describing a fragment from

a mystery object showing a press design.

I built in my imagination that this piece of metal with its design was to be the only fragment

remaining from an etching press, lost in the sinking of a ghost ship named the Emeralda at a


56

location not far from Bellingham. I embellished my evolving story, telling how the object was

turned over the local museum, cleaned, and found its way into the local papers; and that’s when I

discovered it and deduced that the design was an etching press.

Layer upon layer the story grew in my imagination during the long hours of cutting,

sanding, drilling, staining, oiling and polishing the hardwoods that make the parts of the Halfwood

Press. I began writing down the story and developing a timeline and filling in the background as

to how the press—or presses—came to the area of the the San Juan Islands miles north of Seattle.

Another Exchange print with Baren.org Around January 15, 2005 I sent my edition of 31 prints to the 23rd exchange with Baren.org.

The theme this year was, Tribute to a most influential printmaker. Of course I chose to make a

print about Rolf Nesch. As I have written elsewhere, more than anyone in my life, Rolf Nesch was

most influential person in my career (after my wife, Lynda).

Photo: (Left) Remembering Rolf Nesch, relief print for the

23rd print exchange. (Right) The 31-print baren.org folio of 2005.

For the print’s colophon I wrote:

“Rolf Nesch was one of the printmakers who influenced me. I first learned about

his art in 1967, then I wrote to him and he replied. I wanted to meet him, and I did;

then I went to Norway–his home–in 1969. My time with him was short, but I learned

firsthand what it was like to be a struggling printmaker (and sculptor) in an

unfriendly country during the hard times of World War II. He made his prints in a

different way than my woodcut, but working in any fashion in memory of Rolf is

worthwhile.”

It started a scholarly manuscript for a small book about my experience of learning about

and working with Rolf Nesch, but for the meantime it is a condensed article in a privately-

circulated Journal by the California Etchers Society in May, 2017.

Halfwood Press fund raising for Artist Trust In February, 2005, I took part in the Artist Trust Auction, listed as a performance artist! I

showed my latest image, a trading-card sized version of Little Yogi and a way to heat transfer laser

images on it. Artist Trust is Seattle’s premier service dedicated to assisting artists and nonprofit

arts organizations all over Washington State.


57

Photo: The copper plate and the print, Little Yogi, 2005 pr050210rit

Ahead of time I had made a sheet of color laser prints of the artist stamp version of Little Yogi

(the original 2003 drawing) and a triangular logo for Ritchie’s Perfect Press. My spot was near an

electrical outlet to power the heating tool.

Photos: (Left) An attendee prints the Little Yogi artist trading card (Center) and

heat-transferred a color-laser artiststamp image (Right) onto the fresh card.

The event was fun for me plus it gave me another opportunity to show off the Mini Halfwood

Press and also to test my idea of heat-transferring a color laser print image of the artistamp.

A sweet Valentine’s Day gift In time for Valentine’s Day, I got an order for Legacy Mini Halfwood Press number 10. It

was from John as a gift to Deborah Block. Therefore I included a heart-shaped box of chocolates

when I packed it for them. Number ten was the last of the series we made in 2004. The same

month, upon Tom Kughler’s suggestion that we try eBay as a way to reach more people, Damon

Smith—who was in Salt Lake City at that time—ordered number six. Selling on eBay was an okay

way to show more people the Halfwood Presses, but I missed the opportunity to get to know the

owners and get feedback as eBay is not set up for communications between sellers and buyers.

This was a drawback in my plans for developing an online, interactive website for the Halfwood

Press, which seems to me to be part of keeping the social aspect of printmaking alive.

Halfwood Press business grows beautifully Having sold four presses the year prior, Tom Kughler and I had decided to continue making

them—producing ten of them before December, 2004. Meanwhile, the original Century Halfwood

Press—the mother of all the Halfwoods that would follow—I only used occasionally to print my

latest works. By the time it was a year old, its three-by-four foot bed was used more often as a

worktable for making Minis!


58

The Halfwood Press project was opening new doors for me, and insights into my career as

a teaching printmaker. One thing was growing apparent—the large, heavy presses being used in

printmaking centers and colleges were creating a hurdle for aspiring printmakers. They could not

afford to buy a press at the crucial time when they were starting out. Or, most young artists did not

have a space to accommodate a big press.

This realization made me rethink my teaching career. I was wrong (like many printmaking

teachers worldwide) to promote in my intaglio printmaking classes at least, that “bigger is better.”

This error owes to art school faculty identifying printmaking as an extension of painting. Not that

I was to blame because as I was just teaching what I had been taught to believe.

Now the Halfwood Press was taking on the form and style close to that of an art

instrument—like a musical instrument is to the musician. From the responses from people upon

seeing the Halfwoods, it was more than a work of craftsmanship. Cheryl Hall, who bought number

14, corrected me when I argued with her. She said that the press was a work of art; I said, No, it’s

a craft piece.

She asserted: “If it makes me happy, it’s art!” I gave in, and I began to agree with the

people who made this compliment, and now I agree fully—but not on appearances alone. Now my

contention is that is by design to have appearance a work of well-crafted artwork plus it has a

conceptual basis. It has a back story like many works of art which are not apparent to a casual

viewer or even the person owning and using it.

Few people can know how much this press has meant to me. It connected me, first of all,

with Tom and Margie who abided with me since 2004, carrying the load of material costs and

labor until I sold the presses. Letters and e-mails, greeting cards printed on the press, praises sent

to me from around the world and, sometimes, multiple sales to the same person, made the

Halfwood a work of art in the sense that a landscape painter might feel the richness of actually

traveling into a painting and moving among the features there. Imaginary, yes, yet real enough to

give pleasure as if experiencing a work of ordinary artworks.

A website for Halfwood Presses By this time I had developed a website for the Halfwood Press venture, as it was beginning

to look as though the press might find a large audience countrywide—or even worldwide. As

pictures for the web pages I showed the size of the press by as using snapshots of owners’ pets,

and snapshots of the press in different settings, including staged snapshots outdoors.

Photos: (Left) Owner Teresa Redinger sent a snapshot of her press set in a tonsu chest.

(Middle) Ducks examine a Halfwood Press on the boat dock.

(Right) Robert Swartz sent a snapshot he titled Lab Test.

Feedback I got also proved that it was my design for the press that was a huge factor in

people choosing to buy the Halfwoods. In the beginning, I designed my Century model to be


59

pleasing to myself only; my reasoning was always that printmaking has a kinship with performing

arts. In music, for example, musicians usually work from a score, and a score compares to a

template or a printing plate. Secondly, practice is required of both the musician and the printmaker.

Third, the musician usually has an instrument which is designed to be beautiful as well as

functional; the Halfwood Press, with its fine wooden parts and brass appointments, also is beautiful

and functional.

The first Mariner Tom Kughler eventually engineered and built 3 versions of the Mariner. Number one,

which went to Dave, was a direct drive; later on, Tom modified it to a 3:1 geared model and, even

later, an 8:1 and 12:1!

In May, 2005, Dave Klugman, in New York became the second person, after Damon, to

buy his Legacy Mini Halfwood Press on E-bay. Later this year he leveled-up and bought a

Mariner—the press twice the size of the Mini with its 12-inch wide bed and weighing not 12 but

100 pounds. Dave bought the No. 1 Mariner, which Tom had converted to 3:1 gearing.

Photos: (Left) Dave Klugman demonstrated monotype, his Mariner is

almost visible. (Right) Dave’ paint besmirched Legacy Mini Halfwood Press No. 8.

It so happened that when I got an email from a Russian tourist staying not far who asked if

he could see a Halfwood anywhere near him, Dave was open to letting this person visit to see his

Halfwood presses. This visitor sent me snapshots that he made while Dave demonstrated his

monotype printing. Dave also sent an email with a flattering testimonial saying I was a “Class Act”

because I smuggled in a bottle of Champagne for the christening of the press.

Granddaughter and Grandfather make art On June 17, 2005, our Family—Lynda and I, Jane, Matilda, Nellie and Mike—went to our

favorite old retreat, the Iron Springs Resort. Eric was away on a construction project in Hawaii.

We rented a large cabin and took advantage of nature trails, the indoor swimming pool and the

beach. Iron Springs was a favorite destination for our family, and this may have been the first time

five year old Matilda came with us.

It was also the first time I brought a mini studio with me consisting of a laptop computer,

the Mini Halfwood Press, and watercolors. I had an experiment in mind.


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Photo: Bill proofed the drypoint he made of his granddaughter, Matilda while, at the

same time, she drew a portrait of him. (Right) The finished drypoint.

The experiment worked better than I hoped! My subject for a print—Matilda—would not

sit still but I had a method—a quick digital snapshot on the laptop (not in the photo) screen was

my reference as I worked on the drypoint. Looking back and forth at the real Matilda and the

virtual Matilda was enough to capture the proportions, details and the life of my subject. It is

possibly the best drypoint print I ever made. Later I made an artistamp from the image.

Photos: (Left) Iron Springs Resort as it appeared in 2005. (Right) 2003 Drawing,

a view from the window of the cabin at Iron Springs Resort.

Our family loved to go to Iron Springs Resort until it became run-down and shabby. About

seven years later a new company took it over and built new units and did away with the indoor

pool. It was old, so it was no great loss, and the new units are wonderful.

Solarplate™, ImageOn™ with the Minis Kathryn Kim bought a Legacy Mini Halfwood Press No. 21. Her press was among the few

that had an optional steel clamp, which allowed the user to secure the press to the side of a

workbench or table. Additionally, the entire wood based could be removed and be replaced with

the steel clamp, making it more compact. Her press has the shorter based plate.

She got her press in June and in July she brought examples of work she did with

Solarplate™. She also used Imageon™—both plate-making methods that use photopolymer

instead of traditional etching grounds on metal to be etched with acid. The photopolymer plates

are popular because they are nontoxic and more versatile than any plate-making method invented

up until now.


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Photo: Kathryn Kim’s Legacy Mini Halfwood press Number 21, with

the shortened base plate and optional detachable steel clamp.

Besides these photopolymer methods, Kathryn used craft materials such as polymer clay

(Sculpey brand) to make plates that were sculptural yet flat enough to use in her press. She mixed

her methods with aluminum foil and all sorts of novel tricks.

Dellos’ commission Nick Dellos, the next door neighbor to the Taylor Avenue Art Gallery, was working on a

huge interior design project for a penthouse in downtown Seattle. He chose an art deco theme, and

I enjoyed watching him at his art and craft. Not only that, but Nick helped be in building the wood

parts of the Halfwood Presses—things like letting me use his drill press and table saw—those the

tools I had yet to buy. He advised me on woods, too, and didn’t mind my scrounging in his scrap

box and, on occasion, sold me lumber from his supply of exotic woods.

One day in July he surprised me with an offer, a commission: He would pay for my supplies

if I would make several artworks roughly in proportion to selected places in the penthouse—

several tall, skinny formats and one large rectangular space for the master bedroom.

There was a catch: He’d pay for the supplies, but not the art. He speculated that since he

was doing the remodel for the owner who was then going to sell it, then the new owners might

want to buy the artwork, too. In any case, my art was part of the staging, i.e., the lived-in look the

real estate agent wanted.

It was a win-win proposal, in my mind, because the investment in materials was one thing

that stopped me from painting or making artworks of these sizes. If the work didn’t sell, then I’d

own it. After all, I like my work, and we have walls in our home that need art of this scale. It was

a good deal for me and Nick.


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Photos: (Clockwise, upper left) Beginning the Voyage of the Emeralda

selected photos documenting its making and final installation.

Since I seldom have opportunities to make an artwork on this scale due to the costs of

materials and the always uncertain market for my art work. Also, my gallery/shop was getting

crowded with the press-making business growing as it was. For these reasons I thought to

document the painting’s history.

So, as soon as I started preparing the panels (it is acrylic on canvas mounted on hardboard)

I also began taking snapshots of the changes. Probably I was thinking it might make an interesting

photo album or even a book someday—something like an owner’s manual.

The other pieces were not as large. One of was something of a collaboration inasmuch Nick

made the frame, shaped to go with his cabinetry and wall treatments and edged in a wood called

wenge—a blackish, hard wood with a striped pattern. I made this one in three parts which were

actually just like collagraph printing plates but which I never printed. They each consisted of a

collage made of some of my prints from the 1960’s. Artist’s stamps, too, and fragments of mail

art. When I study the work, it’s really something of a documentary piece!


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Photos: (Left) Totem, mixed media, 2005. (Center) Detail of Totem.

(Right) _______, mixed media, 2005

Another work I made was designed to hang either horizontally or vertically, and it, too,

was made of recycled prints from forty years ago. And, again, Nick provided the backing shapes

around which I completed the work, using acrylics over painting the print—a 1966 collagraph.

Laser print transfer demo, then a buyer In August, 2005, after seeing my demonstration of laser print transfer for making etching

plates, Randi Burke Riggs—from California—wanted to buy a Legacy Mini Halfwood Press. At

that time she was still teaching, and she said having her own press would enable her to work at

home or, as an option, she could take the press to school. She bought Legacy Mini Halfwood Press

No. 9. Three years later, in 2008, Randi participated in the group show of works by Halfwood


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Press Owners produced at Baker University by another Halfwood Press owner, Professor Walt

Bailey, of Baker U.

Photos: (Left) Little books made for the laser transfer demo. (Middle) Randi Burke Rigg’s

Legacy Mini on the workbench. (Right) Later, Randi ordered an accessory box for No. 9.

When Randi saw the accessory boxes I had started making to go with the Legacy Mini

Halfwood Presses, she asked me to make for her to go with her press.

A question of size A graduate student at the University of Idaho, Len Heid, sent me an email in October. He

wanted to know if the Mini halfwood Press was capable of professional prints. As a former

professor who loves questions, I was glad to get one from a student like in the old days. His query

was also a reminder of the prevailing attitude fostered in art schools regarding prints—that prints

should be big as paintings in order to be regarded as professional prints.

I didn’t quibble on the matter of scale—I only mentioned that historic prints, like those of

Rembrandt—were usually small. What should also be emphasized, I said, was the economics of

printmaking and how a small press was an advantage. I listed things like the size of papers saves

costs—you can get many sheets from one large sheet of expensive printmaking paper. A

printmaker will use up less ink and the associated of materials in printing. Less money is spent on

mats, frames and protection (glass, acrylic) and you don’t need as large a working space.

Portability is a factor, especially if you are the kind of artist who likes to give demonstrations to

others. You can send prints anywhere in the world for less postage. There was no argument from

Len; he bought No. 11.

Another Demo at Daniel Smith’s On November 12 I gave a demonstration on the anniversary of my first demonstration at

Daniel Smith, Inc. Last year the theme was Small is Beautiful; this year it was on Artist’s Stamps.

This demo took place at Dan’s Seattle’s flagship art supply store.


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Photos: (Left) Sheet explaining artistamps’ history. (Right) Plate, Little Book

and print made for the November 12, 2006 demonstration at Daniel Smith, Inc.

When Peggy Wilson came from Everett to Seattle to see the demonstration, she came up

afterwards and asked if the Mini Halfwood Press was capable of printing collagraph plates. I didn’t

have a collagraph plate as such with me, but I found a scrap of 4-ply mat board, scored a design in

it, peeled off a ply of the paper, inked and printed it. It took all of three minutes; and I guess she

accepted the fact that it would print a collagraph (if the plate was only one-sixteenth of an inch

thick) because she bought number 12.

Kathryn Glowen and her husband, Ron, were there too, and in a couple weeks they came

and bought number 15. Ron, incidentally, wrote for Artweek—a San Francisco art newsletter and

he had written what I thought was the most insightful review of any I had seen. It was when I had

my show at the Erica Williams/Anne Johnson Gallery in the early 1980’s. Ron took note of

elements of in topology and how it seemed to be reflected in my prints.

Ten days later, Cheryl Hall and her husband were up from Mount Hood, Oregon and while

they were shopping for art supplies at Daniel Smith’s store they saw one of my cards on the bulletin

board, called me, came to the Taylor Avenue Art Gallery and we had a nice visit. That’s when

Cheryl corrected me on the distinction between calling the press a work of art versus a work of

good craftsmanship. She said: “If it makes me feel good, it’s art!”

The next month, Patrick Carroll came to the gallery with a special request. He had been

one of the visitors at the November 12 demonstration with his wife Carole. He said the family had

decided to go together and get a press for her as a surprise Christmas present. She already owned

another etching press and was doing very well with her work; but she had commented to Patrick

that day how beautiful and unique it was. Between us we made an arrangement and then, on

another day someone in the family came to pick up Number 16 when I had finished the details.

By the end of the year Tom Kughler and I made and sold ten presses—all Legacy Mini

Halfwoods and, in December, we sold the first Mariner to Dave Klugman—his second Halfwood

Press he bought this year. It would have seemed to most people that we had carved out a nice little

niche in the etching press world.

If I had been made of the right stuff, such as Daniel Smith was made of—an entrepreneur

and business man—perhaps at that point in time I would have taken a different path. I think my

fondness for arts, crafts and design makes me a poor candidate for management neither of the

financial aspects nor the management of people working on presses. Honestly, I’d rather meet

people like myself, sharing shop talk, experimenting with effects and marveling at the beauties of

printmaking, press design and innovations that are possible in printmaking—including the social

aspects of the printmaking world.


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Root of technology There’s also the important fact that what was turning into a business was dependent on

technology. If I had not been schooled at an early age at Central Washington State in photography,

crafts and, at San Jose University in printmaking followed by teaching and technologies at the UW

then I could not have done it. Today I can do the work of four or five people, although not very

well; as they say, a Jack of all trades is no master of any one of them.

