With the photo and paper studios scheduled to be in use during fifth session, and annual benefit auction events planned for the social hall, the new Northlight building is nearing completion. On Friday, June 22, these guys were busy with exterior painting.
A nice touch is this siding on the south side of the social hall. It looks pre-weathered because it is; these boards were salvaged from the old Northlight building.
We kicked off Penland’s 2018 summer sessions with fourteen high-energy workshops across our studios. And here in this photo by student Gregory Jundanian, two of them came together in a wonderfully surprising way. Gregory was in the Word & Image workshop with Christopher Benfey and Neal Rantoul, and he created this image of printmaking/kitemaking instructor Koichi Yamamoto in flight in the printmaking studio. There may or may not have been a little Photoshop involved, but who are we to reveal an artist’s secrets?
For years, we’ve been talking about the renovation of The Craft House, Penland’s iconic log structure. (About 20 percent of the logs needed replacement.) For just as long we’ve all been wondering how it would be done. Now that contractor Richard Huss and crew are deep into the job, we are starting to get the answer.
And the answer is: log by log. They take out a log or two, put in some props, cut a new log to length, lay it in the space, mark it, cut notches, put it in place, refine the cuts, put it back in place, and then do it again.
It helps that the building has a quite a bit of structure inside of the logs and it’s nailed together every which way. But the secret seems to be patience and methodical application of craft—things we respect.
