Swimming

Picking Blueberries, Making Pictures, by Elanor

Making Pictures, 35mm, Polaroids and Digital

Dinner

Peter Reading to Elanor

In Front of The Shepard House Painting, by Peter

Last Coffee on The Front Porch

Heading Home

Pace House Residency

Our time at the Pace home is quickly coming to an end. I feel a great amount of sadness over having to leave this place. It’s been such a joy to have very little to do on a daily basis, to watch Elanor run around naked in the front and back yard, to spend so much time with Kathleen, cooking amazing foods and staying up late playing board games. I hope upon our return to San Francisco I can maintain the discipline it takes to just sit and do nothing, as I so often did on the front porch of the Pace house. Here, with the absence of things like TV and the Internet and cell phones I was just naturally forced to do other activities like reading, or sitting and talking, and I spent tons of time making work and thinking about the work I was making.

As a last hurrah, my friend Peter is going to come up from Portland to see us today. Peter was one of my professors while I was at the Maine College of Art and I haven’t see him since I left there almost 5 years ago.

Peter was a great influence and provider of open instruction for me, and I feel like I was a great source of trouble for him. I often times was able to get him to derail our classes to the pub next door to school, or on another occasion move the entire class to our house, where everyone hung their photographs on the walls of our living room and we spent the afternoon drinking beer and eating soup.

I spent many semesters doing independent studies with Peter, making many short, small-gauge films, watching Wim Wenders films, and talking at length about photography. I am so excited to have him come visit us, so he can meet Elanor and we can talk shop once again.

I am not sure what else to say at this point; the last couple of days have been very slow and calm, and I largely spent them wrapping up the last few projects I needed to make and re-visiting some others that I had made earlier in our stay.  Instead of intensely making work, I went swimming in the ocean, picked blueberries in the meadow out beyond the house, and went for walks with Kathleen and Elanor.

We had a most delightful evening yesterday, as we for the first time ventured out beyond the edge of the woods behind the Pace House. We walked down this beautiful grass and moss covered path that opened up into a meadow that looked like something out of Lord of the Rings. The even more amazing thing was that the field was covered in blueberries. We had seen berries all along the path on our walk out there, and we had brought a basket in case we found some to pick, but the sheer amount of them out in the meadow was just incredible. We spent hours, almost right up till the sun went down, picking berries, all three of us just sitting down in the field and picking the area around us till it was bare and then moving on to another spot. In about an hour or so we picked about a pound of fresh, tiny, wild blue berries, which taste nothing like any blueberries we’d ever tasted before.

Unreal.

This morning I had a nearly spiritual moment at the Lily Pond. I was walking back down the road toward our house. I had shot all the film I brought so I was just walking, and I realized suddenly that there was nobody else there with me, the road normally being dotted with the cars of painters, their easels set up in the weeds along the road. Today I was alone, and the air was still and slightly cool in the morning sun. As I walked, I realized that at that time tomorrow I would be on my way to Boston, having to re-enter society from my unshowering, no shoes or shirt wearing, Huck Finn life on Deer Isle and at the Pace home over the last couple of weeks. As I realized this, I suddenly became aware of just how beautiful, in both the physical sense but also in the spatial and conceptual sense this place is. I felt like God had intended for life to be like this, and, sure, one can’t always lead the kind of life one might find while on vacation on the island, however, one should try to live in that sort of spirit as much as possible while continuing to maintain the responsibilities of a normal sort of life.

14 Pictures From the Place Where Stephen Painted

1. Box of Matches (Flattened)

~A 30×30 digital c print of a box of kitchen matches

2. A Question of Anthropology

~A series of small prints, around 6×6 inches, of various animal skulls found around the Pace property, about 4-6 prints total, possibly actual chromegenic prints straight from the negatives

3. Skilled It

~A portrait of a cast iron skillet, two images on one print, possibly sized around 60×28, digital c print

4. Opposing View

~A 30×30 digital c print looking towards the space where Stephen may have made his initial sketches and watercolors of the Shepard house

5. Another Man’s Coffee

~A portrait of the used coffee cans found around the barn and studio, a large digital c print, possibly bigger than 30×30

6. My View From The Porch

~A rectangular format digital c print, 16×20

7. Morning Constitutional (Ames Lily Pond)

~ A rectangular digital c print, between 11×14-20×24 of the Lily Pond, possibly vertical

8. Painting in Real Life

~ A 30×30 inch digital c print of the painting Stephen made in 1972 of the Shepard house, this painting served as the jumping off point for this entire body of work

9. Compost Heap

~A 30×30 digital c print of the compost pile out back of the Pace House

10. I’ll Keep My Eye on You

~ A 30×30 print of the garage across the street that faces the Pace House

11. Stephen, Where Are You?

~A self portrait, chopping wood and drinking coffee, a rectangular format, possibly vertical digital c print

12. Eating Lobster and Making Performance Art

~A video piece

13. What if You Lived in a Place Where Your Woodpile Was Bigger Than Your House?

~A photographic re-interpretation of an island wood pile

14. Painting

~A 30×30 inch digital c print of a shelf from a painting easel

15. Beast

~A horizontal rectangular image of myself in the blueberry meadow out back of the Pace house, possibly a 16×20 digital c print

16. An Ideal Picture

~An image of an older framed photograph of the Pace house, mounted on a post in the front yard. In the background you see the Pace house and guests. A 30×30 inch digital c print.

17. Family in Maine Doorway

~A 30×30 inch digital c print, taken of Kathleen and Elanor and Me in front of the Pace home, referencing both the American Gothic painting by Grant Wood and a later painting of Stephens depicting him and Palmina in front of the Pace House.