Exposure on the Internet made all the difference—and this was merely still images because

streaming video had not yet been perfected. All I could do was make primitive web pages; my

quarter at Shoreline—and flunking the web design class—was a humbling experience. Now,

writing in 2017, I am, every day, impressed with what is possible not only in web design but in

animation, game design and movies. Most of all—and this is the hardest part—how teaching

printmaking partly or wholly online is possible if only I can find an accredited college to accept

part of the responsibility to realize my dream of being a great teacher.

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2006 By December 24 of this year, I will be sixty-five years old

Photo: Artistamp based on the print

commemorating the 2006 Seattle Print Fair.

Doing the Seattle Print Fair On January 14th and 15th, Seattle’s premier print dealers, Sam Davidson and Carolyn Staley

and other members of the International Fine Print Dealer’s Association (IFPDA) presented the

sixth Seattle Print Fair. This organization does these print fairs this in many cities in the USA (New

York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami) and, overseas, in London. When I learned about this

year’s print fair taking place in Seattle I went to Sam and asked him if I could bring the Mini

Halfwood Press to the show, set up a table and print etchings for the edification of visitors. He

conferred with his colleagues and agreed on the condition that I would not sell anything—since,

obviously, I could not be a member of the organization.

That was fine with me. I thought it would be fun. Of course, my intent was to promote the

Mini Halfwood Press—our project being not quite two years along. For the Seattle Print Fair I

etched a copper plate with an image to commemorate the event and printed the plate on site in the

two days of the show. I printed and chatted with visitors, and I gave away the prints to anyone who

showed interest and who asked me questions.

Photo: The Commemorative print made for the

2006 Seattle Print Fair, which was held in a venue

on the south end of Lake Union.

As I expected there were many questions from people about the Mini Halfwood Press as

well as questions about printmaking. There were no resulting sales of presses that I recall—but the

experience at the 2006 event prepared me for the 2007 Print Fair.


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Nick Dellos commission completed In 2005 the five pieces for the downtown penthouse which Nick Dellos, my neighboring

designer started and in months of 2006 I would complete them and install them. Two pieces I made

were in the collagraph plate-making method which I used in making Totem last year. Unlike a

painter, who might brush on the colors, I applied the colors like a printmaker—inking the plates,

in other words, and wiping them down as if I were going to print them.

Photos: (Left) T-Square Collagraph, mixed media on hardboard mi060325rit pc.

(Right) Jagged T-Square Collagraph, mixed media on hardboard mi060706rit pc

For these two I retrieved my T-square and Wavy Square themes. The technique involves

some painting, carving and collage. I started with pieces of quarter-inch hardboard and gave it a

layer of Durham’s cold-water putty. If you try using this for collagraph, I recommend adding a

teaspoon of Titebond woodworker’s glue to the putty when you’ve got it mixed—a teaspoon to

about three tablespoons of wet putty. You have to work fast!

Using a trowel of the kind that you use for wallboard joint compound, you spread it over

the hardboard. It will set up pretty fast, and it may take practice to get a smooth surface. Actually

I don’t want a perfectly smooth surface, as the imperfections give me the surface character I want.

It has to dry until it’s no longer cold to the touch. Then you can seal it with your favorite sealer—

such as a water-based polyurethane.

My first novel: Hunt for the Emeralda Treasure In February, inspired by the popular online writers’ challenge, I began a novel. The online system

dictated that you write so many pages a day and this promised that by the end of the period—six months

or a year—you would have the makings of a novel. I like systems approaches to creative processes, so I

made rules for myself similar to this, but I went a step or two beyond the guidelines because I felt the

novel might cross-fertilize other mediums, such as artists’ books or collectible cards—even games!


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Photo: Illustration for the system for the novel, giving,

coordinated to the ten protagonists in the novel.

The illustration may help to explain. From left, number one, the author’s role is writing,

using Microsoft Word. He writes the body text. To his left (2) is the subject line writer, who writes

a 255–character (including spaces and punctuation) synopsis of what the author wrote. To his left

(3) is the insert editor. He plugs in blurbs, captions, words of wisdom, comments, etc. The page

layout designer (4) puts the author’s body text into the main page in no more, nor fewer than, 255

words. He positions the insert editor’s piece above that, using a different size, fine, print. He takes

also a graphic from the artist, who is seated at his left in the illustration, and adds it to the page–

both on the front and the back of the page.

Behind him is the database asset manager and his assistant; they link the artwork to the

layout according to the authors calendar, choosing a graphic corresponding in its number in the art

database with the year of the author’s Year of Living Copiously (YOLC). His assistant has two

jobs: one, linking the subject line editor’s work to another asset database and, two, using a

spreadsheet that corresponds to the author’s YOLC to connect both graphic and original text as a

comment.

The assistant to the asset manager, strangely, is the first to show up when the author, the

one opposite her (or, in a circle, next to him) begins work. She opens the Excel spreadsheet to

Book 10 sheet, 2005 – 2006. She is like a dutiful servant, completely devoted to the author’s

success, with the knowledge that the artist’s failings in the mechanical, logical world in which he

lived most of his life.

In the fall, Lynda and I enrolled for certificate courses at the UW. She was considering her

options after retirement and freelance editing was one of her options. She had been editing our

various home-based projects all during these enterprises’ lives; and she wrote and edited as part of

her job at the Seattle King County Dental Society, so she enrolled in a certificate program in

freelance editing.

As for me, that structured approach to writing a novel which I began this February made

me want to get feedback or to join a community of like-minded fiction writers. The certificate

course I signed on for was Pop Fiction (as opposed to literary or highbrow fiction writing). It was

taught by Marjorie Reynolds, author of Starlight Drive-in and Civil Wars of Jonah Moran. As

outlined above, I wrote 255 words a day as a routine, taking a different character each day and

following a cycle to see where it would lead. The plotline was:


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“Ten characters living on islands in the region find pieces of a

Spanish shipwreck from the 18th Century and they secret the pieces

away until they learn to cooperate.”

My theme took up the Emeralda legend and a giant emerald. For the most part I had a good

time in the class, but I my own background as a college professor got in my way. I thought that

the teacher was wrong when it came to the structure I had adopted—my story being intended to be

interactive fiction. When she expressed that it was her expert opinion that a writer cannot have so

numerous protagonists. No wonder. I had ten!

Because I had a game in mind for my novel—but it would be the back story for a game I

could not yet describe. Thus the number of players the roles might require, maybe ten. In the

ensuing class debate over this, some students pointed out examples where there were multiple

protagonists—The Magnificent Seven, Seven Samurai, for example—but it didn’t help me.

She also decried my use of a precious, mysterious stone (a giant emerald). She correctly

asserted that such devices and plot lines are over-used and cliché. On the other hand, I held that

tried-and-true devices were okay to use in popular fiction. That’s why they succeeded! My idea of

the emerald came from a nonfiction book titled, The Mapmaker’s Wife,5 in which the author gave

an account of a legendary emerald, recorded in the annals which are in the French Bibliotheque

Nationale.

“They stopped in several villages . . . and learned about the local folklore.

Centuries ago, they were told, the people living in this region had worshiped ‘an

emerald the size of an ostrich egg,’ which was kept in a temple. When the Spanish

arrived, the natives had hidden the precious stone, and they had remained mum

about it ever since. Their silence . . . was wise, for if the Spanish had ever been able

to find the source of the emeralds, the Indians would have been immediately put to

work digging for more.”

Photo: (Left) Cover of Bill’s first novel, self-published on Create Space.

(Right) Ring binder for the novel, note the trading cards and postcard

mixed with the text of the story.

I had begun my project back in February, calibrating my start exactly on the 3rd, 2006.

Mainly I wanted to invent a back story for my game, Emeralda Works. The game, in turn, would

5 Whitaker, Robert. The Mapmakers Wife. Random House. NY. 2004


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serve as an interface for a legacy transfer method. In the games industry, there was this genre variously

called serious games, learning games, or games with purpose.

To achieve this, I believed I had to start with a story that blended autobiography (write what you

know about, they say) and fantasy. My approach would start with a structured format—255 words a day

for 255 days. I heard about an online project of this kind—that if you played along with this, you’d have a

novel in one month! Another method I used was to write a 255-character (including punctuation) description

to go with each entry and I arranged it in an excel spreadsheet—suitable for a database and XML

applications. I was thinking of its potential as an online, interactive collectible card game.

In the notes I commented:

“When this artist is trying to create a game, he walks a fuzzy line between what

other people think is a game and what he feels, intuitively, a game should be. I

thought, starting out, can’t it be what he or she wants it to be, the kind of game they

wishes had been around for their lifetime?”

To describe the book I wrote for the back matter of the paperback:

“A rusty pointed tool, a shard of porcelain, a mysterious bottle – are they connected

in some way? A pack of brass plates with strange, etched words, a brass bar bearing

Spanish words indicating a ship no one ever heard of, and a peculiar wood canister

containing small wool blankets – all that’s left of ill-fated mission in the 18th

century that might have changed history if it had not been ended by an act of God.

“Ten souls living quiet lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest are drawn into a

search for an uncharted, lost ship somewhere close by; so close, indeed, that small

remains of it decorate their homes, turn up in their gardens and on the beaches.

Whatever happened to the ship? It must have been broken up by tremendously

powerful force because the remains are so small that they are barely noticeable.

“Native Americans tell a legend of a floating longhouse, with tall trees and blankets

flying in the wind – harbored here and then vanished under a great wave.

“Coinciding with the growing belief a treasure is at hand, four strangers, calling

themselves sisters, converge on the community and show unusual interest in the

artifacts, offering hints as to what lay somewhere, probably under water and mud.

Friendships flower and flourish, new relationships lead the residents to discover not

only historical events but also things about themselves and about each other.

“An old curmudgeon – a retired professor – hints that he knows what they are

hunting for. He describes a rumored emerald, the size of an ostrich egg, tantalizing

the group and, despite the odds against finding it, they organize a search. However,

it’s not the emerald the professor wants; more important to him is a lost cargo of

instruments that would have changed world history if they had made it to their

destination: China!”

I described myself under About the author:

“Professor Bill Ritchie began his first novel in 2006, writing 255 words every day

for 360 days. His book is part of a game he’s inventing by playing it. Ten artifacts

that his fictional characters discover will connect to learning the art and craft of


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printing.” The supposed artifacts mentioned are such things as I use in my

printmaking.

Hunt for the Emeralda Treasure was a success in my eyes, and it was soon after that I

began writing Halfwood Press: The Story, in the manner of a “mockumentary”. I would write a

history of making the first thirty Mini Halfwood Presses between 2004 and 2008. Following this,

I began studying screenplay writing—the details of this come later. Up to now, my writing was

only in journals and essays. In fact, in a few more years my essays would number in the thousands.

These longer forms—the novel and screenplay—would bring about surprising results.

My shop is complete It was two years ago that I began furnishing my shop on Taylor Avenue North, rented from

Sarah Johnson for the very reasonable rate of $350 a month—below market rate. I set it up with

the plan in mind to make it a printmaking studio, with the walls serving as a gallery. In soft pine

board I carve the name, painted it green and yellow and framed it in black.

Photo: Painted sign from the Taylor Avenue Art Gallery, 2003-2008

Photo: The fully furnished shop on Taylor Avenue North for press-making and art.

By now, furnishing was complete, with a work counter under the street-facing windows, a

workstation for my computer and printer, and storage drawers for my unframed art and paper

supply. On the glass door I put vinyl lettering of the name of my shop and the telephone number.

All set for business, I restored the 2004 project, Stamps ‘N Stories for both the web and I

made color inserts for the CD/ROM version’s jewel box—the plastic, hinged boxes that had

become the standard CD packaging. I had it in my window when Nick Dellos, my neighbor,

happened to notice it and he came in and bought one! That’s how we got better acquainted. We

would get to know each other even better in the coming years.


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Printmakers boxes and chests Having the little shop on Taylor Avenue North for the past several years had allowed me

to get equipment to do the woodworking on the Mini Halfwood Press—a table saw, drill press, a

metal shear, and others. With Nick Dellos’ woodshop in the adjoining space, I could salvage scraps

of exotic woods. As I was getting out more with my portable press, I needed a chest for it and

began designing one that fit my back story of the press so I tried making it look something like a

seaman’s chest, in pine, or like a shipping crate.

For example, the back story tells that the press is designed after a lost cargo of presses.

They were on their way to China, as rumor had told Europeans that they loved beautiful things and

had a fascination with western technology, too. The presses were built with this in mind. In my

story, each press was packed in grease and oilcloth and encased in wooden shipping crates like my

printmaker’s chest.

Photos: The first printmakers chest, made to look like

a shipping crate or a seaman’s chest.

Following this, when I showed on my website, people wanted me to make one just like it.

Then another buy asked for a chest made in walnut, making it suitable for keeping in his apartment

front room—like furniture. Another and another order came, each one becoming fancier and with

more features, storage cubbies and decorations.

Tool box I delight in cigar box-sized woodcraft boxes and, for fun, I made a box for my tools to take

with me when showed off my presses. I filled the box with printmaking tools—burins, carving

knives and such. Years later I added surplus brass badges to embellish my box.

Photos: (Left) Toolbox for printmaking tools, such as burins,

carving knives, etching needle, burnisher and scraper, etc. (Right)

In a way these tools are mementos of the story of my career in printmaking. They span the

mediums I tried to master—including my occasional work in screen printing, i.e., a swivel-bladed

cutting tool for stencils. The wood cutting tools are of the Japanese type, shown to me by Stephen


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Hazel. The burins are for engraving on copper, and roulettes for making texture. Their use was

taught to me in college and then I taught this when I was a professor.

Photos: (Left) Legacy Mini Halfwood Press #35, the first to include

a handmade tool box. (Right) Melissa Strawser owns this press, the

box is visible. She is collaborating on the development of Young Printmakers.

By this time I had made 32 presses, and the box I made led to making a box to accompany

the Legacy Mini Halfwood Presses. The first one which had this box went to a buyer in Walla

Walla, who, in turn, sold it to another woman who lives in Pennsylvania—Melissa Strawser.

Notice in the photograph of Melissa (with her Young Printmakers group) that the box is still with

the press.

I return to Ellensburg An article that appeared in AARP magazine in the summer of 2006 inspired the CWALS

Project. CWALS stands for Central Washington Advanced Leadership School—a proposed

residential college for seniors. The author, R. M. Kanter, envisioned these schools as being

associated or linked with colleges and universities around the country. Her vision—looking

forward to the year 2012, was for seniors to develop programs of high social impact.

Strongly attracted to Kanter’s vision, I focused on the arts and humanities education as

being based on four cornerstones of higher education: Teaching, Research, Practice and Service

(TRPS). My ideal, “perfect studios”, is where these take place under the same roof, at the same

time. Teaching hospitals, first established in Scotland in the 1700’s, inspired the TRPS concept.

In 2005-2006 I wrote the CWALS Articles with the Ellensburg Old Hospital as a model site

for its location. Autobiographical points that lead up to this follows:

1972-While teaching a course in art I wrote a timeline to illustrate a lifetime to my students,

and I realized I myself needed to chart the course of my lifework. I needed to have a vision

of time and a vision of space—a global vision. Thinking outside the box of academe, I

expanded my teaching and my art by bringing video and computers into the art studios.

1983 Inspiration for an Asset Management and Legacy transfer principle came from our

family visit to the home of Arnie Randall’s widow and her granddaughter’s comment, “We

don’t know what these things are.” Another influence that came later was the Linda

Ginsberg’s article The Last Love Letter, about being sure your family understands and

knows how to liquidate your assets if you are a professional of the kind upon whom your

value depends on your talent, knowledge, and skills.


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1984-Following a sabbatical leave (including a working trip around the globe) I arrived at

the concept of the Perfect Studios, where teaching, research, practice (or production) and

service happen concurrently, under the same roof. I attempted to do this at the institution

where I was a professor of art. Technology played a central part in this process.

1985 I terminated my career at the UW as the only logical action to take in view of the

conservative management of the school’s internal affairs and unfair treatment of students

and faculty. These lessons are important to CWALS because CWALS is based on the

“perfect studio” model (and also the “teaching hospital” or “teaching company” models)

that date back to 1776. Central to this is the TRPS principle, i.e., Teaching, Research,

Production and Service.

1992 CWALS is both an extension of and a proving ground for EarthSafe 2022, which is

my way of responding to the Earth’s Scientists Warning to Humanity, published by the

Union of Concerned Scientists. Out of EarthSafe 2022 came Emeralda: Games for the

Gifts of Life, an idea to incorporate new technologies into traditional art mediums.

1993 Moving from a single-family home to a condominium began our lessons in

community living, beginning with introduction to condominium laws, management,

construction, legal processes, and quality of life—both internal and external.

1998 A Total Quality Management, a course that I took at South Seattle Community

College suggested to me that I could apply TQM to two important areas of my life: One,

TQM in art education and, two, management in condominium living.

2005 From this “circularity” of results and my overall teaching mission—my purpose in

life—comes the Great Notion that Emeralda, a printmaking teaching method online can

and will pay for the CWALS community, give purpose to the community and inform the

structure of the Articles of Corporation as I formulate them.

For this my plan had three prongs: One, meet and share my idea with the current owner of

the old hospital located on a hill in the middle of Ellensburg, which had recently been auctioned

off as surplus property by Central Washington University. Two, I would present my idea to three

key university people: the head of the art department, the newly-hired Dean of the college, and the

retired art department chair and my 1964 classmate, Constance Speth. Third, I discussed it with

my wife and daughters because it would likely involve relocating to Ellensburg.

