NC Painter William Jameson Offers " Working Large" Workshop

March 20 - 22: Working Large: Conquer Your Fear.  Leave your comfort zone and enjoy working a little or a lot larger than your usual sizes. Become adept at making larger as well as better paintings and discover why some compositions are meant to be small works and others translate beautifully to a larger format.

This 3 day studio workshop will be a fun and intensive exploration of handling a large canvas. Participants will learn how to select compositions that "work" for large scale paintings and how to execute them without letting the size intimidate. Painters will work in their choice of acrylic or oil.

The workshop will begin with a "get acquainted party" on Wednesday evening, March 19th at the Jameson home and studio. Each painting day will start with conversation related to studio technique over coffee, tea and pastries. There will be daily demonstrations working on a large painting. There will be a break for lunch ("Dutch") and conversation at one of Saluda's delightful cafes. This workshop is limited to 12 participants so register early with your deposit of $100.00. For more information,  visit www.williamjameson.com or call Bill at 828-749-3101 or email billj@williamjameson.com.

Get links for lodging and visitor information on the Saluda NC Visitor Guide. 

Annual Penland School of Crafts Community Open House

March 1   Penland School of Crafts holds its annual Community Open House. Each year, Penland's community open house welcomes hundreds of visitors into the studios for demonstrations and hands-on activities. The event is free and all ages are welcome. Hundreds of adults and children from the local Mitchell County as well as mountain visitors will engage in free, quality hands-on studio experiences with over 100 artist volunteers.

Activities may include making glass beads, rollerprinting copper bracelets, creating clay sculptures, screenprinting on bandanas, papermaking, forging garden stakes, painting colorful pastepaper, blowing glass cups or paperweights, making photographic “sun prints”, assembling wooden birdhouses, making souvenir books, and more.

Get local visitor information on The Spruce Pine NC Guide. 

ArtMart This Weekend in Old Fort

March 1   ArtMart   Locally created arts and crafts displayed inside the historic Old Fort Depot. Stop by to chat with the creators of these one of a kind items while you shop for yourself, family or friends. Something for everyone including baskets, paintings, woodwork, wreaths, candles and live demonstrations. Sponsored by Arrowhead Artists and Artisans League

Find links for more NC mountain crafts, galleries and artists on the NC Crafts Guide. 

Penland "Sketchbook" Visits Tom Shields Studio

This article was written by Elaine Bleakney for Penland Sketchbook, February 14, 2014

Photograph by Robin Dreyer

The chair. A form for one. A group of chairs: a human gathering, a table, a home. Gertrude Stein put it this way: Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them.

Photograph by Robin Dreyer

Tom Shields has been messing with wooden chairs—and our domestic contexts for them—for a while now. He collects, breaks, and alters–reworking flat-backs, ladder-backs, whatever chairs he can find by responding to and then rebuilding them into each other. (And away from each other, too.) Even the bank of discarded chairs that Tom keeps as raw material in his Penland studio (below) feels kind of irreverent:

Photograph by Robin Dreyer

It’s not just chairs: irreverence fuels all of Tom’s sculptural “furniture” work. Take this recent commission, made from a group of original Heywood-Wakefield tables:

Photograph by Robin Dreyer

“Blasphemer,” says Tom, grinning as he tells us what one studio visitor called him after seeing the commission. If you’re a mid-century modern junkie, Tom might just be your nemesis. But looking closely, the tables retain their modern context. Form is interrupted and not shattered: the “futuristic” lines and planes are made fluid by Tom’s choices. It’s almost as if the atoms in the birch went haywire and some happy blasphemer came along and set the forms into each other, responding to the tables as potential parts of a larger functional sculpture.



In the irreverence in Tom Shields’s work, reverence. To put a finer point on it: in irreverence, reverent play. Gertrude Stein, another blasphemer, would’ve raised her glass. She said in 1935: A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.
Subscribe to the Penland Sketchbook for the lastest information about Penland School of Crafts events, classes and artists.