The Penland Experience - Part 3

I finally managed to take photos of the books I made at Penland, and here are some of those images.

I'd worked only briefly with acrylic paint in the past, so I was looking forward (although with a bit of trepidation), to my two-week Book Arts workshop at Penland, where we were going to paint papers for our books. I wasn't disappointed. We spent days and days painting layers of paint on both sides of large sheets of Arches Cover. We used various techniques and tools to create texture with each new layer. We cut up the papers and used them as pages for the books we made. Altogether, we made about a half-dozen books, each a different structure, each a little more complex than the last.

We supplemented this with other processes: printmaking (making collagraphs on an etching press), carving rubber stamps for mark-making, and using handwriting as graphic imagery. I loved it all. I loved it and I was anxious about it. "Am I doing it right?," I kept wondering. After a while, I stopped wondering. I still wasn't sure, but I'd decided to treat what I was doing as an experiment. After all, if you can't experiment during a workshop, when can you?

So though perfectionism and I are on a first-name basis, I told myself that wanting to achieve perfection at something that others -- notably, our instructor, Laura Wait --had been doing for years was just a titch overambitious. The self-talk helped, and there's something about Penland itself that encourages you to take risks and try new things.

I didn't lose all my fear when I was in the studio (fear of failure, of embarrassment, of whatever else scares us when we feel vulnerable), but what was left was healthy. It was the kind of fear that pushes you to create even though you're not sure of the outcome. And since by nature and habit I really like to know the outcome in advance, managing to live with the ambiguity was a big deal.

I read somewhere today that, in art, the most important thing is to start, and the second most important thing is to finish, and that if you do those two things, everything else will take care of itself. In a fundamental way, that's what places like Penland give you: a start and a finish. And that makes the next time all that much easier.

More to come.

Drum leaf binding (developed by Tim Ely) - the book is approximately 15" high by 3 1/2" wide.

The first two-page spread from the book. We worked with signs and symbols.
I focused on the triangle and the letter 'M'

A close-up of another of the spreads from the book

We overpainted mylar that we'd used underneath our pages as we painted.

A two-page spread from another book

A head-on view of the pages of another book

Field Trip

Tuesday was a field trip with a friend to visit the gallery in Burnsville that will be hosting the exhibition for our Book Salon for a month later this year. It's a lovely space. Coincidentally, Wendy Reid, the owner, serves with me on the Board of HandMade in America. She's brought in a wonderful selection of art at all price points. I noticed that the gallery participates in several community and philanthropic causes, usually by donating a percentage of sales of specific objects.

We stopped in at the Burnsville Town Center across the street from the gallery to see a quilt that my friend had heard about. It's amazing. The work of quilt artist Barbara Webster, it portrays key places, people and sights in the history of Yancey County, and surrounds them with representations of the four seasons. She used both old photographs and took over a thousand new ones. it's a masterpiece of design, and spans the entire lobby wall (the size is 24' x 7'). It's well worth making a trip just to see it.

After lunch (which was a delayed birthday treat for me), we traveled on to Penland School of Crafts, so that my friend could visit with a book artist friend she hadn't seen for nearly 20 years, Jana Pullman, who's been teaching a two-month class in leather bindings. I planned to visit Annie Fain Liden, who's currently a teaching assistant in Beth Ross Johnson's weaving class. Annie Fain is one of my bookmaking teachers as well as a friend, and it was a joy to catch up with her.

It was a long day, and a good one. I'm soooo looking forward to the book arts workshop I'll be taking at Penland this summer with book artist Laura Wait. I've been Googling Laura to learn more about her work and have found many examples of her books, which has made me even more enthusiastic about learning from her.

Summing Up the Week

Well, I didn't get into the Hedi Kyle workshop at Penland, but did get into Laura Wait's workshop. I don't know where I fell in the lottery, so I have no idea how far down on the waiting list I am for the former. I'm disappointed about not getting to study with "the book goddess (my term for her)," but looking forward to the class with Laura Wait. We'll be doing at least one case-bound book, so I expect it will be very different from what I might have done in Kyle's class. I am hopeful -- and the workshop description seems to indicate -- that we'll spend a fair amount of time on content as well. I'd be more disappointed if I weren't scheduled to take a class at Arrowmont in August with Carol Barton, who is known for her pop-up and tunnel book structures. That will balance out my summer's work nicely.

I started my classes at UNCA: 'Women in the Short Story' class and 'The Art of Watching Film.' They're both very good (the teacher for the film class is particularly dynamic), and I'm only sorry that I'll be missing of one each of them, as I have a HandMade in America Board retreat that I'm scheduled to attend (and looking forward to) in a few weeks. We read Irwin Shaw's 'The Girls in Their Summer Dresses' for the first short story class, a little gem of a piece. Luckily, there are no wallflowers in the class, so we had a voluble, spirited discussion. Our film session focused on using literary analysis tools to analyze film, and we watched clips from Blue Velvet, Apocalypse Now, and City Lights, and Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. in its entirety. Almost every class will include one entire movie, to illustrate a theme. To start the class, each student was asked to introduce himself/herself and mention a favorite film. An impossible task. It was a great ice breaker and a good way to get a sense of people through their choices (or at least to delude myself that I was). I simply mentioned two films that I love: Days of Heaven and Bringing up Baby. According to my film-choice disclosure theory, I wonder what that said about me?

Friday, which was to be my Studio Day, turned out to be a play date in Asheville with my friend Carol. We cruised a couple of galleries (including Ariel, where we saw some of Dan Essig's latest work), stopped in at Early Girl for lunch, Malaprop's for coffee, and True Blue for art supplies. I haven't done that in quite a while, and it felt great. The splendid spring day felt as lighthearted as we. Oh, and we located Eaties, the cereal bar, for future reference.