The owner of the hospital was interested because he, too, wanted to develop the building

and, as a developer, he hoped to profit from his purchase. The art department chair was interested

in the connection between an online printmaking course to generate interest and revenue. Later,

his department rejected the plan without discussion. My only support came from Constance Speth

and, of course, the building’s owner. My family also rejected the plan without much discussion.

As my dream is to develop the Perfect Studios concept, the failure of this episode has not

stopped me. It was a good learning experience—another experience for me in my self-made

lifelong learning program.

Halfwood Presses keep selling From January to November, eight more Halfwood Presses were purchased—some of them

as gifts for spouses. This was the first year we made presses with purple heart—a hardwood from

South America. It was the strangest wood, being purple, and I decided to make a purple press! It


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was the makings of a joke press. I was astounded when someone bought it within a week of

finishing. As a bonus, the sale came about in a strange way.

Photos: (Left) Cyanotypes 1982, poster. (Middle) Arborescence, Cross and Calculus, monoprint.

(Right) Sea Squares, print. All three artworks in the Horiuchi collection.

This strange story began with an email from a software engineer, Hide Horiuchi, asking

about getting a replacement of my Cyanotypes 1980 poster. I said I could do that, and he brought

his wife, Mina, to the studio. She heard about my Halfwoods and she was looking for a press. She

was learning printmaking at the Kirkland Art Center and made a studio space in her home. She

bought the Mariner No. 2, and decided to buy the Mini Halfwood Press No. 23 (the first purple

heart model). At the same time they bought two of my artworks to add to their poster!

Photos: (Left) Mina’s Mariner Halfwood Press No. 2.

(Right) Mina’s Legacy Mini Halfwood Press No. 23, in purple heart.

As a side note, it was interesting that I had met Hide in the early 1980’s when he was doing

program work for Eleanor Matthews and Carl Youngmann. He was writing code during their

software development for the Ibis Project. The Cyanotypes 82 poster was part of my showings that

year, and Hide was one of the people who bought the poster—along with many others. When it


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was damaged in 2005, he located me and we arranged to meet at our shop on Taylor Avenue

North—along with his wife, Mina.

More tetrahedrons For the past ten years I had occasional reason to think about tetrahedrons. The shape began

to turn up often when I was looking in game shops and drug stores—where I found it as wrapping

for ___. Equilateral triangles, too, had a dominant part in my drawings and prints. I made a

tetrahedron with drywall and plaster and painted a side with flat black, thinking to make a kind of

erasable chalkboard on which I could sketch diagrams.

Photos: (Left) Plaster tetrahedron. (Middle) Steel Tetrahedron.

(Right) Fabric printed with cyanotype, tetrahedron by Nellie Sunderland.

Another time, Tom Kughler noticed my interest in the tetrahedron and we discussed why

it is a difficult form to cut with a table saw. The angles and sides where they meet are not simple

to compute. One day Tom showed up with a gift—a tetrahedron made of steel plate!

With the chemicals I had left over from my cyanotype period, I treated cotton fabric with

these chemicals, dried it and exposed the fabric in the sunlight under the transparent positives I

left from my posters. I asked Nellie to sew the pieces into a tetrahedron form for me, and she made

a quilted tetrahedron for me. One more project awaits me, which is a tetrahedron pastry—inspired

by pastries like cream-filled puffs or muffins. It requires research to make the baking pan—

probably of cast iron so as to distribute the heat and not burn the tip of the tetrahedron.

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2007 By December 24 of this year, I will be sixty-six years old

Photo: Artistamp based on the commemorative

print for the 2007 Seattle Print Fair.

Doing the Print Fair - Again In January, 2007, for the second year in a row, Seattle’s premier print dealers, Sam

Davidson and Carolyn Staley, as members of the International Fine Print Dealer’s Association

(IFPDA), presented the Seattle Print Fair. As I had been allowed in the the year before, I

approached Sam and asked him if I could bring a Mini Halfwood Press to the show, set up a table

and print etchings for the edification of the visitors.

Sam talked with his colleagues and agreed, stipulating that I would not sell any prints (since

I could not be a member of the IFPDA). He also asked me to write a proposal for having more

than one printmaker in future Seattle Print Fairs. I asked Izumi Kuroiwa, who gave me an amount

for her fee, enabling me to give an estimated budget to Sam; but I never heard back.

Photo: (Left) Bridget and Mark Nowlin watch as I printed at the 2007 Seattle Print Fair.

(Right) the print featuring S. W. Hayter which I gave away.

For the 2007 Seattle Print Fair, as I had done last year, I made a plate with an image to

commemorate the event and printed from it during the two-day show, giving away the prints to

people who showed interest. Of course, it was my hope to promote the Mini Halfwood Press also—

a project which was now about three years along.

For this year I chose as my subject of the commemorative etching the renowned artist and

teacher Stanley William Hayter. I printed and gave away about fifty prints to visitors, among them

was David Lotz, who—a few months later, in October this year—would embark on plans to

collaborate with me on the Emeralda project.

During the time I was at the Seattle Print Fair, I got an order for the 27th Mini Halfwood

Press (today it is known as the Legacy series). This order was from Billy King, one of my former


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students from the 1960’s. Later the family of Mark Nowlin, a Seattle Times illustrator, bought him

a press for his birthday—a direct result of his having seen me printing at the Seattle Print Fair that

January. Not only was it fun to print and meet the visitors, I sold a couple presses and my prints

went to many homes.

Big Bash for Lynda’s Birthday Lynda hates surprises, so when I began to plan a surprise birthday party for her earlier in

the year, I knew I was taking a risk. First I reserved a dining room at Ivar’s Acres of Clams, a

historic Seattle restaurant where she and I had enjoyed a few meals away back in the 1960’s, but

where we hadn’t been for years. Next I made up a mailing list of our immediate family, people I

thought were her best friends and some of my closest associates, too.

Photos: Screenshots from Lynda’s Birthday Special video.

Lynda’s office people came, too, including her boss at King County Dental Society. They

were good at not hinting at that evening’s plans. They asked her if she was planning anything

special and she said, “Yes, Bill and our kids are meeting us at Ivar’s.” They said that sounded like

fun. At Ivar’s we were seated in reception. Then a waiter came and gave her a red rose. “Wow, I

didn’t know they did that!” we said. We were impressed, getting this special treatment.

The waiter led us down a long aisle, pointing out the interesting photographs on the walls.

Lynda looked at me funny, I remember. He showed us into the room. Lynda was hesitant,

embarrassed, she said, because the waiter had shown us into the wrong room—obviously a private

party! Then she realized she was looking at Wyoma—one of her oldest friends—and then Pat

Hyde, another, and Margaret Robinson, and more and then she realized what was happening.

Photo: Our friends from Oregon, Keith and Janice McGraw,

made this snapshot of Matilda, Lynda and I at the surprise party at Ivar’s.

Lynda wasn’t angry, after all, to my relief; but I think she enjoyed it since so many of her

friends and her family were all together for a while. I brought in a DVD player and played both


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our Travel Tapes video and a new video I made for her birthday with snippets of photos and videos

going back to her infancy. The only sad thing was that her parents were both in a nursing home,

and so it was impossible for them to be there.

Taylor Avenue North shop complete By February, 2007, the empty space at the studios of Sarah Johnson I moved in to four

years ago was built up and fully equipped so I could finish the Halfwood Presses as Tom Kughler

delivered them to me. I could also do some printmaking although the demand for the presses was

far greater than the demand for my prints.

I made all the worktables and cabinets from recycled materials. The band saw, drill press

and router I bought used on Craigslist; but some—such as the benchtop shears for cutting metal

plates and the sander and hand tools—I bought new. Tom Kughler loaned me a grinder, and Nick

Dellos, my next door neighbor, let me forage exotic wood from his scraps and cutoffs. Our son-

in-law, Eric Bryan, loaned me his thicknessing planer.

Photo: The south wall of the shop on Taylor Avenue North.

Photo: Looking toward the northwest corner of the shop.

The walls gave me room to hang some of my artworks—old and new. I set up a computer

workstation in one corner. Gwen Howell, another former student (also an owner of a Legacy

Halfwood Press, No. 61) made a thousand-dollar gift to me so that I could buy a large shear for

cutting heavier copper sheets. A shop vacuum connected to all the bench tools, but I had to move

the table saw outside for using, right outside the door—the noise and sawdust too much for

working inside. Fortunately the property line allowed it—the sidewalk being outside the line.

When I made my etching plates and medallions for the presses, I needed to use the sink in

the shared bathroom, which meant I could not use any chemicals stronger than ferric chloride and

I had to be fastidious with my cleanup. Sarah and her associates were always more than considerate

when I needed to use the bathroom for rinsing etching plates.


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Photos: (Left) The purple heart model of the Legacy Mini Halfwood.

(Right) Pam Gunn and Flo, her dog, posing with her Legacy Mini Halfwood Press.

Located on a main thoroughfare as the shop was, the fact I could showcase my press in the

three windows made a difference. For example, Pam Gunn—a watercolor artist who lived on the

next block—walked by with her dog and a press in the window caught her eye. She became the

owner of Legacy Mini Halfwood Press No. 17. Jenny Wilkson drove by on her way to work every

day, and one day she stopped to order a press for her husband, Jeffrey Wilkson, as a surprise

birthday present. She chose a purple heart model, with a brass bed, too. It was a beauty.

New book: Halfwood Press: The story It was about this time that I was completing the first edition of my first book about making

the Halfwood press titled, Halfwood Press: The story. Thinking it would be more interesting than

a straightforward narrative, I took the part documentary, part fictional mockumentary approach, or

mock documentary (or mockumentary). I wrote under the pen name, Harris Sweed, my 1970’s

pseudonym. Early in the book I related my first market analysis, in third-person, copied here:

“The spreadsheet “Then he would sit down at his computer and make a spreadsheet to see if

he could estimate the real market size. He’d base his figures on his past forty years’

experience and, looking through his past like through a frame and glass on a

picture, study the period of 2004-2007. Through this he might see his future. In

three years he’d sold presses to thirty individuals so he now he could figure in the

demographics. He pondered and thought about those 22 women and 8 other men

who bought presses. They ranged in age from about 25 to 70. He thought, at 65, he

had a lot in common with some of those buyers.

“Some were of retirement age, like Bill; but others were still students. All

of them were fascinated with printmaking—having taken classes in printmaking in

college, or privately, or they were currently in school. If not retired, then most had

day jobs, a working spouse or a pension. Printmaking would be an avocation at

best and a hobby at least. In some situations, printmaking would be a family affair.

He reflected for weeks on this.

“Bill sees himself foremost as an artist with a passion for printmaking, and

press making grew out of this passion. To him printmaking is more than producing

prints, or what is termed production printing. There were other things about the art

form that interested him—such as the art itself as he’d seen, studied and taught it;

the technology such as the chemistry and physics of ink, paper and machines. A

press and a plate are more than machine or mechanical tools. Printmaking means


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more than production printing. Production printing is redundant, boring. Except

for the people. The press is instrumental in bringing people together—even people

with different roles and goals. A press is empowering sometimes, a type of affinity

item for like-minded people, like an anchor holding a community-of-interest and

practice in position, together, despite diversity.

“Scientists need a press. Churches need them. Revolutionaries need it.

Democracy needs printing—as the printer Benjamin Franklin proved. Versatile

artists could be found who could illustrate or express ideas, diagram the workings

of machines, and illustrate stories or beliefs in mechanical mediums. In addition,

engineers, paper makers, ink makers, and designers of all kinds were needed to

make human desires known and to realize them.

“People who bought intaglio presses shared Bill’s special fondness of

etching, engraving and the other intaglio platemaking methods. While it was the

type of press that interested Bill the most, it was not the only kind of printing

instrument. Asian printmakers had accomplished great things with simpler ways

for printing relief-carved woodblocks. Lithography required a different kind of

press for planographic printing. Silk screen, or stencil, was now mechanized, but

Bill had learned it as a hand printing method.

“Getting back to business, then, in real numbers, the question Bill would

have to ask if he was to get a handle on his market research, became: How many

people, share my interest in intaglio? How common is this passion for this kind of

printmaking? Are there enough people to build a business? And how much would

people be willing to pay the cost of a Halfwood press?

“Daniel Smith must have thought people would pay enough when he started

his company in 1976. At that time he began by offering etching ink, and eventually

it helped him quit his night job as a production printer. Then he added paper, ink

modifiers and, finally, a complete line of art and framing supplies with all media.

When he sold Daniel Smith Inc. and left the business to others. As a business, it

gives employment to over a hundred people and generates millions in sales. It also

provides educational opportunities.

“Judging from attendance to the weekend demonstrations there,

printmaking interest is as alive today as it was when Dan started it in the 1970s.

You could tell partly because, in 2005, when Tom Kughler put the Halfwood Press

on Ebay, he counted the number of hits for the auction period. There would be

around 500. People are using Internet search engines like Google and Yahoo,

besides, to locate etching presses for sale.

“Tom—a no-nonsense manufacturer—didn’t know what an etching press

was until Bill came along with is wooden prototype, but the response on EBay was

enough to impress him. Not only did it seem to him like a new product with an

income potential, but it was also something which he shared in the creative design

and which was almost entirely a product of his own handiwork with steel, lathe

work and welding—plus a good part of the wood work.


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“In his own way, Bill had another perspective, ingrained in him after 19

years as a college professor teaching printmaking. He laid it out in numbers which

went something like this:

“The University of Washington School Of Art, where he taught for 19 years,

was typical of US art school populations and the number of printmaking courses

offered. From the numbers at this school he could derive the answer to his

questions, How many people are interested in intaglio printmaking—and are they

interested enough to buy a Halfwood today?”

“On his spreadsheet Bill plugged in the numbers. In his experience his

classes averaged 15 students, usually with 3 classes offered per college term and

these at least three terms a year. Therefore, in such a college as this one, 15 people

times 3 classes, times 3 amounts to about 135 people. These people would get

hands-on experience with printmaking in some form or another per year, he

decided, in one college like the UW. He remembered that on his wife’s video

business mailing list (traded with Daniel Smith in return for cleaning it up) there

were—around the time of Bill’s college tenure—approximately 2,500 colleges,

universities, community colleges and professional schools listed nationwide.

“That could be taken to mean, based on the figure above, 135 times 2,500,

or over 300,000 people would get exposure to printmaking in one year. Multiply

those 300,000 times the 19 years Bill was a professor and you could conclude that

as many as 6 million people had learned about the art and craft of printmaking.

That is, between 1966 and 1985.

“Six million! Six with six zeros! It seemed preposterous, but the numbers

didn’t lie. Would it really be than many? Maybe this was an exaggeration.

Experience taught Bill that at best, less than ten percent of this six million had a

“medium-to-high” interest in the class, which made the number 600,000. But, to

Bill, even at one-half or one-quarter of that number, it was still a great many

people.

“Should one confine the figures to Bill’s short, happy career in college—

nineteen years? At 65 [writing in 2007], his passion for printmaking hadn’t died.

His love of the mediums had started in 1963—way over 40 years ago. In his first

try at calculation the market size, Bill would be counting only the generation during

the 19 years that he happened to be a teaching professor.

“If he wanted to see today’s total market size—in 2007—he could afford to

double the number of potential press buyers, i.e., those you might say who were

already sold on making prints. Therefore, now in his spreadsheet to be realistic he

upped the figure, and considered forty years.

“In a keystroke, his target audience grew to about 1,200,000 people,

ranging in age from their mid-twenties to over 70. The spreadsheet, based on Bill’s

college teaching experience, could not take into account the people (and these of

all ages) who attended museum lectures, read books or watched TV, took

workshops, high school art classes and attended commercial gallery print exhibits

and art fairs. Would this mean that, in business potential, the Halfwood Press was

a sleeping giant? It made Bill think that the 21st Century offered more to him and


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Tom than he’d ever dreamed of.” – From the 2007 edition of Halfwood Press: The

Story.

Six million customers? So I said in 2007 in my first edition of Halfwood Press: The Story. In all candor, I wrote

as though interviewing myself, first person in the point-of-view of my imaginary character, Harris.

I gave an accounting in an Excel spreadsheet, counting who had bought the first 30+ Halfwood

Presses up to that year. Taking into account these people (some I knew in great detail) as a

demographic; and then I took into account the people I had met when I was an art professor

teaching college. I didn’t consider the parents, or the children of print-loving parents, nor their

spouses, These people, in one way or another, love prints, printmaking, and printmakers.

Writing now, in 2017, probably I was trying to assure myself that I wasn’t nuts and that I

was making another big mistake in my career and my efforts to restore our living standard to what

it was before I resigned from the UW. So I added the codicil: Only ten-percent of my former

students continued in the art field after graduation, and of these only one percent would continue

making prints in the manner in which they learned in college.

Thus reasoning, then six-thousand was a number with which I felt more at ease. Still, if we

made and sold six-thousand Halfwood Presses over the next decade, my partner Tom Kughler's

and my families could do well financially. At that time, Tom and I were only making Mini

Halfwood Presses and selling them at the top price of $1,300. The larger ones—which sold up to

a price of $3,500—were just a twinkle in Tom’s eyes.

I wonder: Will I look back (or am I now looking back?) and realize that, once again, I’m

making a big mistake—like the time I put my faith in the integrity of the University of Washington’s

Powers-that-were and lost my family's financial foothold? Have I, again, gambled on a vision of

the success of the Halfwood Press for thirteen years and now assessing my losses?

