Day One, Sunday

Pace House Residency

I initially anticipated using one of the three typewriters that are laying about this old house to keep a daily log or journal of my activities while my family and I are in residency at the Pace house. This idea came to an unfruitful end as I just spent the better part of my morning allowing my cup of coffee to get cold, my fingers to get soaked by the ink from an old typewriter ribbon and my nerves to become somewhat frayed.

Thank God for the laptop and the free wireless Internet at the library in town.

We finally arrived here yesterday afternoon after nearly two days of travel; we left our home in San Francisco around 4 am Friday morning, spent all day flying to Boston where we subsequently rented a car and drove north to Portland, Maine. In Portland, we stayed the night with some friends, and after some errands and supply-gathering Saturday morning, we headed north to Deer Isle to find the Pace house, finally arriving just as the sun was going down last night.

Before the car was even unpacked, I set to work making a couple different images I had in mind. A few of the projects I will be working on while I am here involve channeling the artistic spirit of Stephen Pace. Through some preliminary research before we left California, I had already mentally drafted some projects using some of Stephen’s paintings as guides. In that vein, I made two sets of images on two different cameras at dusk last night.

Today, Sunday morning, we awoke to the sound of fishing boats motoring through the harbor just down the road from our house. It’s been raining like mad all morning, yet it’s pleasantly warm outside. I am currently sitting outside on the front porch, typing away in my pajamas with a cup of coffee at my side.

We made a breakfast of steel cut oats with honey and I fried some bacon in an old orange Le Crueset skillet on the gas stove.

The barn is where Stephen kept a studio, and while Kathleen was cooking our oats, I got my stuff set up in the studio. The studio is off the back of the kitchen through some sort of utility room and then a long connecting hallway. Keep in mind that this is very much part of the “barn” versus being part of the “house,” and while the house in and of itself is fairly rustic (being at least 100 years old and formerly the residence of the town sea captain) the barn is even more rustic and shows its age most clearly in the odd display of items and tools stored in its rafters and in various boxes and shelves along its walls and hallway.

The lower part of the barn studio is built out as a woodshop of sorts, while the top portion is where Stephen painted. There is a book here of Stephen’s paintings, and in the essay about him it describes going out to the barn to paint on cold, chilly Maine mornings and how he would fire up the wood stove in the upstairs painting studio and using this Goldberg-esque motorized block and tackle system he would haul loads of firewood from the lower part of the barn into his studio upstairs. While my practice doesn’t usually entail sitting in the studio and working through things, the barn studio is a welcomed inspiration and I felt instantly inspired when I turned on some Sun Ra and settled down into one of Stephen’s chairs and, with a cup of coffee in one hand, started going through my notebooks and thinking about the work I’m going to make while I am here.  I brought a handful of cameras, two medium format and one 35mm, a couple of mini DV cameras and my Nitzo Super8. I’ve already fallen into a very fluid pattern of working while life commences and its been a wonderful morning of exploring this old house, sitting on the front porch drinking coffee, reading and typing, making photographs (some pre-planned and some on the spot creations), and of course hanging out with my girls.