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bill ritchie

EmeraldaWorks - A proprietorship

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Online Art Education - Shifting away from a view of prehistoric art and seeing the sea change caused by printmaking.

30,000 years ago two people practiced their art in two different ways. One used a stick, some pigment, and her vision flowed from her through the hand holding a tool.

The other got her results by spraying pigment against her hand flat on the stone wall and, as variation, painted her hand and smacked it to leave a hand print.

The line from the former led to what we call visual arts. The line from the latter led to what we call media arts, and this one is not a visual art at all, and it has made all the difference in the world.

I took the line of thinking less traveled in the art world, the line that says media arts are not visual arts, but they are performance arts.

And that choice has made all the difference.

This would seem like a good thing for a person like me - 70 years old and still coming up with new ideas to offer students - but, no.

Not until now, when ONE speaker in the TED series has said "humanities" in the same context as free online education alongside science, math, etc.

The time is coming when I will see my 1980 approach to sharing what I experienced in printmaking - the ancestor of all the media arts and useful for the transferrable skills associated with it.

Related Talks:
Topics: a life of service printmaking
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    elizabeth muncey 10+

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    Aug 17 2012: Not sure if I said this before but will say it again. A visual image is far more powerful than a written one. Words are social constructions. In a society like U.S.A. where there are so much cultural diversity words are too open to misinterpretation. I believe Bill that some kind of software package that could be used at home is very relevant to today's fast moving media industry. It is a great way of introducing the idea of creativity to a very wide audience. It is also important to have balance hence all my references to artists like Rolf Harris. Family workshops might be a way forward for what you want to achieve, there have to be boundaries to protect the vulnerable. Anyone working with children and vulnerable adults in this country has to undergo a rigorous C.R.B. check and rightly so even though the argument is that it is out of date aa soon as it is printed. What about printing some colouring in books for the youngest of the children and then talking to the parents about the transferrable skills to be gained from creative workshops. As I said before not at all linked to Elizabeth Muncey, actress. Not even related to her.
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      bill ritchie

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      Aug 17 2012: I apologize for asking abou the theater connection. Printmaking is a performance art, so it has a historic relationship to video games and TV, and those businesses have done a lot of damage to families and the children show it. I like coloring books of course, and I wanted to make them one time; graphic novels, too, I like a great deal. A visual image is powerful, yes, but aural dimensions, as music, are examples of time-based dimensional arts. Theater, opera, ballet, dance - all time based but, in live performance, site dependent and very costly. Add to that the tremendous generation of emissions going into the atmospher. Yet artists who are not educated to the extent that they can join with scientists to work on, and communicate possible solutions, are usually working for the corporations responsible for rolling ahead with yesteday's premises, such as that we will never run out of resources, that global warming is a natural cycle, etc. Music and movies, TV, video games - all are more powerful than a visual image, if the condition of today's world, etc. are an indication. I used to teach in an institution where the visual image reigned supreme, and if you dared to bring up the subject of aural dimensions and the interaction with performance artists and scientists, you were ostracized. That's why I'm attracted to free (truly free in both the sense you don't have to pay tuition and the professor is free to express the results of his or her work).

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