Today, in the 21st Century, we are awakening to the importance of big data—when success

in business is in how many millions of dollars you can acquire as seed money to launch a startup

like the Northwest Print Center Incubators. So it seems, from the meetings I attend regularly,

dominated by high tech and a favorite pursuit of Millennials, dreaming of the Next Big Thing.

Six million dollars’ income—one dollar from every customer for any kind of printmaking

experience ranging from sales of presses to armchair, VR tours of studios—spread over the years

may not be enough to impress anyone! However, I think this is like making an artwork from

scratch, a process only a very few can experience. Fewer yet can imagine an etching press being a

work of art. And maybe only one can imagine a center like the one I conceive, the Northwest Print

Center Incubators, as a work of art.

A Mariner for a Brazilian In New York a designer named Eloise Romais ordered a Mariner Halfwood Press—the

third of our largest presses we sold in as many years. Eloise mentioned that she and her husband

planned to move to a property they owned on the coast of Brazil. This made me curious. She said

it was near Florianopolis—also known as Floripa. This piqued my interest because the mythical

ship I wrote about, the Emeralda, I said was to have made landfall somewhere on Brazil’s Atlantic

coast. It was convenient that I should decide to make Floripa part of my fiction.


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Photos: (Left) Eloise Romais’ owns Number three of the Mariner Halfwood Press line.

In 2008 she participated in the group exhibition of Halfwood Press Owners at Baker University.

My fiction is about how the Halfwood Presses were originally made in northern Spain and

came to be in the Pacific Northwest on the ship, the Emeralda. Some years later, Eloise let me

know their plans changed and instead of moving to Brazil they would move to St. Augustine,

Florida to an address on Santander Street. This mounted another level to my fiction, because in the

story of the Emeralda, the original one (built in the 16th Century) was commandeered to serve in

King Phillip II’s Grand Armada in 1585.

In the battle in the English Channel, the ship was heavily damaged so heavily that she was

beached at Santander, on the north coast of Spain. In my fiction it was there the original Emeralda

I remains were buried deep in the sands off Santander. Its remains would be noticed and the plans

would be found by the second-generation Emeralda’s architect, who would see it rebuilt. Imagine

my surprise when Eloise told me her new address in Florida!

More Halfwoods get homes Back in February, Nancy Bonnema—a jewelry designer and calligrapher—bought a Mini

Halfwood Press plus she hosted a workshop in my Taylor Avenue space on the topic of silicon pad

transfers. She brought two friends and cookies! Later she asked me to help her build an aquatint

box exactly like the one in my shop.

Between that time and December, seven more Mini Halfwood Presses were purchased.

Each press had a story attached to it. For example, Ann Williams telephoned from New York City

in June to get my video on the technique of sharpening Japanese woodcut tools. It was by

coincidence that she saw the Mini Halfwood Press online.

“I just cancelled an order for the Baby Press and I want to order yours,” she wrote. The

Baby Press is a Brazilian-made press. Incidentally the so-called Baby Press (imported from Brazil

by the Jack Richeson & Company) is twice the size, almost ten times heavier and sold for half the

price of the black-lacquered Mini Halfwood. Anne’s was the first black lacquered model I made.

It appears in video from the early times when I resumed making videos and putting the videos on

Youtube for teaching.


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Photos: (Left) Legacy Mini Halfwood Press No. 24, with CD/ROMs, Little Storybook, etc.

(Right) Ann Williams participated in an exhibit of prints and presses at Baker University.

With the help of the search engines on the Internet, I made it my practice to learn what I

could about people who bought our presses. On the web, for example, I found Barbara Stanton,

who is a painter of miniatures, and I decided that must be why the Mini interested her for its size.

Sometimes it was convenience the buyers wanted, such as Michele Thomas, who said she

didn’t like to drive the ten miles from her West Seattle home to Seattle’s Ballard-area Sev Shoon

Workshop to do her printing, and having a Mini at home was a welcome addition to her tools.

Seattle artist Billy King lives part-time in Mexico and envisioned taking his Legacy Mini

with him to his studio in Chapala. Billy had been a student of mine and came straight over to see

the press when I was at the Seattle Print Fair at the Seattle Center. Years later I saw him displaying

it in one of his pop-up galleries.

Lois Chichinoff Thadei, an Aleut artist, was smitten by the beauty of the press, and she put

it in her studio alongside her big etching press. Here, again, chance meetings due to the Halfwood

Press fed me ideas for stories. Lois explained her Russian name—the fact that the Russians were

active in the Alaska and Aleutian Islands area, for example. When I wrote the ballad, Vladimir’s

Song in 2013, I gave the main character her name Chichinoff.

Photos: (Left) Lois Chichinoff-Thadei, holding her press.

(Right) Similar to Lois’ Legacy Model Mini Halfwood Press.

Mark Nowlin—an illustrator for the Seattle Times—saw me printing on the Mini at the

2007 Seattle Print Fair, and his family chipped in to give him one for his birthday. Mark Mahaffey,

a master printer in Portland, was visiting Seattle with his wife and saw the Mini in my Taylor

Avenue shop window and later he got a Mini for his birthday. The map of locations were our

Halfwood Presses went was beginning to fill out!


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Notes from my journal When I open my journal from 2007 the first thing I find is a greeting card from Carol

Summers. It’s a beautiful card, and on the inside he describes his plans. He wrote to me on June

5th to thank me for a DVD that I sent to him at his home in Santa Cruz. The DVD is of his 1984

demonstration of his cutting and printing method. Carol Summers was an inspiration to me partly

because he changed the way he printed woodcuts, making it possible to make very large, brightly

colored prints. His video shows how he did it. For these he became famous, and opened a live/work

studio and B&B in Mexico. He had a show in Seattle, and I offered my remaining DVDs to the

Davidson Gallery, but they ignored it. Carol died not long after.

Photo: (Left) Carol Summers’ thank-you note.

(Right) Carol’s DVD package.

My journal is sprinkled with ideas, and a few sketches, which informs me that I must have

been pretty busy doing other things since my handwritten notes are so sparse. There are no articles

published in my news clipping collection, either. I had no exhibitions, and therefore it is a mystery

to me what I did between the months of the year. It’s likely I was using my Casio PDA for most

of my notes, as mentioned in my journal. Then, after a long silence, I wrote:

February 4, 2004: “If you are me and you create a DVD that you can and will sell online,

or an augmented product such as Halfwood Presses, your investment in equipment and time will

pay a certain percentage every year for as long as you produce or own the necessary elements of

the business. Ten–percent is a reasonable number; it surpasses most other kinds of investing. [This

feels like my Muse must have made me write it—advice to a young man.]

February 10: “The crew of the scientific group in the Emeralda story included a member

who was seeking to rendezvous with the Emeralda. He also got the emerald, and the

[undecipherable]. He left the company and sailed with the Emeralda to the Puget Sound. He was

Dutch and his name was Thomas Van der Kughler and he missed the sailing of the Emeralda.

That’s why he signed on to go with the Frenchman. [I don’t know what this is about. It hardly

makes sense. Signs of a confused person, I’m afraid.]

March 10: “Sitting and staring at a print I made in 1968, and thinking about the

superimposed engraving lines from about 2004, I wonder if I’m mistaken to think that my days,


89

then, of teaching, whenever the moves I made always connected to a notion of community and

giving. Suppose I changed, and resumed my art, free of any intent to share, to show, to teach and

then the only sole context of a work was the work itself, shed of its relation to my image as a

teacher. [In 2017 I read, in another man’s autobiography, the term NIF, which stands for Nuclear

Integrated Fantasy—living with an event that happened in your life that colors and permeates your

outlook the rest of your life.]

March 13: “I’m sure there’s a good name for what I wrote on the 10th, above, such as

“insular” as” cocooning.” [NIF] One has to consider one’s early, youthful optimism and remember

that a creative artist and teacher will enjoy himself more in a long life if he finds the right

combination of craft, art, and continuous lifelong learning.

March 17: “I’m constantly seeking ways to restore and raise the value of my legacy. New

technologies will be that way, or ways, tied to old technologies as a matter of course. Next January,

2008, I’ll have my own giveaway DVD, or low-priced, for the Seattle Print Fair. [The 2008 Seattle

print fair never happened, apparently.]

March 25: “Barbara Stanton bought Legacy Mini Halfwood Press No. 25 and is giving

me an opportunity to reach the next stage–the inclusion of DVDs with the presses that help show

printmaking from my legacy of archived videos. Also, I’m offering some tools and supplies to get

started. I’m going to phase out my press-making to prepare for the real business–and hopefully it

will give Lynda something real to work with.

April 16: Cannon Beach, Oregon. “I entered a Flash! in my PDA regarding a vision. It

was of my notebook to be entitled Press making: Mini Halfwood, and it was a description of the

Journal–style version, handwritten and illustrated. Overnight the notion grew. I planned to include

art by the 50 people who own the press, and their stories. Interspersed in the vision were my

thoughts about game design and fiction. It is, in a way, the crowning achievement in my life story.

It would take years, of course, perhaps 10 years or more. [Now, as I write this, it is ten years later—

2017.] The Monster’s Apprentice was an idea hatched by Carl Chew on April 13, 2007. It was his

answer to a question I put to him: “How can you create printmaking lessons in the IF manner?”

Interactive Fiction takes place in textual language. He said the player is a prisoner of the “monster”

and must demonstrate skills of… (an unfinished sentence).

April 23: “Carl chew always had better ideas on mediated learning. He thought of art

student in the first place.” [1988] On the opposite page of my Journal I made a sketch following

Carl’s idea of a map or a room being the artist’s agora, a word that means space.

Photo: (Left) Sketch of the Monster’s Apprentice after Carl Chew’s advice.

(Right) Sketches of Mariner Base, Lynda and West Beach Resort snapshot

June 18, 2007: “West Beach Resort Orcas Island. It’s a picture perfect afternoon as we’re

on our 43rd honeymoon and been here since yesterday. Tomorrow I go back to work. I’ll get started

on the side pieces of the Mariner Halfwood Presses Numbers four and five.”


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More demos at Daniel Smith’s stores The demonstrations I gave at both the Seattle and Bellevue stores on October 14 and 28th,

2007 were about combining relief and intaglio. I used a woodblock, inked with watercolor in the

manner of Japanese methods, and overprinted it with an etched and engraved plate. Somehow, that

plate disappeared—one of my life’s mysteries.

Photo: (Left) Demonstrating with a Galleon Halfwood Press, No. 1;

Photo by David Lotz. (Right) A print from the demonstration.

In this demonstration I pulled out all the stops—with both an etched and engraved copper

plate, a carved woodblock, several kinds of inks both oil-based and water-based and one of Akira

Kurosaki’s Disk Barens handy to show the visitors an optional way to print. However, I printed

the woodcut with the Galleon Halfwood Press to make my point—which was to underscore the

versatility of the press. My method was to print the woodblock color first, and while it was still

damp, print the inked intaglio print over it. Japanese printing, with watercolors, gives effects that

are almost impossible to get with intaglio. In addition to the printing, I also brought in a laptop to

show digital images of my work. The laptop was placed on top of the Mini Halfwood Printmaker

Chest, and the door dropped down to show the press.

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2008 By December 24 of this year, I will be sixty-seven years old

Photo: Artistamp for the Blue Saucer

coffee shop presence at the North Seattle

College Earth Week Festival.

Billie’s Blue Saucer Billie Jane Bryan nee Ritchie, our older daughter, worked at many jobs before she got into

the coffee shop business—a job hopper, as so many people her generation were. While still in high

school she worked for an Italian Restaurant in Seattle’s Uptown). She moved through office jobs

in real estate, radio, and travel agencies.

Then she found a niche she really liked in Seattle’s booming coffee shop industry, working

for several and decided she needed to be her own boss. She searched for a location, found a shop

in the Maple Leaf District. In February we combined our nest eggs, formed a partnership and, with

her husband Eric’s construction skills, remodeled it and opened the Blue Saucer Café and Pastry

Shop in March, 2008.

Photo: View of the Blue Saucer Café and Pastry Shop in 2013

opened in March of 2008 by Billie Jane Bryan nee Ritchie.

Billie’s husband, Eric, is a Journeyman carpenter, which made Billie Jane’s project move

much faster than it would have if she had needed to hire a contractor because Eric had the tools

and know-how to remodel speedily. He solve plumbing and electrical wiring problems they

encountered, and HVAC, wood and cabinet work were no problem for him. Along with his

construction work, it was like a side job for him, and good for the family.

Eleven-year old daughter, Matilda, pitched in—a good experience for her. After her high

school graduation years later she took part time jobs with other coffee shops such as Starbucks

while she started classes as Shoreline College.


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Photo: (Left) Seasonal greeting card (Left to right) Nellie and Mike Sunderland, Lynda,

Eric and Jane Bryan and Matilda (with Trigger), Bill in the foreground.

For seven years Billie’s Blue Saucer was a going concern. We met scores of new friends

at the Blue Saucer. Some families bought a yacht and this, for us, was the equivalent without it

being a money pit water. We could plan our meetings with friends and family at the ‘Sauce. Lynda

and Jane cooked up new pastry products and confections—a big hit with customers.

Nellie and I hung our art there, and many times I met my working associates there. When

I wrote the screen play, Swipe, I used our shop’s name and ambiance and descriptions in the

fictional island town, Puntaville, as in this excerpt:

SIDEWALK – CLOSE UP ON HAND-CHALKED A-BOARD

The Blue Saucer is open late tonight. A colorful announcement

says “OPENING PARTY” to celebrate the play. Parents, a few

children and playgoers are milling around AD LIB chatting,

laughing, sipping juices and snacking.

INTERIOR - BLUE SAUCER CAFE - CONTINUOUS

Inside, many revelers peer at glossy photos of the play’s

scenes displayed on walls. At the counter, Billie is taking

a tourist’s order and, closing in, we overhear them.

TOURIST

By the way, what’s the occasion? What’s going on?

BILLIE

School play opened. It’s the opening night party.

TOURIST

A play? Wow! What is it?

BILLIE

(hasty)

It’s a children’s play about an alternate

universe, an alien storyteller introduces

printmaking to Earth women.

TOURIST

Printmaking?

BILLIE

Sir, I have a lot of people waiting. Those photos

tell it all. Check out the photos. Your order

will be ready in a minute.

During Earth Week in April, Billie and I shared a table at North Seattle Community

College, choosing as our theme the Cerulean Warbler, a bird that migrates from Central American

coffee regions where Billie’s roast coffee beans came from.


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Photos: Earth Week 2008 Commemorative, intaglio print pr080422rit.

(Right) Billie and Bill shared a table with free coffee and a printing demonstration.

I etched an image of my artistamp for visitors to our table. Years later, in 2015, Billie Jane

let the ‘Sauce go. Partly it was because the property owners proved hard to work with when

negotiating a new lease; and there were growing labor expenses and the stress of running a small

independent coffee shop. Anyway it was a good thing to move on to something new. Pretty soon

she was a manager working for Bon Appetite, the commissary contractor for Google.

May is video month We made two videos about printmaking techniques in May—one on carving and printing

a woodcut in a Mini Halfwood Press, and one on drypoint—also printed on the Mini. In July and

August we’d make three more videos.

Photos: Screenshots from early videos made for Youtube.

Sometimes I made the videos alone. One method was to make a series of still images and

edit them into the video track and dissolve among them with subtitles and voice-over. Other times

I set up the video camera on a tripod and then go on with my demo—talking up to the built-in mic

as I worked. For close-ups I made mental notes as I worked and talked and the video was recording;

and, after my demo was over, I moved the tripod, focused for close ups and tried to repeat the

action from memory. This gave me the catch-ups I’d need. Edited, it sometimes seems there was

a camera operator! You might say I had a ghost shadow helping me.

The best setup, of course, was when Lynda wasn’t at work and could come and do the

camera work. Our cheapo camera (a Nikon Coolpix L5 digital camera, actually, but with a video

feature) had a high pixel pickup for its day—7.2 megapixels—and made acceptable videos for our

purposes.


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David Lotz gives us a hand In February, 2008, I proposed to David Lotz—who was one of the visitors to the Seattle

Print Fair last year—to join me in the capacity of Systems Analyst. It had not been long after that

when he visited our shop on Taylor Avenue. We became friends and I often went to his studio in

the Bemix Building in SODO to talk about the possibilities of a business that would encompass

both his interests and mine. He was working as a floor clerk at Daniel Smith Inc., but had a

technology background. He knew a lot about digital data mining, the arts, and exhibitions that use

new technologies. We met on Fridays every week for months.

David and I devoted hours to building a strategy to approach investors in a service for

artists’ asset management and legacy transfer. When Lynda and I bought the Mini Art Gallery,

then David spent hours developing parts of a business plan that might be useful if I proceeded with

idea of incorporating for the purpose of the artists’ asset management project.

Photo: Lynda I contemplate a gift painting from the Lisel Salzer estate. Photo by David Lotz

David did favors for Lynda and me—like driving us to the train station when we went to

Kansas to do workshops there. He helped us set up the booth at the Edmonds Art Festival, and

making hundreds of digital photos. The most profitable favor was when he introduced us to the

Pacific Galleries Auction where we discovered we could sell selected work from our family art

collection. The windfall of selling our Tsutakawa sumi paintings and Joe Goldberg’s monotype

helped to pay down our debt. When personal stresses got to be too much for me, I had to suspend

the arrangement with David, but I like to believe we parted as friends.

