Time Was

When students paid a lot to hear me - In a nostalgic mood, the old professor reflects on a time when he was at the peak of his career when students paid a high price to hear and see him teaching. Considering this, what do students get today for their money, paying a lot more for someone else?1284 Words. es100405. ©2010 Bill Ritchie.

Closet Musician

Let the music be heard in a printmaking world - He postulated there is a connection between printmaking and music. In printmaking you make plates and print them repeatedly. In music you write the score, or improvise, and do this over and over. A good game needs music, and he finds an idea how to do it. 789 Words. es100125. ©2010 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Printmaking Objects

How many objects are there? - Seeking a way to teach printmaking online, this professor arrives at the question most beginning printmakers encounter: What are the tools and equipment needed for making traditional fine art prints? He uses a musician’s computer game as an idea to teach. 441 Words. es100115. ©2010 Bill Ritchie

First Day

Starting all over again at E’Studios - It’s his first day on a make-believe island, the second of ten, at the onset of his fourteenth year winning the Gates Prize, sending himself off to his imaginary printmaking world in Emeralda Region. This requires an introduction so he writes another one. 514 Words. es091216. ©2009 Bill Ritchie. Full Text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Fourth Place

Meeting up in a changed world - The “third place” was popular in the last century to describe a place between work and home, like a stop at the tavern or coffee shop to see friends, gossip or maybe do a little business. There is a fourth place today in cyberspace, as artists go virtual. 1231 Words. es091201. ©2009 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Millionaire Printmaker

When I opened my eyes to prints I was looking at time - He liked to say, “When I opened my eyes to art, I was looking at prints.” This was his mantra for over 40 years. The author may have thought prints were the carriers for fine art, art’s time-and-space vehicles, but printmaking is in fact a time-based art. 1145 Words. es090912 ©2009 Bill Ritchie Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Erica Williams

After all that she did for me - A telephone call inspires an artist, who had his heyday in the ‘80s, recalls some things that the caller did for him as an art dealer back then. He recalls highlights of his short, happy career, and how her help brought about creative acts and made money. 1017 Words. es090714. ©2009 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Intern Task

Ideas for a Web Design Intern - With an opportunity to gain the assistance of an intern, the taskmaster notes some ideas to serve as guidelines for the intern period of 12 weeks. His goal is to use the Internet as part of an online course that bridges art history and new technologies. 611 Words. es090614. ©2009 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Meta Soap

A soap opera for the age of digital reproduction - There’s an essay he would like to write to enter for today during his day stay on the island of Electronic Studios and Art Galleries—but his time is up, used up in a review of Chapter 7 of his novel, “Hunt for the Emeralda Treasure,” a meta-daytime drama. 1111 Words. ©2009 Bill Ritchie. es090604. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Selling Sequel

The art of selling prints - Twenty years ago he wrote “The Art of Selling Art,” based on his experience selling his own creations. It was an education, and his textbooks were many, their advice skewed toward commercial gain. His book was personalized. Now he wants to write a sequel. 1354 Words. ©2009 Bill Ritchie es090525. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Lesson One

Introduction to Learning Printmaking Online - He may be teaching printmaking in a new way soon, and the professor, entering the final phase of his lifelong career as a teacher, considers ways he will approach the vital first lessons of his plan to teach printmaking in the age of digital reproduction. 1125 Words. ©2009 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Studio Bound

Note from a studio of anticipatory studies - What would it be like, he asks, if he spent his entire day bound to his studio, like being housebound? Surrounding him are unfinished projects that he knows are part of the anticipatory world of Emeralda, his imaginary, perfect world of arts and artistry. 1180 Words. ©2009 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Driving Son of HAL Crazy

If Doug Lenat Made Movies - Turning points are features of a written script for a movie or plays that carry the audience from one event to another. The sequence is a combination gives us Acts I, II, and III. An Internet company, Cycorp, likewise develops dramatically along a course. 1928 Words. ©2000 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Holding Labor

I choose Emeralda - Ideas are the commerce of artists. Not only their productions in the form of paint, paper and other matter, but the impulse or notions—musings—behind them, their hands owe the brain of the artist. In economics, artists labor in the precarious professions. 744 Words. Copyright 2008 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

IICS Asks, Ritchie Answers

Notes from a panel discussion - The International Interactive Computing Society members held an Annual Art Show in December, 1991. Board members called three artists together to show their work and speak in a panel. I wrote this based on the list of questions that guided our discussion. 5480 Words. Copyright 1992 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com

Card 40

Getting to the right language of art in the age of digital reproduction - The 14th collaboration session established the idea that XML would be the language for Emeralda Artist Trading Cards. Not Excel and not Access, as had been the dilemma. So the inventor turns his attention to the designing of card number forty for testing. 472 Words. Copyright 2008 Bill Ritchie. Full text by email request: ritchie@emeralda.com