Jeff Goodman, who is teaching a photo/video/documentation workshop this session, made this sequence of pictures of studio assistant Laurencia Strauss (listening) and instructor Christina Shmigel (yelling) for a flipbook demonstration. Of course, anything you can make into a flipbook, you can also make into an animated GIF.
WNC magazine’s current issue contains an excellent story, titled A Tradition of Innovation, that presents an illustrated overview of Penland School. You can read the article on the WNC website. Here’s a teaser:
The more time one spends at Penland, the more one understands the sense of connectivity and pulse of mystery that’s hard to define to an outsider. Though almost everyone who visits can agree there is a certain magic to the place. “There’s a removal from the day-to-day that happens when you have to drive up and up and up, and then up some more into the mountains, and you come around a corner and there’s that valley with the studios behind it,” says Steve Miller, another trustee who runs the MFA program in book arts at the University of Alabama and has taught at Penland 14 times. “That remove, that temple at the top of the mountain phenomenon—it moves me every time.”
Thanks to writer Brian Barth (who is a relative of Penland’s founder Lucy Morgan) and photographer Mike Belleme for their fine work on this piece.
Instructor Tom Huang and his assistant, Reed Hansuld, putting the skin on a canoe outside the wood studio. The ribs of the canoe were cut from plywood, the shell was made from strips of split bamboo. The skin they are applying is recycled grocery bags laminated with spray adhesive. They applied 6 or 8 layers of plastic to each canoe. The class built five canoes using this method.
It sounds a bit sketchy, and the boats were intended to be somewhat ephemeral. But when they put them on the water, they behaved just like canoes.
Here’s the flotilla (plus one dog) on its way down the Toe River.