Janet Fisher helps One of the meetings we enjoyed that stemmed from Billie’s Blue Saucer venture was

hanging out once a week enjoying coffee, and putting up Nellie’s and my my art. One day, two

women were sitting at a table directly below one of my works, all of which had labels with details,

and one of the women near my work was leaning in, closely scrutinizing my label.

Admittedly, I love when people study my words as well as my artwork. Seeing her reading

so studiously attentive to the wording on the label, I could not resist introducing myself. We

chatted, and the subject came around to game designs. One of the women said, “What a

coincidence, our friend, who’s meeting us here, is a game writer and designer!” and looking up

and waving at another woman entering the shop, she said, “Here she is!” That’s how I met Janet

Fisher. An interesting aside is that Janet is my wife’s sister was known as Janet Fisher.


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This (new) Janet Fisher listened to me tell her my sketchy idea, which is to develop my an

online printmaking course using a video game or virtual world user interface. My fragmented and

rambling description did not put her off. She found it interesting since she herself is an artist and

printmaking was something she wanted like to try for herself. Naturally, a game to teach and learn

printmaking might be the ticket.

Photos: Left, Amina Seattle, which was Janet Fisher’s (right)

avatar in her two-minute video, Welcome to Emeralda—a teaser

to introduce the Emeralda Learn Printmaking Online concept.

Janet became my design procedure mentor, meeting me on a fairly regular basis—and

almost always at Billie’s Blue Saucer. She quickly grasped the principles for a design for an online,

alternate world where people could learn printmaking. This was in the day when hybrid games

were being used for distance learning. In hybrid, gamified learning, students worked on their

assignments in remote locations, and periodically—once a month—they’d come to a central

location for hands-on, face-to-face experiences.

I was pleased and amazed at her support. She adapted my Elmer Gates Prize narrative and

put it into a two-minute video teaser. The animated video, Welcome to Emeralda, introduces the

imaginary place, Emeralda, which I “discovered” in 1992. In Janet’s story line, her avatar, Amina,

is a bored and disappointed artist. One day a courier knocks and presents her with the Elmer Gates

Prize—an expense-paid Year of Living Copiously in an artist's paradise.

Janet amazed me when she showed me her video! She had gone into Second Life (SL)

where she used SL’s tools to build interior and exterior sets, and carried out the story line using

hers and her husband’s SL avatars. Her husband, Darren Mitchell, was the voice of the courier.

Janet finished the video in August, 2008, in time for me to include it in my talk at Baker University

in Baldwin, Kansas. Her video was an example of one style of user interface for my plan for

teaching printmaking online which I code-named my proposed method, Emeralda Learn

Printmaking Online, or ELPO. In a later edition I added subtitles for Youtube.

CWALS revisited Having never yet given up on bringing my life and professional experiences back the

Central Washington State College (now Central University), I had explored the idea of the Central

Washington Advanced Leadership School in 2006. Then I began discussions with the art

department chairman—who was, at that time, Dr. William Folkestad. By this time the Mini

Halfwood Press was a going concern and I embedded the physical press in my plan for a blended

online printmaking class.

The first step would be to adapt the printing press to a kit—a “printmaking teacher in a

box” and a curriculum plan for blended online learning. Second, I needed to begin discussions


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with a university to mete out the credits, and—always a loyal alumni and grateful to my teachers

there—CWU was my first choice of schools.

Photo: April 13 and 14 journal page showing

sketch of a Halfwood Press DIY kit, and comment

about Dr. Folkestad’s email from CWU.

In April 14, 2008, Dr. Folkestad sent me an email and asked if my syllabus for the online

printmaking class was ready to go. As part of my efforts toward an online printmaking course, I

made a PowerPoint presentation, but I sent him a paper version. On May 16, Professor Folkestad

told me the art faculty would not approve the curriculum plan I made for an online printmaking

class. I was disappointed—and at the time of this writing nine years later, still am.

Busy year for the Mini Halfwood Press Art festivals were the focus this year, with the kickoff being the Edmonds Art Festival in

mid-June, a book-signing and printing in Edmonds, at North Seattle College Earth Week, on to the

mountain town of Index, then Everett and halfway across the country to Kansas.

Photo: The most ambitious undertaking of the season was at the Edmonds Arts and Crafts

fair. We outdid the other exhibitors—to my surprise—and won an award which helped us

to break even on our expenses.

As it looked like the Halfwood press business was serious, and I enjoyed doing the

demonstrations if I could come up with new images for etchings, I applied for a spot at the


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Edmonds Art Festival. They required a photo of my booth. The problem was that I had no booth,

never had one. We didn’t even have the canopy to set one up. To meet this requirement, we went

to the Fremont Flea Market, which runs every weekend, with a digital camera and took a picture

of a booth. Back at my workstation I altered the booth, putting images of my art, the press—in

other words, the way our booth could look if we were given a spot at the festival. It worked!

Then we had to order a canopy and I began building the interior of the booth as it had

looked in the photo I made up. The canopy was on its way, and I bought hollow doors and

constructed portable walls. I made a center worktable for the press I would demonstrate with, and

narrow counters all around three sides to display art and the other presses we make. Our sons-in-

laws pitched in on moving and setup day. I rented a van for a week to transport everything.

A day into the fair, things were going great. Three people walked in as I was working. They

chatted awhile, and then they introduced themselves. I thought it was nice, that they would go

around and chat with all those vendors at the fair. They were the fair’s board of directors, they

said, and I won first place of our booth. I was speechless! I didn’t even know there was a prize, in

fact.

They said one of the things they liked best was that I was an artist in action which most of

the artists and crafts people there did not try. They merely sat in their booth and smiled; and not

all of them smiled! Mine was a crowd pleaser. It was a problem, however, as my adjacent neighbors

complained because my booth’s onlookers sometimes spilled over into their front area, making it

difficult to see what they were showing.

Nellie Sunderland hired Our younger of our two daughters, Nellie Sunderland nee Ritchie, had been doing office

work for us since her high school days. Uncounted small jobs she had done included transcription

of audio and videotapes, lists of former students and art patrons, and much more. We decided to

make her work official, giving the title of Family Asset Manager which includes a salary. In order

to become more familiar with printmaking terminology and techniques we added school expense

benefits. She did some of her work at North Seattle College taking night classes from Seattle Artist

Amanda Knowles.

Photo: Nellie Sunderland and, right, an artistamp based on

the photograph by Bill Ritchie.

Later she took online courses offered by Shoreline College to deepen her skills with the

Microsoft Office suite, as Excel and Access were to be important to listing our assets and moving


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the Mini Art Gallery into its phase for developing support for my concept of the Northwest Print

Center Incubators.

I masterminded these moves intuitively, and in November this year I entered a brief note

and stored it with other essays having to do with legacy transfer. The note reads: “Matters of the

Will: Leave Nellie all ‘Zine essays, manuscripts, journals and other written memorabilia or in a

trust for her.” Where this all-family venture will lead no one knows, but, as they say, “It’s the

journey.”

Kids with Presses My lifetime mission is to teach cultural multimedia arts, and one of my teaching goals is

to bring the printmaking experience to kids. From the first year I began demonstrating my Mini

Halfwood Presses, I found a readymade especially-interested group in kids. In my encounters I

began collecting snapshots of kids with the Mini Halfwood presses. Pretty soon I had enough for

a photobook of kids ranging in ages as young as 18 months old and up, but mostly kids from four

to eighteen years old.

My first encounter with kids was in school. Our granddaughter’s 2nd grade class teacher

was open to my visit for a printing demonstration. Years later, my recollection of this experience

was the opening scene for the screenplay, Swipe, as the protagonist is doing the same thing which

I did that day—he was pulling a proof from an etched copper plate in front of a class.

Photos: (left) Ritchie’s first kids’ demonstration, 2nd-grade class

of his granddaughter’s. (Right) Cover of the photobook, Kids with Presses.

The Kids with Presses collection includes kids from around the Seattle region, plus kids in

Kansas, California and Pennsylvania—wherever I could coax owners of Halfwoods to take

snapshots of kids with the press. From other countries some of the best snapshots were sent to me

from Riga, Latvia. The owners have a vigorous print and music outreach program for youth.

Train to Kansas In September I was invited to Baker University, in Baldwin City, Kansas, to give a series

of workshops and demonstrations to students in the public schools there and also on the campus.

Professor Walt Bailey, head of art department, was my sponsor. He had bought a Legacy Mini

Halfwood Press and he knew that I made made a portable printmaking chest. In addition to the

demonstrations of printing, he arranged for me to give a lecture to the faculty on the subject of my

game, Emeralda, and I was able to include Janet Fisher’s video, Welcome to Emeralda.


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Photos: Left, Professor Walt Bailey’s Legacy Mini Halfwood Press as a display

item in Bill’s solo show at Baker University. Middle, a 4th-grader tries his hand

printing on Bill’s Mini Halfwood press. Right, a high school student prints as

Professor Walt Bailey watches in the background. Photo by Sheryl Espinosa.

As Lynda and I no longer fly, we asked for and were allowed a generous budget to go by

train. It was one of the most memorable experiences we had in our life! Arriving in September—

tornado season—there was only one small tornado near Baldwin City. Professor Bailey had a full

schedule for me, including elementary, middle school and high school demonstrations.

On the Baker University campus I demonstrated to two art classes and, on our last night

there, I gave my distance-learning talk and showed Janet Fisher’s video to the faculty. Professor

Bailey also set up a one-man show for me in their art gallery, purchased a print and a Mini

Halfwood Press for the university collection and two people bought presses. Several people bought

prints and an artist’s book I produced.

Index and Snohomish art festivals About a week after we got back from our trip to Kansas, on September 19, 2008 Lynda and

I took our Halfwood Press booth to Everett to “do the Snohomish” arts festival. It rained and we

were pretty miserable, and there were no sales at all. It happens.

Photos: (Left) booth at the Snohomish Art Festival, in Everett.

(Right) Kids watch at the Index Art Fair.

Index, a mountain village on the Amtrak railroad line across the Cascades, also had an art

festival. We had invested in a canopy for these festivals and made good use of it.

Artist’s Last Love Letter, a parable On November 2, 2008, I wrote a vignette in my journal, with a footnote that it was a parable

for the Artist’s Last Love Letter project:

She’s going to be really angry at me for this, he said to himself as he hurried the last block

to the funeral home chapel. He had to park two blocks away. He smiled weakly at the doorman,


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who was occupied with his cufflink and didn’t acknowledge him as he entered the quiet and somber

hall.

Slowly and quietly he pushed the chapel door open and entered, holding the door while it

silently closed without a thump. He looked for her. He could see the back of her head. She was in

the front row! Dang! He’d never be able to sit next to her now. The speaker was droning on as

they always do in the ceremonies for the departed.

“We are here to celebrate a life, not to grieve…”

He saw an empty seat in the last pew. He’d have to wait it out. Boy, she was never going

to let him live this one down! He could hear her now, berating him: “You’re going to be late for

your own funeral!” That’s what they used to say about his dad.

He found pleasure, however, just looking the back of her head from this perspective. Such

beautiful hair. It was only one of the things he loved about her—that hair. How many times he had

gone funerals and had seen the widows of men from this same point of view, seated in the back;

but even from here, he somehow felt and identification with the one in the flower-covered casket.

What would the widow be thinking? The women he’d seen loved their men, and in their

dignity they were just still and observing. Yet what were they thinking? Were they listening to the

eulogy? Or, were they worrying and wondering, “What will become of me? Did he have enough

insurance?” Or has he left me with a huge hospital bill to pay?”

Other questions to, like, should she continue living in the same house with signs of him all

around, his presence in every corner? And what about his things, his possessions, all that clutter

and stuff he’d saved the years?

Now the service was ending. He snapped out of his daydreaming and wondering. People

were standing up. Next would be the part which he hated: The final viewing. He would just step

out into the hall and wait for her. It wouldn’t be long.

He pressed the door open again and sidled through. The lobby was empty. Through the

exit door he could see the limousine that would take them in the caravan to the cemetery, following

the hearse.

There was a large wreath in the lobby and, behind it, a floor-to-ceiling mirror. He went

over to the wreath and was admiring the flowers. He leaned up to one of the blooms to smell and

noticed something odd out of the corner of his eye. In the mirror he could see the back of the

wreath reflected, but there was no reflection of him. – Bill Ritchie’s Journal

Videos of testing Halfwoods On October 8, 2008, Lynda and I began making videos of the test-printing on newly built

Legacy Mini Halfwood Presses. We used Legacy Mini Halfwood Number 37, which was

purchased by Baker University. It seemed like a good idea to have an instructional DVD with the

press to help the printmaking students and the professor to learn the fine points of printing on a

Halfwood of this vintage. It worked out so well I wanted to do it again.


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Photo: Lynda did the video camera work for many

of the first videos of testing the Mini Halfwood Presses.

Making the videos became a routine process—for every press I finished and sold, I etched

a copper plate, inked and printed it while Lynda recorded me teaching. When Lynda was otherwise

occupied, I learned how to make selfie-videos, which was slower, but still it could be done. With

desktop editing I made the tapes reasonably short and burned DVDs. It was all in the spirit of

practicing for my dream—an online course in printmaking, the teacher in a box.

Photos (Series) Left to right, Lynda sets Bill up with a joke

camera—a water-squirting fake camera (center) at a shoot for

Halfwood Press No. 52, which is available on Youtube.

There were plenty of opportunities for innovations in making these videos. Sometimes a

buyer specified certain techniques they wanted to use on the press, and I would reach into my

“knowledge bank” and set up the test for this purpose. Lynda and I had fun, too, so as to reduce

the monotony of making tape after tape the same way. One time we set up a joke introduction, and

she squirted me with a squirt camera.


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Photos: Two views of the first printmaker’s chest, modeled to

resemble a seaman’s chest, keeping with the nautical theme.

Photos: (Left) Printmaker’s chest, this one made for Peter Rowan.

(Right) A walnut box fashioned by Tom Kughler for accessories.

The printmaker chest, too, became not only a subject for a video but also as an add-on after

a number of people saw it in the videos and ordered one to be made for them. Early Mini Halfwood

Presses came with a small accessory box, and my partner, Tom Kughler, began making larger,

solid walnut boxes for the larger presses.

Those press demonstration videos on Youtube number in the hundreds today, covering not

only the how-to of using the press but also some showing do-it-yourself press building.

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2009 By December 24 of this year, I will be sixty-eight years old

Photo: Artistamp based on the first

(Legacy) Mini Halfwood Press to

commemorate its 5th anniversary.

Virtual worlds and Second Life On January 22, 2009, David Lotz and Janet Fisher joined me in the back room office at our

home to begin my class on Virtual Worlds, offered through the UW Certificate Program. It was

run by Randi Heinrich, assisted by his wife. The cool thing about this class was that they used a

branch of Second Life (SL) to manage the course. I was able to keep up, but my old nemesis, my

stubbornness and professor’s academic vanity kept rearing its head and I curtailed my enrollment

after one quarter. It cost around $700 or more but the experience was worth it.

Photo: Screenshot from SL version of Emeralda City,

including a musical virtual press. (Right) Janet Fisher.

After I ended my part, Janet continued to build on the idea of a virtual world for the

Emeralda concept. She had cobbled together an introductory reel the year before for my Kansas

stint titled, Welcome to Emeralda. Janet and I bought virtual land in SL, and to my amazement

Janet made a virtual etching press that played music when the wheel went around—just like my

real, first Legacy Mini Halfwood Press.


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Photos: Screenshots from Janet Fisher’s Welcome to Emeralda reel.

Janet illustrated and animated her animation, Welcome to Emeralda, with images from SL,

and her husband provided the voice of the man who delivers the Gates Prize to the protagonist,

Amina. Years later I added captions.

Mini Gallery rented For six months, starting around February of 2009, we rented a 300-square foot corner office

space in the condo, The Residence on Queen Anne. It was to be an experiment. This meant we

were now renting two spaces in which I could pursue my ventures. The new space, located on the

breezeway of the condominium, had windows facing west and north. It looked more like an art

gallery than the shop on Taylor Avenue. A coffee shop, two restaurants and a bar were across the

avenue. The one we rented had been an office space, so it was nicely carpeted and painted plus it

had high ceilings.

One of our sons-in-law, Eric, installed track lighting to give the space more of an art gallery

feeling. I moved my workstation out of the Taylor Avenue workshop and got connected to the

Web. David Lotz began using it to lay out a business plan and we hung some artworks. David

wisely suggested that we have an opening, but I was reluctant because we had no liability insurance

and no money to do it right.

“So, buy insurance,” he said. Yet, having no money to pay for it, plus it was unlikely we’d

be sued for anything resulting from an art opening, I declined. Therefore, no opening.

Busker Etcher concept - 2009 In April I sketched a concept for “print busker” showing a cart fixed with a Mini Halfwood

press—the whole shebang designed for printing at street fairs. About four years later—around

2013, Ethan Lind would pick up on it and we started a proof-of-concept collaboration.


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Photo: Journal sketch for the “busker etcher” concept

that become reality nine years later at the Pike Place Market in Seattle.

Building a database I can’t say when I began to keep digital records of my thoughts—that is, in addition to my

written journals dating from from 1968. The computer opened up a new way of writing, so as soon

as we had a personal computer—an Apple II+ with software called a text editor—I began to keep

digital files. Sometimes I didn’t bother to print them out.

