Bill H. Ritchie

Born 1941, Yakima Bill Ritchie grew up on his father's farms in the Yakima Valley, Washington. An artist since 1960, he studied at Central Washington University and San Jose University, California. Bill taught art at the University of Washington from 1966 to 1985. He lives and works with his wife, Lynda, in Seattle, Washington practicing in the family’s workspace and gallery in the Queen Anne Neighborhood. In addition to his art practices, Ritchie designed and built miniature etching presses with plans for developing online learning printmaking using games and toys for the for all ages. He made good teaching art and technologies but went on a quest for the "Perfect Studios," where teaching, research, practice and service happen concomitantly, which he saw in the teaching hospital at the UW. He discovered the 19th Century neuroscientist, Elmer Gates, whose biography inspired a vision of great world teachers in an imaginary place Bill named "Emeralda," where people in Science, Technology, Reading-and-writing, Engineering, Arts (including performing arts, Mathematics, and Nature studies (STREAMN) interact to create blended, online learning experiences. Centered on his passion for traditional printmaking he reinvented it for the age of digital communication, having observed that art and technology were joined at birth, proved by the paintings and handprints comingled on the walls of caves where prehistoric people convened demonstrating the earliest form of civilizing, social arts.