Everyday at 4:30 PM in Kathy King’s spring clay class, several students stop working for a bit and mop the floor (a daily necessity in a clay studio). While this is going on, Kathy reads out loud from a cheesy pirate romance novel. George Bowes was here this week as a visiting artist so he did the honors on Thursday.
Our neighbor, frequent instructor, former resident artist and trustee Dan Bailey recently shared with us a series of stills from a photographic animation of a lunar landing he made at Penland in 1983, using multiple slide projectors:
Our neighbor, metalsmith Marvin Jensen, is the astronaut, and jeweler Kathleen Doyle is his alien attacker. Author/illustrator and puppeteer Debra Frasier created the extraterrestrial costume. This was all pre- Photoshop and After Effects, of course, so the props, costumes, actors, and scenario had to be photographed live, in situ, in rapid sequence. The slides were then projected with a programmable two-projector setup that created the appearance of animation. Dan describes the project as an attempt to connect narrative photographic series (like the work of Duane Michals, for example) with early cinema from the 1900s.
Please join us for a lecture by master blacksmith Nol Putnam in Northlight Auditorium at Penland School, at 8:15pm on Saturday, April 28th.
Nol Putnam opened his first forge in 1973. He taught himself the craft with the help of books, stubbornness, and a mentor. Starting in the early 1980s he undertook large architectural commissions – gates, balconies, and curved handrails. While he still does a few commissions, his work since 2001 has largely been sculptural, ranging in size from the palm of the hand to architectural scale.