It was at this time I came upon the problem most people encounter: How do you organize

a filing system? We, Lynda and I, had two purposes where our Apple was useful—the videotape

rental and sales business of Lynda’s, and my personal musings. For her purposes we bought

graphics software to promote the videos. I believed we needed a magazine-style catalog for the

videos, listing the titles and telling about their content.

To these catalog/magazines we made in the 1970s I gave the name Magalogs. They were

printed and mailed to those on our lists—the original mailing list which Daniel Smith had shared

with us from his startup. They were mostly schools that taught printmaking, and these schools

were beginning to use videotape players instead of film for teaching.

This was the practical, commercial side of our use of computers, and helped pay for the

artistic use, or experiments, with computers which interested me more. By “artistic,” I did not limit

my interest to computer graphics although people thought that was all I cared about. After all,

video had led me to using computers. We edited videotapes with computers through a system

which tracked every frame of video, and my students and I learned to make “edit decision lists”

which—if we wanted to—we could print out on paper and visualize how the edited video would

look.

My intuition told me you could create a “world” in a computer’s filing system—a system

based on what was called a logic tree. An eight-bit system could manage 256 colors, for example,

or 256 cells. I am oversimplifying, but my point is that I began to visualize a world inside the

computer. It was not long a plastic box for me—it went much deeper.

I felt, more than I knew or thought, that if were going deep into a digital world, I had better

leave a trail, like Hansel and Gretel, or I might never find my way back. If I wrote something in

AppleWriter, I better have system to tell me where to file it—a path I could trust.


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This led me to my virtual world which, in 1992, I named Emeralda. Before long I had

established a methodology for storing my writing and giving each essay an index number which

would be useful in the future. All this was at a time when did not know what the future held for

these essays. I never intended that they would be published in the conventional way.

Information Highway for professors The age of digital reproduction changed the significance and the form of libraries for every

student in any professor’s course and also for people who are not students in intuitions. Anyone

can enter a professor’s inner sanctum if the professor puts his or her library into digital form.

Everything that a professor wrote and said in their teaching career can be in a cyber library. Their

mass-produced publications would be listed along with their unique, unpublished articles, private

journals, diaries, manuscripts, screenplays and miscellany. The physical form of these disappear,

or are buried in the age of mechanical printing. Most often this happens when a professor retires,

loses their mental faculties or die. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Photo: On-demand published books that used online services.

All around the region where we lived, new technologies were being developed that made most of

the tasks of the professor easier—such as writing, graphics, communicating and, most important of all,

teaching and continuous learning. Education was to become a two-way street reaching beyond the halls

and walls of academe. By this time—forty years after the technology boom started—I find my role as

artist, designer, craftsman and educator going on and growing. (Source: Ritchie Mined foreword)

Dead Professors keep on Teaching Well into my college teaching career, I experienced another awakening 26 years ago. It

was in 1983 that my family and I were on our way across the country and we stopped in Montana.

Our older daughter, Billie Jane, had a friend who lived in Polson, near Flathead Lake. She is related

to my old college mentor, Reino Randall. He had a brother who was also a college art professor.

They were also both chairmen of the art departments in their respective colleges.

We were invited to visit Reino’s brother’s widow at home, their dream home on a tiny

island on Flathead Lake. He was working on it when he died. His daughter gave us a tour of the

house—an unusual work of architecture (as you might expect of an art guy). As she opened the

door she said words that were branded on my memory:|

“This is where Dad kept his things.

We don’t know what they are.”

I stuck my head in the door to see what she meant. I recognized instantly the boxes of

slides, portfolios and sketchbooks, files burgeoning with notes and unpublished articles spanning

forty years of teaching, research, practice and service to the community. All resigned to a room on


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a rock in Montana, imprisoned in a sense, like Alcatraz. A chilling thought came over me: Back in

our house in Seattle, I had a room just like this!

Photo: Lynda and Bill begin an attempt to catalog some

of the family art collection. Photo by David Lotz, 2008.

Techno-teaching To think of my career with an ending in that way was not for me, not this art professor. My

contact with older artists in their sixties, seventies and eighties—people like Sarah Spurgeon, Rolf

Nesch, Stanley Hayter, and Maria Guaita to name a few—helped me to see the value of a teaching

artist’s life work. Since 1968 I had logged my thoughts in journals. In 1979 I had started using an

Apple II+ computer. With it I digitized my notes and essays and, still, even after thirty years, they

are on my computer and on the Web.

When I started my Ritchie Mined project—with our daughter Nellie’s help, I thought it

would be possible that someone might be reading the notes I wrote in my web log (blog) since the

Internet went with the World Wide Web. All my notes could be found online by anyone curious

enough to read them. It’s something a university could have done, but did not.

In the end, it has come to pass that teachers can keep their brain alive with the aid of a

computer, which is what my Ritchie Mined project was about. Now everyone—including myself

and my family—may have access to what has been on my mind at different times in my life, for

what it’s worth.

ELPO – Emeralda Learn Printmaking Online In May the Washington Art Educators posted an announcement that this was the month for

Art Education Week, and it was about this time that I felt my concept for online printmaking

teaching was ready to launch. I named it ELPO: Emeralda Learn Printmaking Online. I had

acquired quite a library on many aspects of interactive online experiences and it was easy to adapt

things like video game design to ELPO.


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Photos: (Left) The Bible of Elpo, ring-bound. (Right) Sample page from inside ELPO Bible

I created what is known in the industry as a Bible. The bible contains virtually everything

a company of developers needs to know about the product, i.e., the online service supporting

printmaking learning. This tome is hundreds of pages of printouts and hand-written notes and

sketches showing the game mechanics, back story and business plan suggestions for what is a

patentable printmaking teaching method.

We buy the Mini Art Gallery Last year, 2008, the year she retired from the Seattle King County Dental society, Lynda

and I anticipated the Great Recession of 2008 and we went to the bank and told the man in charge

of her retirement portfolio that we wanted to take her retirement fund out of stocks and bonds.

Already her portfolio had lost value as the market was teetering on the edge of collapse due to the

questions rising up in what would be called the housing boondoggle. We could see that she was

losing her nest egg, and the economy was worsening. To our concern he calmly assured us, “Oh

no, you haven’t actually realized your losses.” He meant, of course, that our losses were, at the

moment, only on paper. We had not “realized” our losses at all. We wouldn’t realize our losses

until we cashed out—which he assumed might be years and years from now.

To this we responded: “Oh yes, actually, sir, we have realized it!” Thus began our

separation from the bank’s management of our funds. Lynda had already realized that her portfolio

of investments for her retirement fund had suffered about $10,000 in losses. If we had waited any

longer, she would have lost half her retirement fund, maybe $75,000. This happened to many

millions of others. Many Americans remember that 2008 was the beginning of the Great Recession

due to the criminally-inspired housing crisis.

Here’s an anecdote which was to take place a few years later. A woman from back East

called because she was interested in getting a Mini Halfwood Press. She makes drypoints. She and

her husband live in a tiny town far away from any print workshops. As I got to know her better,

she told me they own an oyster farm. Her husband had worked on Wall Street as a software

developer. She invited me to read about him because he was famous. The New York Magazine

published his story this year in which he wrote: “It’s been eight years since I compiled a program,

but the last one lived on, becoming the industry standard that seeded itself into every investment

bank in the world.”


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Photo: The Residence on Queen Anne is a condo with commercial units on the

street level. The Mini Art Gallery windows are between the white and red

cars – the shades are lowered in this snapshot. Right: Bill and Lynda pose in their

Mini Art Gallery, December, 2010.

On May 21st, 2009, I wrote on the last page in my journal:

“Invest in people – their ability to labor. Invest in the young – the 57, 47,

37, 27 and 17 year old’s ability to labor. Sell your interest in your businesses, hold

what you can provide to service other people’s businesses. It’s not your business

once the market has shown itself – the market wants what you cannot provide. The

smallest thing and the right thing is for Lynda to buy the 812 5th Ave. N. C2

property.” –Journal

With Lynda’s retirement money and my IRA proceeds, we did decide to buy it and we

closed the deal in August, 2009, for about $150,000. We felt secure in this because we could do

three things with this investment: (1) Use it, (2) Rent it, or (3) Sell it. By using it, I meant to

continue displaying my life’s work on the walls, store my legacy art here, have a workstation for

my writing and graphic design, finish Halfwood Presses and prepare for shipping them, and

generally make myself visible to the community passers-by and keep my door open to visitors.

Rents in the area were continuing to go up, up, and up. By 2017—the year I began this

autobiography, the space next ours had a commercial rental value of $20 per square foot per year.

That unit is much larger—1,643 square feet. It sold in 2017 for $870,000 (about $15,000 over its

estimated sales price). That’s almost $530 per square foot. You might think, then, that our little

space—316 square feet—might rent for a little over $500 a month. The market value to sell it, in

2017, might be at least $164,000.

My first finished screenplay, Swipe This year I started a screenplay—not my first, but the first screenplay I completed,

registered with the Screenwriter’s Guild of America-West, and approached agencies. One agent

responded, but he passed. Using CreateSpace and amazon services I then published it as a

softcover book. I started this year with a title, Dusty’s Prize and after two years’ work I changed

it to Swipe. I was well-warned that everything about the business of screenplay writing was

temporary—that if anyone wanted it then they would see to many re-writes. The title, too, would

be changed to suit marketing it.

Honestly, I didn’t really care about seeing the film produced because Seattle is not a movie-

making city. I tried a few contests, and sent it to Amazon Studios. In the end, I thought if it didn’t

make it in Hollywood, it wouldn’t make it all. Instead of wishing for the impossible, I would give


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myself time to focus on learning the art and craft of screenplays and I’m happy with what I learned.

Besides, Seattle is a technology and gaming city, so it could be the back story for a game—but,

again, as commercializing my story was the last thing in my mind—not my motivation. Besides

learning the art and craft, I wanted to tell my story through my protagonist; in this sense, the story

is autobiographical besides containing my fantasy story of the Halfwood press’ design.

Photo: Cover of Swipe, semi-autobiographical screenplay slick cover paperback.

My screenplay logline reads like this: “A colorful art professor, obsessed with winning

prizes, takes a tumble that leaves him jobless, broke, brain-damaged but then phantom tales

illuminate his pathway to redemption.” The full synopsis follows:

Act one: Open on Dustin “Dusty” Cann, 37-year old, inventive art

professor, who has achieved his lifetime goal—newly tenured as professor of

printmaking, and life is good. His admiring students, loyal wife and a promising

business making art printing presses of original design assures him. Money and

awards are flowing in. Ambitious and feeling invincible (and goaded by his Muse)

he becomes obsessed with the rumored of a secret society of holders of a high award

for Great World Teachers. Striving to be noticed, he allows an unqualified,

challenging and unsavory student to take his class. He is Greg Potter, Jr., 27, a rich,

spoiled, unscrupulous medical student (and scion of the University Godfather) who

takes Dusty for a tool in his own ambitions. When a furious controversy arises over

Dusty’s radical teaching simultaneously with an accident involving his art press,

Dusty is pressured by lawsuits, academic furor and campus politics. Dusty’s mind

crumbles, made worse by a head-injury. Hospitalized and judged unfit to teach, he

is dismissed from teaching. In a forced sale, his press business is lost to Greg

Potter’s father, a renowned brain surgeon. The doctor sends Dusty—who’s in and

out of comas—to an island recovery village. His stressed-out wife, feeling helpless,

leaves to care for her ailing hotelier sister in Brazil.

Act two: Opens on an ambulance delivering comatose Dusty to Two Dog

Island, north of Seattle, landing at the Puntaville ferry dock. Dusty’s speech is

impeded with purpose tremors. He takes up writing as therapy, adapting to an Apple

computer at the Puntaville library. Nights, in fantastic, vivid dreams he re-

encounters his muse, a woman who interprets his dreams—her fall to Earth, fateful

kidnappings and a mystery ship—reviving Dusty’s wishes for the creative life. He

mines his muse’s treasury of stories seeking ways to get redemption. He thinks

again about a great prize for teaching art. Gradually, the enigma fades, but

fragments of the woman’s stories persist in teaching dreams and fantasy swings.


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Accepting a job as town librarian, which includes a rundown house to live in, he

finds Richard Dana’s long lost seaman’s chest. Besides new facts about Dana’s

stay, it also contains an ivory and wood model of an etching press similar to Dusty’s

design, and, in scrimshaw, one of the woman’s yarns. Dusty’s circle of friends form

a society of archeology amateurs who find artifacts in the locale suggesting a

mystery ship lay nearby. Dusty’s nemesis, the infamous Greg Potter, Jr., comes to

the island with an offer and asking his help. Potter knows about the valuable trunk

and he wants it. Dusty and Potter have a confrontation, and—enraged that Dusty

has sent the trunk to the Smithsonian as a national treasure, Potter assaults him and

intercepts the trunk and steals it.

Act three: Dusty’s had enough and leaves for Brazil. Potter disappears and

is a person of interest, suspicious of having stolen a national treasure. When a

construction crew unearths a skeleton on the Potter family property, parts of

Dusty’s stories are confirmed. Dusty’s gone, but the archeology club works on,

aggregating their discoveries. Gregg’s nefarious past and his hijacking of the trunk

is exposed, which will result in his ruin and shame the Potter name. Far away in

Floripa, Brazil, Dusty is reunited with his wife, helping her run a hotel. Their family

is joined by a precocious, artistic street kid. Dusty’s life is good again, except for

his speech problem. They get news that the great prize he wanted is won by the club

back in Puntaville. One morning, he catches a glimpse of a woman passing who

resembles the woman of his fantasies, waving invitingly. He takes up pursuit and

the little girl follows. The woman leads them to an antique shop, and then vanishes.

In the shop an amazing discovery tells truth of the legends and Dusty is redeemed,

his great hopes actualized.

Invasion from Fleur In October, 2009, Janet Fisher, who had continued to work with me since last year, was

interested in the Emeralda legend for the user interface for a printmaking teaching method online.

I sketched out the back story for the setting—the imaginary place called Emeralda Region, and

how the leader of this paradisiacal artist’s colony is in fact an alien aiming to end Earth’s human

life sustainability. His method is simple: Suffocation by CO2.

I needed to figure out why this character was such a bad guy. All I knew was that the aliens,

I said, are from the Flower Planet., that there were four sisters and two brothers, and the brothers

were a good guy and a bad guy. Janet took to the thesis and wrote a one page explanation about

these aliens:

Invasion from Fleur

by Janet Fisher

“Fleur is a planet where amazing, colorful flowers grow. The sentient race are

insect-like, relying on the flowers for their basic necessities. They've harnessed the

power of the chemicals that flowers and plants give off, and they use the chemicals

to concoct formulas that, once inhaled, can give them longer, healthier lives, change

other plants, and make the larger, dumb species of Fleur do their bidding. They can

even use complex formulas to program the behavior of larger species to do specific

tasks.


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“Due to the Fleurians' harvesting practices and the heavy need for flowers, their

environment is becoming too heavy with oxygen. There's not enough carbon

dioxide (C02) to produce the massive crops of huge flowers.

“The Fleurian governing body sends a sextuplet on a stellar quest to find more

CO2 to harvest it and bring it home, or at least bring back a mechanism by which

they can increase CO2 levels on Fleur.

“After a month, the Fleurian family has used up their rations on the ship, and

are at death's door. They crash-land on Earth, rendering their ship useless, but not

before they record the massive, increasing levels of CO2 on the planet.

“They tumble out of their tiny, broken ship, all but invisible to the sentient

creatures of Earth. They're luckily in a natural area, and they locate flowers, but

what odd flowers they are to them. What strange derivatives of the chemicals

they're used to.

“Over time, the Fleurian family are getting used to their new environment. As

sustenance, these Earthian flowers are not as biologically appropriate as their home

world flowers, and so the poor Fleurians suffer from chronic malaise, but they're

adjusting. And they're learning, quickly, how to mix the chemicals and program the

larger creatures around them.

“When they realize they're going to die faster than on their own planet, they

learn how to chemically program the mind of an Earthian insect to replace

themselves, in body and mind. When they realize they can do that, they all take on

new bodies, starting a cycle that will span 100 Earthian years and result in taking

over a human bodies.

“Having resolved the question of their survival, they soon turn to their original

quest: to harvest CO2, or technology for making more CO2. But, they are not in

unison. The chemical formulas they have used to take over human bodies result in

incomplete takeovers. They act like damaged people.

“One of the brothers becomes fanatical about increasing CO2 levels on Earth

and begins a long quest to use the power that the family of his human body have to

begin manufacturing alluring vehicle engines that burn gas at 10 miles per gallon—

each gallon producing 20 lbs. of CO2. His family's interests grow to include Oxygen

bar patents that they know they will be able to sell in the future when people need

to stop in for some clean air.” – Story by Janet Fisher

Two dozen presses sold By December of 2009—the fifth year of designing and building Halfwood Presses—Tom

Kughler and I sent two dozen presses to new owners, including one to Australia to a designer

named Catherine Watkins and another designer, Christine Müller, in Venezuela. My friend and

formers student, Pat Austin, bought one and another, Gwen Howell, from the same class year,

1974, also bought Legacy Mini Halfwood Presses.

Phil Bivins, who had been buying my videotapes since the 1970s, bought a Legacy Mini

Halfwood along with a printmaker chest. One went across the Pacific to Jane Mau, in Hawaii. In

the greater Seattle area we sold presses to Barbara Buech, John Cogley, Ali Fujino, Carol Puri,

John Stinson, and Sylvia Dillon. Ron Myhre, from Port Townsend—which is north of Seattle,

bought one and partly finished it himself.


