Old dogs and new tricks! Convert a PC user and classroom frustration.

This blog will probably be the least frequently added-to blog on the site. Pretty ironic for an artist's website and gallery. The simple fact is that so much of what happens concerning my art requires demonstrations rather than explanations. In regard to the website itself? When Leo Laporte used to describe this infuriating computing machine as a 'personal confuser' he couldn't have been more spot-on in his description. This old dog has had to learn so many new tricks that his brain is about to explode! Learning to use the technology is a requirement, not a choice. It makes my work better...when it works! There's my problem. So many updates, so many failures! Maybe someone out there will try to convert me from being a PC user to a Mac user with the same enthusiasm that they use to convert me to a new religion!
So what's technology done for me? I started working with digital photography way before the mainstream because of my early computer work and quickly found practical applications for it as yearbook sponsor in my teaching days. Digital photography saves a lot of money and waste in film. I'm all for saving myself and my clients moolah and being kind to the ecology. Digital imaging, like photoshop, and the internet, has been equally beneficial. Once upon a time I'd use scads of paper creating my composition sketches and ridiculous amounts of fuel and time commuting back and forth to clients like the Blackhawks to do 'show and tell' until everything was ready for the canvas. Now the process is paperless via the Internet, and except for client meetings at the beginning and end of a project, virtually pollution free. My prices have lowered even though general costs in most industries have gone up and my own cache` as an artist has grown. The answer is technology. My prints are better than ever, sometimes surpassing the original art (I'll explain that in another entry later) because until the final pressing, the process is now in my capable hands, rather than a printmaker who may not have the same artist's sensibilities that I've developed over all these years.
There are times when I toy with the idea of teaching again. I'm afraid this may all be too complex for a High School curriculum, and I don't have the advanced degrees to 'prof' at a college. My wife is still teaching, and despite being a workaholic and owning 'multi' advanced degrees she's still forced to jump through bureaucratic hoops to prove that she's still capable of educating semi-literate kids (I mean that kindly, this is English as a second language stuff). I spend about one quarter of every day studying, experimenting and learning new tricks, yet it would all count for nothing in today's school system of paper layered, PC jargon infused, lowest common denominator advancement. In my teaching days I usually expected the best from my students and was gratified to see that they usually thrived on it and rose to the task-until the school system forced me to turn that concept upside down. I'm afraid my teaching days are over unless I start my own classes. As my favorite movie character once said, "I am impatient with stupidity".