Day Six, Friday

Pace House Residency

While most days here have been fairly hot and at times muggy and or humid, yesterday was another one of those days were at 8 am the air was still and dry, the sky was devoid of clouds and it was hot as freaking hell.

Elanor and I left Leen in bed and we drove off into town for various items. I needed a giant magnet for a project I am working on, so we headed down Route 15A in search of a hardware store, among other things. We found Buckminster Fuller’s house a couple of miles down the road, and for all his spacely inventions, his former house is nothing more than your typical New England beach home. We saw a few deer, drove really fast on the open country roads, the windows down, the stereo cranked and Elanor yelling, “WEEEEEEE!!!!” in the back seat.

We found a hardware store deeper into the island, and I got a nice big 50-lb magnet for a mere 8 bucks. We turned around, and after a quick stop at a playground behind an old church, we drove home to wake Kathleen and make some breakfast.

Kathleen had made us black bean soup for dinner, and I reheated some of that in a pot on the stove, fried some eggs and bacon, crumbled up some havarti and extra sharp cheddar in the bottom of my shallow soup bowl, dumped the black bean soup on top, put the eggs over easy on top of the black beans, a little more cheese on top, and with the bacon at my side ate that meal like a ravenous farmer. Man, it was a tasty meal.

I finally feel, after almost 6 days in, content with what I am doing, and I feel able to direct the work I am making into a larger and more concise body. I was incredibly inspired when I arrived here, and I spent the first few days frantically making images and absorbing this house and this place. I imagine if you could have just watched from the outside, it would have been a terribly funny sight to see. I was moving very quickly, and would go from one moment sitting on the porch with the girls, out into the barn to set up and build a shot, back into the kitchen for a quick lunch, only to be up on the roof taking more pictures as the light just happened to reach that nice place while I was making lunch in the kitchen.

The light here is a force to be reckoned with. It has no consistent times of “good” light, and the day could just as easily go from nice, soft, cloud-filtered light, to bright, intense, small aperture and quick shutter speed light in a mere matter of minutes. It also has the ability to appear much more dimly lit than it actually is, for instance this very moment, from the front porch, there’s a fair amount of fog and mist rolling in off the water, the sun is definitely obscured by the clouds, but a meter reading tells me that with 400 speed film rated at 320, I am going to need to be shooting somewhere in the F8 at 2000 range.

The work I initially conspired to make while I was here was a mixture of work from different projects and ideas as well as a couple of things that I was thinking about making directly about or because of the Pace House. However, the projects that I have been making thus far have shown me an entirely new body of work that deals directly with inhabiting the Pace House and the effects of being on Deer Isle in relation to the rest of my work and practice.  It has now become of utmost importance to finish this work while I am here so as to bring closure to the project I have started. I spent last night in the barn drawing up a list of works that would fall under the rubric of the Pace Project, and along with that list I drew up another list of pieces that I need to finish before I leave here. Absent from that list are items that I had intended to make but no longer see a need to; these are pieces that can be made anywhere and don’t require a location for their execution. I will be making a couple of seemingly random images and things, if for no other reason than the space around here has provided a good backdrop or location for their completion. However, these pieces have very little bearing on or relation to the Pace Project, and shouldn’t be viewed as part of that body.