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Photos: (Left) Sylvia Dillon, a teacher, alerted me to an Art Educators gathering

where I set up my press. (Right) Phil Bivins’ video included the printmaker chest.

Virginia artist Jennifer Balisle bought one. California became home to presses at the

studios of Jeremy Joan Hughes and Frank Trueba. In Texas they went to Natalie Olterman and

Letitia Wetterauer; in Colorado it was Scott Skinner; Mark Pinkerton and Christopher Fraker

brought them to their homes in Georgia. A Legacy Mini went to James Jenkins in Arizona.

For nearly every press ordered I made a video and burned it to a DVD, plus I uploaded the

videos to Youtube. My idea was to send along a demonstration—like a test printing session—with

the press. The practices I read about in customer services gave me this idea, and it was an extension

of my self-image as a teacher. I like the idea of the Halfwood Presses bringing helpful hints and

education to their owners.

Each individual I met brought new relationships, some which have lasted for years. I can

say that the design of the Halfwood Press—and Tom Kughler’s help in realizing it—taught me

important lessons about the meaning of art, craft and design. By chance, each new owner opened

new awareness. I grew less interested in being a printmaker, limited to making pictures no matter

how enjoyable this is, and more interested in a community of artists, craftspeople and designers

who happened to love prints, printmaking and printmakers.

A Seasonal Card with Michael Baldwin On walks up to the the top of our neighborhood’s highest point our path led us through a

Bhy Kracke Park—named for a philanthropist years ago. It was here that we encountered a

remarkable man and his dog. We learned he was Michael Baldwin, and we were impressed by his

fluffy white beard, pot belly and wide, red suspenders. It turned out his main line of work, albeit

seasonal, was as Santa Claus!

He was a likeable guy but sometimes when we’d meet him in one of the neighborhood

grocery stores we learned he could be a bit crude. It struck us as funny. He was younger than Lynda

and I by a dozen years. He spent his youth as a beach bum in Southern California, when surfing

and the Bee Gees were at the top of the charts. I note this with respect due to the dead, because

Michael would live only a few more years.

Since meeting Michael I thought of hiring him for a promotional photo to boost sales of

Halfwood Presses as gifts. Already several people had bought my presses as Christmas gifts. I was

hesitant because Michael was a professional, and I probably couldn’t afford him. But one day, in

the park, I asked him if he would, and what would he charge for a photo shoot.

“I charge $100 an hour, but you’re doing something interesting and I can do it in a half-

hour, we can negotiate,” and he laughed and his belly shook like a bowlful of jelly.


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Photos: (Left) Michael Baldwin as Santa’s helper.

(Right) Screenshot from a video, Bill with Michael with the Micro Mini.

Michael showed up with his costumery and I made a number of snapshots of him posing

as if he were helping to assemble the Mini Halfwood Press. After a series of still photos, I asked

him to do act for a quick video to show my Micro Halfwood Press. I had a green Santa hat and I

posed as his helper. It was pure fun, like being a kid on TV.

Seniors and kids see printmaking up close Back in March our younger daughter Nellie arranged for me to visit a retirement

community. She was a volunteer in the offices there, and helped with crafts and exercise classes.

There I met with a half-dozen seniors to show the magic of printmaking on a Halfwood Press. This

was the first time I tried such a thing and it gave me an idea to develop Seniors Printmaking.

Photos: (Left) Showing printmaking to men at Foss Home, a retirement community.

(Right) At Billie’s Blue Saucer coffee shop pop-up event. Photo by David Lotz.

Later this year, Billie Bryan, Nellie’s sister, held a Pop-Up event at her coffee shop, the

Blue Saucer and this gave me another chance, this time to show kids my printmaking methods.

David Lotz helped us with this and took many photos. This event reminded me of my plan for

Printmaking Circus and Roadshow which I proposed when I was still a professor at the UW, and

the idea persists even today.

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2010 By December 24 of this year, I will be sixty-nine years old

Photo: Artistamp based on Bill Ritchie’s

images for his game, Emeralda.

A stamp for 2010 The triangular stamp I designed this year shows an image of Emeralda Region as seen from

the air, as if coming into the region in a float plane to land on the Great Lake of Emeralda Region.

The dates, 1992-2010 indicate the span of years I had worked on this imaginary place, this universe

that parallels mine.

In fine print are the words, “Halfwood Press Origins,” and “Mt. Media Emeralda Region.”

The mountain peak (actually a modified image of Mt. Rainier, photographed by Paula Cipolla) is

one of the three, nearly identical mountains that lie equidistant from each other around the lake.

They represent the three points of a tetrahedron form, but it is inverted, i.e., the fourth tip is deep

in the bottom of the lake, like a tetrahedron that has been pushed into the Earth like a spear point.

Three more triangular stamps came out of this period—each one on the same theme but

standing for the sisters of Media, the women who fell earth in my legend of Emeralda. Her sisters

are Aurel Techna, and Tetra. Each has a distinct personality and philosophy which shapes her

mission. There are, in my story, also two brothers. One is good, one is bad. One is in sympathy

with the sisters’ mission, but the bad one has a distinctly anti-human mission. This one schemes

to eliminate human life.

Let the games begin January of 2010 found me writing copiously in my Journal. Nellie and I began developing

a database of my thousands of essays. I put myself in the role of the missing professor as this was

one of the game mechanics I had conceived in a game concept. Admittedly, I had in mind an

autobiographical game, because I gave a decade of my life in pursuit of role-playing a professor.

Now I was missing from the institutions of higher education ever since, that day in June, 1985,

when I walked off the UW campus, never to return. I like to imagine that I’m missed.

Back-wind a two years to 2008, when Janet Fisher made an animated introduction to my

fantasy world I call Emeralda and it was then we combined our efforts on Second Life—that virtual

world interactive software that reached high popularity. We shared in taking an online course in

virtual world-making. We invited David Lotz to join in. It was an online course, so we never went

to the UW campus, but rather we convened in the back room of our condo. It was a rich time—for

me, at least. My journals include notes about games-with-purpose, as, for example:

“A beautiful idea, this comic book and game to teach printmaking online.

And a coffee shop classroom… Jasmine, one of Billie Jane’s baristas at The Blue

Saucer (and a former student of Cornish’ Kathleen Rabel), is another one of those

‘gifts’ you come across in your pathway. ‘An eyebrow–raising, jaw–dropping


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computer game from Emeralda works. I wanted a game I would like to be playing,

a game that reinvents arts’ studios.’ I heard an artist say, ‘You play your instrument

and then your instrument forms you.’ That’s the kind of game I wanted – a game

that, while you play it, it actualizes as you—all your dreams, your self-image, your

goals, your vision—all these are a parts of the game. You become one with your

game.’ Years later I heard a line in a film called Blind Date: “You have to invent

it to solve it.” –Journal

Janet coached me on the subject of video games, and with her help I made several

PowerPoint presentations to describe the design concept. As mentioned, this was in 2008, and by

2009 I had filled a 3-inch ring binder with hundreds of pages documenting the game concept, the

mechanic and description of the players. As 2010 began it was coming clear that my hopes for an

online printmaking course that included a game interface were too high.

Five more presses get homes From California Richard Trujillo called me one day on the telephone and announced: "I'm

going to be a pro," he said. His enthusiasm delighted me. He ordered Mini Halfwood Number 66.

He was smitten by the optional brass bed and he wanted that too, despite it added five pounds to

the shipping costs. Luckily I had one brass bed left. We originally planned that he would come up

to Seattle and get lessons; that can still happen, of course. Also in January, Wil Moore, who had

emailed me in 2009 with his interest in a Halfwood reserved Mini 74. But Pete, Joan Grimord's

husband wanted to trade timetables so the press could be a Birthday gift. Wil was willing to swap

dates, delay his press and so he received the beautiful black lacquered press, Number 80.

John Weaver ordered a Mini in partnership with Jeff Geib. John said he is mostly a painter

and hadn't done any printmaking since college in the 1980's, but he remembered how he enjoyed

it: "This is great way to get back into it, probably with dry point, and go from there, maybe

monoprints as well," he wrote.

Stellan Schedin, in Sweden, found the Mini Halfwood on the Web and as we exchanged e-

mails we discovered we had some mutual acquaintances since I had been to Sweden on a sabbatical

leave in 1983. For me it was enjoyable to visualize his environment where his Mini, number 70,

would be and talk about some of those I met on my travels.

Photos: (Left) Holly Welsh’ holly wood Legacy Mini Halfwood Press.

(Right) Wil Moore’s black lacquer Legacy Mini Halfwood Press, now lost.

Later in February Holly Welsh, from Florida, called and described her plans to work with

her daughter in printmaking, and they planned to share a Mini Halfwood Press. She asked if it

were possible for me to make the press with holly wood—to go with her name! It was frustrating


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at first because holly is scarce and expensive. I was about to give up, learning that Holly herself

was also having trouble getting pieces that were big enough for the press’ wood parts. By chance,

when it seemed prohibitive, a local supplier, Rockler, came up with a shipment; and so Holly’s

Halfwood turned out fine. The wood took on a creamy, ivory-like color, which gave me an idea I

was to use later in my stories about the origins of the design of the Halfwood Press line.

Printmaking Party In February, 2010, Seattle’s flagship art supply store, Daniel Smith Inc., sponsored another

one of my printmaking demonstrations on a Legacy Mini Halfwood Press, and I used it as an

opportunity to test my idea of a printmaking party. To begin, Lynda, Janet Fisher and I loaded up

four presses plus my own demonstration model which I would use for my presentation. We brought

all the peripheral tools and supplies—inks, dampened paper, mixing knives, applicators, rubber

gloves—everything our participants would need to print (except aprons).

Plus I made etching plates for each printing station. These were the same plates I used to

do the printmaking tests in the second series of presses. In the course of about two hours, I did my

usual demonstration in plate-making and printing. Then we turned the people loose to try their

hand at printing. They slipped their prints into plastic bags I brought for this purpose and the happy

campers took them home.

Photos: (Left) Printmaking party at Daniel Smith, Inc.

(Right) Number 52. Intaglio test print. Photo by Janet Fisher.

The atmosphere was party-like, and laid the groundwork for even greater ideas yet to come

in the Halfwood Press saga—ideas like Printmaking Camp, Young Printmakers and Seniors

Printmaking. Lynda and Janet Fisher made videos and snapshots. Later I edited Lynda’s tape and

put the video on Youtube, but Janet’s video was from her Sony digital camera and in a format

which I couldn’t use on the editing software I had at that time; either it was incompatible or I

simply didn’t know how to convert the format.

The event had a backstory. This was at a time when I had invented a marketing plan to sell

the Legacy Halfwood Press that was successful—a little too successful because I was spending

most of my time finishing these presses and then, when they were completed, I had to test them.

That is, I chose to test the press and, in addition, I made video, put it on DVD and included the

DVD with the press when I shipped it. The plate, which I made just for the press I was testing, also

went. In fact, it was laminated on a card. It was beginning to look like some high-end luxury item.

All this work found me planning to promote the press yet again at Daniel Smith, so I made

up the test plates and, rather than print them on my own, alone in my shop with no one to talk to,


118

I took the plates to the Printing Party and other people printed them! In truth, I probably printed

them, too, but it was a lot more fun. Somewhere out there, among the people who happened to

come to the demonstration and party that day, there are people with a souvenir print from this first

printmaking party

The Ritchie Mined Series This year, we completed Nellie’s work on the ‘Zine articles database I titled Ritchie Mined,

with approximately 3,000 entries in an Excel database. The project is part of my concept for

teaching printmaking online. Inasmuch I presume (outdated, perhaps, as old principles of

university teaching values may be hopelessly obsolete) that students in higher education need deep

wellsprings of knowledge into which they can drill—and they would have to do this drilling-down

online. It used to be that the professor’s brain was worth picking

As the “missing” printmaking professor, I would need to provide access to my mind,

particularly to those experiences which I lived, the people I worked (and played) with, and the

contents of my inner sanctum, as it were, put into the form of my essays.

My notion of a university was—and is—based on the assumption that an accessible

database, like a library of the professors’ knowledge bases should be online. Furthermore, what

has been lost of the physical reality of the university—its brick and mortar, face to face

connections—could be augmented by the virtual reality of a user interface. In the best case, these

augmented realities my implement new realities, new contacts, new enriching experiences.

I had been keeping journals of my essays and digitizing them since the early 1970s. These

titles formed the basis for Word documents which, in turn, were put into e-book form using the

CreateSpace service and, from there, to Kindle eBooks on amazon.com. There are ten of these

eBooks, but as yet (at the time of this writing) I have not committed to paperback versions for

reasons of the cost and the lack of a market. When I do have them made into books, the boxed set

or bookshelf would look like the simulated version below:

Photo: (Left) Simulated image of the ten spines of Ritchie Mined.

(Right) Sample cover, the one shown here is for Artsport.

The Ritchie Mined Trading Cards Inspired by Hidden Objects Games (HOGS) such as Escape the Emerald Star and REO

Speedwagon: You can’t go home, I asked Nellie to create a spreadsheet in Excel listing works of

art in our Mini Art Gallery which could be used as images in Artist Trading Cards (ATC). I

sprinkled these cards through each of the Ritchie Mined eBooks.


119

Photo: Screenshot of an eBook in the Ritchie Mined series

this one from the ArtsPort eBook, one of ten.

Today—writing in 2017 on my Memoir Project—it’s easy to open one of the Kindle

eBooks on my desktop using amazon’s Cloud Reader. The photograph is a screen shot from the

first volume, ArtsPort. With my eyes on the screen I can scan the brief descriptions and the dates

I wrote the essays. It’s revealing to me how, although many years have passed since writing them,

I have been thinking about connecting my life to a game or making a game out of the gifts of my

life. Confucius said, “Better to play games than do nothing at all.” Florence Scovel Shinn laid out

the rules in her little book, “The Game of Life and How to Play it.” Good teachers!

Four more presses find homes At this time I was having a hard time keeping up with press orders, so I let it be known that

people could make a deposit and reserve a press if they were willing to wait for as long as it took

me to make it. Julianne Kershaw, in Australia, reserved her press in March. She was interested in

the printmaking party she saw on YouTube. As she is a designer in Australia I asked her about

finding someone Down Under to take up making presses there; she thought it was a good idea, but

this idea—a way to work around the high duty—never took hold. Later we had fun exchanging

galvanic etching techniques and other shop talk.

Another artist in California, Anne Van Oppen, had contacted me via e-mail back in October

and reserved Galleon Halfwood Press No. 3. She was putting together a new studio. She sent me

cards she printed in relief, some with special papers. On the Los Angeles Print Society Web she

wrote about herself: "Nature has been a primary interest. It's wonderful to capture the natural things

attracting me." Ann got deep into galvanic etching and made a series of YouTube videos.

Kirsten Horning, from Seaside, an Oregon beachside town, contacted and arranged to come

to Seattle to see the Halfwoods. On that visit she chose the Galleon and, when it was finished, she

came back to Seattle for an afternoon get-acquainted session. We printed her two zinc etching

plates she had made from earlier times. We also printed and my new test plate I was working on

for the schedule four 2010 Galleons Tom Kughler was building.

Michael Emory, or, it was actually a friend of Michael's, called me and talked about a plan

to incorporate printmaking in a coffee shop they were planning in Eugene, Oregon. It sounded like

an exciting idea—inspiring in my mind another way to bring printmaking into casual social

environments. His friend said about Michael that he is an artist who had early successes with his

prints and he wanted to get back into printmaking. Their coffee shop printery idea suffered during

the economic slump at the time, but Michael got his press anyway. Unfortunately, there was a

disagreement and I was to lose contact with Michael.


120

Graphic Novel Beginning in the spring of this year I was drawing comic panels in my black, blank-book

journal and illustrated the periods of my life that I mark as turning points. Besides making a meta-

game out of the story of my life, I sometimes think of comics and graphic novels. This goes along

with serial art—the art forms common in TV series (think soap opera, Downton Abbey, etc.) but

with an attempt on my part to gain viewer or user interaction.

Games figure so strongly in the arts of the last generation of the 21st Century that various

game mediums (including video games) were a lot like art forms. Time and again, people have

described the ephemeral and minor arts as being as important as the fine arts; and, perhaps,

sociologically, economically, and politically even more important than the vaunted fine arts if you

consider measuring their importance by those other factors.

Photo: Double page spread from the June, 2010 series

of drawing under the working title, 2010.

The drawings in my journal went on and on for weeks. The last one is dated in October.

The stories did not stop there, however, as I took up writing screenplays and novels after that,

and—in 2013—a forty-eight verse ballad I titled Vladimir’s Song—the images for which had

already appeared in the earlier 2010 journal.

Printmaking camp June found Nellie and I deep in the workings of Printmaking Camp, my idea for a

multimedia printmaking experience described in a graphic novel, collectible cards and screenplay

form.


121

Photos: Sample pages of the comb-bound version of Printmaking Camp,

(Right) Artist Trading Card sample, illustrated by Nellie Sunderland

The storyline follows my screenplay, Swipe, as a sequel. In Swipe, the screen play ends

with the hero’s adopted daughter on a passenger plane about to touch down in Brazil’s Hercílio

Luz Airport, outside Florianopolis, where her adoptive parents wait in happy anticipation as their

girl—now a grown woman with a college teaching job in Hawaii—is coming home for a visit.

