“Take one look around the school itself – brought to life almost entirely by one man, in the space of one year – and you know you’re in good hands to learn. Having the opportunity to go through both foundational classes, I find myself with a respectable set of skills, and an invaluable set of memories I’d simply never get working on my own. Wally is two things that you rarely come across in one instructor – masterful and patient. Throughout the course, at just the right moments, he’d calmly say one deceptively simple sentence that I return to almost daily – ”Remember, it’s not a race.” That sort of commonsense encouragement – and his technical mastery of whichever tool you put in front of him – that’s the kind of place you want to be. It’s a damn privilege to have this school come back into existence, decades after the first one closed its doors for the last time – with all the authenticity and character I’d imagine it once had – but has a presence and personality all its own. If you want to learn – the right way, in an ideal space, alongside fine people – you owe it to yourself to spend your time here.”