The Payoff
Bill H. Ritchie Memoirs 2011-2019
Description:... He had a nightmare. He dreamed of a dump truck parked in front of his private art museum and workers cleaning everything out and throwing it away. This day should be depressing. But it's not. It's unburdening. He teeter-tottered between virtue and reality for five decades, trying to reconcile his calling with reality.The total of his life's work may be the stuff of landfills - neither museum quality nor right for commercial galleries. Even after millions of hours of practice with so-called old and new technology it may come to this. The nightmare lingered, triggering his decision to write an account of how it all came about.Were there other reasons to start his memoirs? Yes. It's what his mother did; and in 2016 Trump was elected president and the United States was on the threshold of a long social, moral and economic decline under his administration. Trump would dump American values in the landfill, beginning in January 2017.Believing this, 2017 would be a good time for an artist/teacher to cocoon, tell the tale of his happy life, account for his past successes but also confess his mistakes and disappointments.Writing his memoirs might be like squeezing that lemon which he (like other artist/educators) believed life had handed him. Who knows? This way might be the recipe to make lemonade!His goal remains: To be a great teacher in the printmaking world, and to go on working in the spirit of win/win. Writing may be his last refuge, so his story can reside in digital devices linked to the web.
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