I composed the graphic novel simultaneously with a screenplay intended for a ten-part TV

series. Printmaking Camp, the screenplay, begins with the daughter, Issey, on a plane bound for

the first stop of a round-the-world tour as she will be giving printmaking workshops. Her parents’

company in Floripa, Brazil specializes in manufacturing small, portable, hand-operated etching

presses—Halfwoods, naturally. Her press is in a printmaker chest just like the ones that I made.

In fact, the whole story is based on the Ritchie World Travelers’ travels in 1983. In this

treatment our heroine is worried because soon after she boarded the plane, her adopted father has

sent her a message with an encrypted SOS. He is a renowned professor on a tour of a remote and

secluded “communiversity” as part of a genius award he received—the Gates Prize. There’s

something dangerous going on, and he’ll try send follow-up messages later. She’s in flight so she

must continue on to fulfill her teaching obligations and await for further word from her father.

Her first stop is in Australia. Seated beside her on the plane is a man who is inordinately

interested in getting to know more about her. They land and he persists in stalking her. She shakes

him off, only to find him at a welcoming party given in her honor. Increasingly worried, she wants

to get away and an Aboriginal man—an old friend of her father’s—who helps her escape by

motorcycle. She’s safe for the moment.

She must get to her first printmaking camp session in Melbourne, and her new friend gives

her a ride on his motorcycle all the way from Sydney to Melbourne by way of Canberra. In

Melbourne, she gives her printmaking Workshop using the Mini Halfwood press. A radio station

broadcasts a special about it, and unbeknownst to our hero, it’s picked up on her stalker’s car radio.

Finished in Melbourne and encountering the bad guy on a beach, her savior intervenes again. She

must go back to Sydney to catch a plane to her next stop and her friend offers to fly here there in

a World War II biplane. She makes it to the airport on time.

However, the airport authorities want to inspect her printmaker chest and she fears they

will confiscate it. Secreted it in the press is her only means of communication with her father. The

authorities assure her that her press will rejoin her in Singapore.


122

This summarizes the first installment of this ten-part series titled printmaking camp. Nellie

and I combined her illustrations and fragments of the screenplay in a kind of graphic novel. I added

stamps from my artist stamps series, and I added cards. To this day it is not clear how all these

disparate parts fit together; even now, seven years later, I haven’t given up on this project.

At this point in the series Nellie began to write the remaining nine segments. It’s fortunate

that she could write from memory about those places on the hero’s itinerary because she made the

trip. She was only eleven at the time, but she is blessed with an excellent memory.

Some presses leave Washington State, some stay Linda Bandini, in Australia, reserved her press in mid-July and got it in January the next

year. The next month, Lane Hill, whom I met the first time in 2003 came to the Halfwood Press

Workshop on Taylor Avenue North in August. She saw the Mariner in progress and made a

commitment to take it for her planned shop in Wenatchee, then went traveling to follow her interest

in outreach programs. In April she returned and finalized her plans to take her Mariner home.

Cary Brief contacted me asking about the Mini Halfwood; then another email came, from

Christine—his wife. She wanted a Mini for their Anniversary present and a surprise gift for Cary's

birthday. It happened a press on the bench had lost its buyer, so I was able to meet the date and the

press arrived in time.

Gerry Giorgio sent questions regarding using the press for linoleum cuts, his favorite

medium. I related my experience with printing linoleum cuts and also woodblocks by utilizing a

chase. Gerry said he would build himself a chase like mine. Later he asked for, and bought, a

Printmaker Chest. We had a hard time because it arrived broken, and he returned it for repairs, and

then all was good. He said he needed the chest so it fit in his small apartment.

The 5th Galleon Halfwood Press I ferried to Port Townsend to my old friend and former

student, Pat Austin. It was her second Halfwood Press—the first one, a Legacy Mini Halfwood,

she bought in 2009 and I delivered it to her at PT’s North Wind Gallery. She thinks the press is a

work of art; she has a niece she hoped would eventually inherit her Galleon. In Port Townsend,

delivering her Galleon, I spent the night as her guest which gave us time to talk about the good old

days—the Mole Press and the workshops she set up for me in Anchorage, Alaska.

Photos: (Left) Patricia Austin with her first Halfwood in 2009.

(Right) Elsbeth Knott’s black walnut Printmaker Chest, with her press No. 79.

Elsbeth Knott, in Portland, Oregon, won a grant to produce her poems in book and print

forms, and as she had printmaking classes in the past, she saw the Halfwood press as a way to

expand on her poetry. Several months later she saw the Printmaker Chest and she added this to her


123

order, mentioning walnut as a possibility because her family heirlooms were of this wood. So I

used black walnut on her press, and it worked out well. She received her press in mid-April.

Photo: Twenty-three presses sold in 2010 composed as stamp sheet.

Phoebe Dylan contacted me after she saw the Kuroiwa-Leonard DVD, Japanese Woodcut

Workshop, in which my artwork appeared. Phoebe used to live in Seattle and practiced oil painting,

working on small scale. She started doing woodcuts and took a class in SolarPlate. She said plein

air printmaking was an appealing idea.


124

Joan Grimord makes all kinds of miniatures, so when she noticed the Mini Halfwood Press

online, she thought to get one, made her reservation and then, thanks to her spouse, it was to be

her Christmas present. Later she asked about small copper plates, and I sent her a little bundle.

Kim Joo Hee was still in London when she contacted me in September of this year, fresh

out of design school. She settled on the Galleon, and specifically wanted No. 7. I shipped it by

FedEx to Paris, to where she moved but the press arrived totally broken. It was a long and

harrowing experience for both of us to make it right again, but at long last we achieved it.

Roger Newton sent me several messages and settled on Legacy Mini Halfwood No. 65.

Also he sent a cyanotype greeting card—a rare thing! I read a review of a show he had at Ruth

Horowitz' gallery in New York back in 2001, a show of camera-less photographs. They were huge

cibachrome prints made with his contrivances of water-and-glass objects.

Takes time to make presses Brent Learned telephoned me from Oklahoma early in October to order his Mini Halfwood

Press. It took me a long time, but I finished in April, 2011. He and his work is well represented on

the Web, I found. Then there was Dustin McClure, who telephoned from Wyoming and ordered

his press in mid-September of 2010 but didn’t get it until April, 2011. I could not resist telling him

his name, Dustin, was one of my pseudonyms, Dustin Handyside McCann, a name I used in some

videos and which is also the lead's name in my screen play, Dusty's Prize, later changed to Swipe.

Marvin Johnson is a stamp artist and former trade printer. He had heard of me because he's

another ardent follower of our mutual friend, C. T. Chew, the renowned stamp artist. Marvin has

followed the artistamp movement for years. When he discovered a Mini Halfwood Press at the

home of Ali Fujino (Ali has Legacy Halfwood Press No. 51) he wanted one.

Megan Yee's parents wanted to give her a graduation present. Megan had been passing by

the Halfwood Press Workshop near her home, had seen the press and at one point had stopped in

to chat. She was sold! Megan is a graduate of a California art school and was having success with

paper-based arts, and planned to advance her career partly by means of her own Halfwood press.

Dave Wilburn made a Mini Halfwood Press a gift to the artist Ai Hayatsu, who makes

aquatints. Ai's Website says "… always has been an animal lover including frogs, worms and

squids. She also has loved writing and drawing since she was a child. Ai came to New York to

attend school. She lives with her husband David and a creature called Tombo in New York City."

Whenever Carol Brozman came to Seattle to visit, she bolstered my notions about teaching

(because she had taught at Penn State) and updated me on things like SteamPunk, video games,

project management and designing with other people over the Internet—her day job. She was the

first to tell me about TED Talks and, wow, has that ever been a good tip! In December she bought

Legacy Mini Halfwood Press Number 62, her second Halfwood press. She got the first Galleon

Halfwood Press years before. She, like several others expressed that she thinks the Halfwood

presses are works of art.

The final quarter of the decade As the year coasted into its final months, my journal shows that my mind was bursting with

ideas and Bob Dylan’s lyrics came to me: I got ‘a head full of ideas that are driving me insane. At

one point in my journal I quipped: It’s not a matter of which kind of mental illness we have, it’s

which kind is sustainable. When a population of all unsustainable mental illnesses is too great,


125

that population destroys itself. I was thinking about the theories about creativity being a kind of

mental illness or the consequence of letting your mind run free, unrestrained by social norms.

Photo: Selection from the 2010 journal.

The pages have one incredible (lacking credibility?) idea after another, like time-share

printmaking studios, a novel way of selling one’s art studio as a startup launched on an unfinished

career. That one was based on the movie, Spitfire Grill, when some women raffled off their

restaurant. The probably reason I was getting so many wild ideas was because Nellie and I had

been working on my Ritchie Mined series, which is a compendium of my essays dating back to the

1970’s, logged on our computer drives from the days I first started using computers for writing. I

was drunk on my own home-brewed essays! Blogging descended from this technique, the word

itself comes from web log, invented to describe the way website-users analyze their use and their

audience’s use, a method of logging data.

Our Ritchie Mined series is designed to go with my plan to be a great teacher, and the only

way this can happen is digitally. It’s an outmoded idea now, but there was a time when great

universities kept the intellectual capital of their faculty in order that the value of their research

could be tapped even after the faculty retired and died. The UW is not in this class, I decided, so I

made a game out of keeping my IT for my family—just in case.

David Prentice collects my art Aside from Dennis Evans and Nancy Mee, who were fans of my artworks in the 1970’s

and early 1980’s, my artworks haven’t been “collected” in numbers by individuals in the same

way that Virginia Wyman, to recall one example, who bought many paintings by George Woodall

who (like Dennis and Nancy) were once students in my classes at the UW. However, this year a

man named David Prentice saw my work in the window of the Mini Art Gallery, called me up and

on that day began buying my work in earnest. He happened to be living in one of the units in the

same building as the Mini Art Gallery, saw my work daily, and grew to like it.


126

Photos: (Left) Screen of the Rolling Sorcerer, wood and paper, 1980?

(Right) Rocking Horse Winner. Woodcut, 1964. Collection of Robin Abel.

The interesting thing about is that David did not consider himself an art collector at all. If

I expressed my curiosity he’d say, “I just like it!” The other interesting thing is that he chose pieces

that were—what can I say? Strange? I mean, for example, the fake lithograph stone bearing the

fake image of the lithograph I printed for Jacob Lawrence in 1970. In October, David added the

last of the six Screens of the Rolling Sorcerer to his Ritchie Collection. He collected so many

pieces I published a photobook for him to put on his coffee table.

Another Seasonal Card with Michael Baldwin Our seasonal Christmas card last year was a big success and I liked working with Michael

Baldwin, he gave me a special rate for a photography session. He told me he shared our work last

year with others on his website and got good feedback. Naturally I called on him for another

session—this time a different setup.

Ahead of time for the shoot I made an etching plate picturing Santa’s face. Before Michael

showed up I prepared the plate with red ink so he could print it. Our photo session as a big success.

Lynda and I took separate photos at home in our ‘jammies and I composed all the images—

including a Christmas tree—into one card for this year’s greeting card.

Photos: (Left) Greeting Card with Michael Baldwin and the

Ritchies peeking. (Right) Etching made for the photo.

Again, as it had been the year before, people who received our cards were pleased, and we

resolved to do another one in 2011. It was sad when we reached the next season, because Michael died

before I called him. So it was not to be.


127

Index

A

Albright, Steven Dr., 26

Austin, Pat, 112, 122

B

Bailey, Walt Professor, 98, 99

Baldwin, Michael, 113, 114, 126

Balisle, Jennifer, 113

Bandini, Linda, 122

Bark, Rhea, 11

Benjamin, Walter, 38

Bivins, Phil, 112, 113

Block, Deborah, 57

Bonnema, Nancy, 86

Both, Greg, 47

Brief, Christine and Cary, 122

Brozman, Carol, 124

Bryan, Billie Jane, 51, 59, 91

Bryan, Billie Jane and Eric, 40, 51, 91, 93,

104, 106, 114, 115

Bryan, Eric, 81

Bryan, Matilda, 9, 55, 59, 60, 80, 91, 92

Buech, Barbara, 112

Bush, George W., 12

C

Carol, Tom, 39

Carraher, Ron, 10

Carroll, Patrick, 65

Chew, Carl, 23, 51, 89, 124

Childs, Julia, 9

Cipolla, Paula, 26, 115

Clark, Arthur C., 7

Cogley, John, 112

Collette, Kevin, 27

D

Davidson, Sam, 23, 48, 67, 79

Dellos, Nick, 41, 50, 61, 68, 72, 73, 81

DeMente, Nicole, 51

Dillon, Sylvia, 112, 113

Dylan, Bob, 124

Dylan, Phoebe, 123

E

Emory, Michael, 119

Enghaus, Brad, 21

Evans, Dennis, 11, 125

F

Fisher and Darren Mitchell, Janet, 94

Fisher, Janet, 94, 95, 98, 99, 103, 104, 111,

112, 115, 117

Fisher, Veda Janet, 94

Folkestad, William Dr., 95, 96

Forsythe, Doug, 45, 46

Fraker, Christopher, 113

Fujino, Ali, 112

G

Gates, Bill, 11

Gates, Elmer, 95

Geib, Jeff, 116

Ginsberg, Linda, 26, 74

Giorgio, Gerry, 122

Glowen, Kathryn and Ron, 65

Goldberg, Joe, 94

Gore, Al, 12

Grimord, Joan, 124

Grimord, Joan and Pete, 116

Guaita, Maria, 107

Gunn, Pam, 82

H

Hall, Cheryl, 58, 65

Halloran, Dean, 48

Hayatsu, Ai, 124

Hayter, Stanley W., 22

Hayter, Stanley William, 79, 107

Hee, Kim Joo, 124

Heid, Len, 64

Heinrich, Randi, 103

Hill, Lane, 122

Hill, Napoleon, 13

Horiuchi, Hide, 76

Horning, Kirsten, 119

Howell, Gwen, 81, 112

Hughes, Jeremy Joan, 113

J

Jenkins, James, 113

Johnson, Marvin, 124

Johnson, Sarah, 40, 72

K

Kanter, R. M., 74

Kehl, Richard, 10

Kershaw, Julianne, 119

Kim, Kathryn, 60

King, Billy, 79, 87

Klugman, Dave, 59, 65

Knott, Elsbeth, 122

Knowles, Amanda, 97

Krekow, Barbara, 36


128

Kughler, Tom, 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 57, 59, 65,

77, 81, 83, 85, 102, 112, 113, 119

Kughler, Tom and Margie, 46, 47

Kuroiwa, Izumi, 25, 40, 79

L

Labitsky, Curt, 48

Laden, Osama Bin, 12

Larrick, Maggie, 21

Lawrence, Jacob, 53, 126

Learned, Brent, 124

Leonard, Mark, 25, 40

Liao, Frances, 28

Lotz, David, 79, 90, 94, 103, 104, 107, 114,

115

Lundin, Norman, 48

M

Mashek, Dennis, 44

Matthews, Eleanor, 76

Mau, Jane, 112

McGraw, Janice and Keith, 80

Mee, Nancy, 125

Moore, Wil, 116

Mueller, Mark, 39

Müller, Christine, 112

Myhre, Ron, 112

N

Nelson, Hans, 54

Nesch, Rolf, 56, 107

Newton, Roger, 124

Nowlin, Mark, 87

O

Oaksen, Heather, 44

Olsen, Marta, 17

Olterman, Natalie, 113

Overton, John, 44

Ozubko, Chris, 48

P

Parks, Lane, 33, 52

Peterson, Michael, 11

Phillips, Peggy, 23

Pinkerton, Mark, 113

Prentice, David, 125

Puri, Carol, 112

R

Rabel, Kathleen, 44

Randall, Arnie, 74

Randall, Reino, 106

Redinger, Teresa, 58

Reynolds, Marjorie, 69

Riggs, Randi Burke, 63

Ritchie, J. Harlene and W. D., 16

Ritchie, Lynda, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 26, 35, 37,

40, 51, 52, 53, 56, 59, 69, 80, 89, 92, 93,

94, 99, 100, 101, 105, 107, 108, 109, 113,

117, 126

Romais, Eloise, 85

Ross, Bob, 14

S

Salzer, Lisel, 25, 26, 94

Schedin, Stellan, 116

Scheier, Shirley, 48

Shinn, Florence Scovel, 119

Skinner, Scott, 113

Smith, Daniel, 28, 44, 53, 54, 64, 65, 83, 84,

90, 94, 105, 117

Sommers, Larry, 48

Sperry, Bob, 10

Speth, Constance, 75

Spurgeon, Sarah, 107

Stair, Larry, 11

Staley, Carolyn, 67, 79

Stanton, Barbara, 87, 89

Steinmetzer, Christina Dr., 25

Stewart, Martha, 9, 19

Stinson, John, 112

Strawser, Melissa, 74

Summers, Carol, 88

Sunderland, Nellie and Mike, 40, 59, 77, 92,

94, 97, 98, 107, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121,

122, 125

T

Thadei, Lois Chichinoff, 87

Thomas, Michele, 87

Tobin, Rob, 19

Trueba, Frank, 113

Trujillo, Richard, 116

Tsutakawa, 94

V

Van Oppen, Anne, 119

W

Wadley, Preston, 44

Watkins, Catherine, 112

Weaver, John, 116

Welsh, Holly, 116

Wetterauer, Letitia, 113

White, Mary Kaye, 15

Wilburn, Dave, 124

Wilkson, Jenny and Jeffrey, 82

Williams, Ann, 86

Wilson, Peggy, 65

Woodall, George, 125

Wyman, Virginia, 125


129

Y

Yee, Megan, 124

Youngman, Carl, 76

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