Day Twelve, Thursday

Pace House Residency

It’s been a few days now since I last did some thoughtful writing. We went down to Portland on Saturday night to see friends and spend the night and also to pick up our friend Nathaniel who took a bus up from Boston to come up to the island with us for a couple days.

Friday and Saturday before we left were enjoyably wild days out here at the Pace compound. On Friday, I cooked a 2 ½ pound lobster, which served as both dinner and art medium.

Later in the evening, Kathleen harvested some rhubarb from the garden out back, and, along with some strawberries from the farmers’ market, she made us jam.

I made a pot of baked beans, which took till almost 2 in the morning to complete and almost resulted in a failure, but we persevered and they survived.

We went down to Portland late Saturday night, staying with some friends for the evening. Then, on Sunday, we had a small BBQ with friends at the house where we used to live when we lived in Portland.

On Sunday evening, we picked up Nate. He and I went to school together in Portland, and he had spent much of the time since we were in art school teaching English in Japan, returning to the states last winter, when he first stopped off in San Francisco to visit us. While in school, we collaborated on various performance-oriented projects, among other things. At one point, we ate an entire 11×14 drawing pad of paper, and a completely different act was spent creating some sort of record of a private performance we did, and then taking the only video recording of it and putting it in a water tight box which we subsequently welded shut and tossed into the depths of Casco Bay.

Having Nathaniel up here added great insight to the work I’m making on the island and the internal dialogue I’ve been having regarding said work. We spent most of our time on the front porch talking, starting the day with coffee and moving on to wine or beer around noon, beer only if we had made a quick run to the lobster boat for some fresh crustacean.

Nathaniel is great with Elanor, and it was such a joy to have him here playing with her and eating dinner and playing board games with Kathleen and me till late at night. Our time was largely spent just hanging out at the house, and with the exception of a couple drives around the island, a walk through the old granite quarry, and a trip to old Bucky’s house, we really didn’t do much. He assisted both physically and mentally in the completion of a couple of pieces and ate tons of food. His stay was even more meaningful as he is about to spend the next three years abroad, working for the Peace Corps. It will be quite some time before we see him again.

It’s now almost 9pm on Wednesday night, and I am sitting alone on the front porch, watching a terrific thunder and lightening storm. We only have a few days left at the Pace house, and I have a small bit of work left to make, in order to complete what I started when I arrived here. It’s very odd, as the work I have been making is all photographs and video works and I am obviously not processing or printing the pieces, or editing the video pieces, so I really have no idea what the work I am making looks like. In this way everything I’ve been doing exists in my head: I know I made the work, and I know what it looks like because I was there when I made it, but I don’t know how it’s going to function within the overall body.

I did have one roll of 35mm that I processed at the Rite Aid an hour drive into town, so I know what those images look like, and they excite me, but the rest of the work won’t be finished till after I get home. Normally when I make photo work at home, I’ll shoot a couple images and have it processed immediately, then look over the results and adjust what I need to so as to get the photograph right, and then I’ll shoot some more. I don’t have that luxury here, so I’ve been shooting more of one scenario than I normally would. I feel that in the end, this is going to be some sort of great blessing in that I have also been shooting the same scenario across different formats, so in the end I’ll have a selection of negatives to work from, shot on 35mm, 645, and 6×6. For me this idea is reflected in the way Stephen works; he would initially make a drawing or sketch of the place he was interested in painting, and he might even later revisit it as a watercolor, before he made the actual final oil painting. Furthermore, he had a wide range of artistic tools at his disposal, his studio being filled with oil pastels and charcoal plus all the wood block carving equipment. It’s odd to me, because on one hand,  the work I have been making has been limited to the photo and video equipment I brought with me, however, I feel like that limitation has actually caused me to use those devices in a much broader manner.