18. A Loving And Supportive Wife Was All The Man Needed (Palmina)

~A rectangular format silver gelatin print, made from a rubbing of Palminas signature found on the back of her pottery in the kitchen

19. My Friend The Fox

~A rectandular format digital c print, around 11-14-16×20

20. A Slinged Shot

~An image of three sling shots found in the barn and studio, digital c print 11×14-16×20, maybe larger square format

21. A Means To An End

~ A rectangular format digital c print, 16×20

With Nate at The Quarry

Nate and Elanor

Nate and Elanor Reading

Playing Settlers

Lobster Duel

Watering the Garden

Art Making Team

Making Work

Self Portrait with Elanor

Making Jam

Dinner

Elanor in the Gallery Room

Writing on the front Porch and hanging out with Elanor

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.

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.

Pre-Boil Rinse

Dinner Is Served

Get Er Done

Elanor Screaming in Front of the Barn

Working

Elanor Working on Drawing

Working

Wood Stove in the Studio by Elanor

Working

Pace House Residency

It occurred to me that while I have been speaking of Stephen in a familiar voice, many people might not know who he is or why I happen to be staying in his house for the next couple weeks.

I’ll begin with a brief biography of sorts, put together from the various show catalogs, books, and other documents found around the house, and then include some information I have interpreted or discovered through actually inhabiting the house.

Stephen Pace was an American painter born in Charleston, Missouri in 1918. He came of age as an abstract expressionist in the late 40’s and 50’s and was widely regarded as an integral part of the New York School. He and his wife Palmina were married in 1949 and, in the early 70’s, bought the house in Stonington where we are now staying. They spent a lot of time at their Stonington house, and much of Stephen’s later work was made in the barn studio.

In 2007, the Paces retired back to the Midwest and they left their home in Stonington to the Maine College of Art (where I did my undergrad work) to be used as an artist residency. The residency program, as stipulated by Stephen, gives first priority to painters, and any alumni or faculty of the school may apply. Part of the residency program is to open the barn studio and the front gallery rooms of the house to the public every Wednesday evening. The hope of the residency program is to keep the house as an artistic haven and retreat for artists as well as to share with the community of Stonington the life and work of Stephen Pace.

Palmina was of Italian descent and first found a love for mushrooms when, as a young girl, she was taken mushroom hunting with her mother in Springfield, Massachusetts. This became a lifelong interest; upstairs in one of the bedrooms of the house are nearly a dozen books on mushrooms, and according to an island newspaper article I found on her mushroom activities, she prepared mushrooms as a meal at least twice a day, ate around 40-50 different varieties a year, and most frequently prepared them with white wine and fresh herbs.

In addition to mushroom hunting, Pam was also a potter. Many of the plates and bowls and cups in the kitchen have her name inscribed in the bottom, although I am not sure how late in life she practiced pottery, as a couple pieces are dated in the early 1960’s and there doesn’t seem to be any trace of a pottery studio around the house.

I sense that both the Paces were avid vegetable gardeners, but I feel like Pam was the driving force behind the garden out back. There is a stack of maps and notes for the garden for every year they lived here, and everywhere I look I find boxes of instructions for canning, preserving, and cold cellaring food. There are also a ton of mason jars and other canning supplies at hand.

I feel like Pam had an interest and belief in homeopathic remedies. There is an encyclopedia of herbal medicine in the kitchen and several pages of the notes about the garden indicate that there were items like Echinacea planted there.

The Paces had a love for cooking; a dozen or so cookbooks can be found in the kitchen, more upstairs, and the kitchen and back utility room is filled with pots and pans of different shapes and sizes and uses as well as stacks of pie tins and baking sheets and other items generally used for baking breads and pastries.

Stephen’s heritage can be traced back to some of the first European settlers, the first Pace having settled near Jamestown, Virginia in 1610. His father and mother met on a farm; his father John was a hired farm hand and his mother Ora Katherine was the daughter of the owner of the farm, Stephen’s grandfather David Reeves. Stephen’s self-reliant farm boy upbringing was presumably a huge influence in his life and art practice. Figuring prominently in the studio are various devices and contraptions made out of random items most likely scavenged from some other project or use. All of his easels and painting stations (of which there are about four or five) seem to have been built by hand, there is the hoist to bring fire wood upstairs, tons of small boards on hinges for swinging work lamps all over the space for proper lighting, as well as a custom built jig that I believe was built to hold wood blocks in place for carving.

Based on the amount of photographs I’ve seen in which Stephen is wearing a hat, along with the sheer collection of them laying around the property, it’s safe to say he wore hats regularly; there are at least a dozen floating around the house and studio.

One would also be led to believe that Stephen enjoyed the occasional cigar, as there are a bazillion cigar boxes out in the barn and studio, although these could have been obtained for the purely functional use as a storage device. I think every box out there has a handwritten label on the side, and 9 time out of ten the contents of the box correspond correctly to the label.

The labeled boxes are just one of many aspects that show Stephen’s meticulous and organized ways.  There are tons of boards and pieces of scrap lumber tucked away all over the barn rafters, the edge of each board having the dimensions clearly written on the side. Along with the cigar boxes there are tons of old coffee cans, some also having labels either handwritten on the side or written on a piece of masking tape. Some cans are even wood screwed into place as a permanent part of an easel or workstation.

Although much of Stephen’s artistic output is seen in books and catalogs as oil paintings and the occasional ink drawing, you can tell he had a broad and enthusiastic practice. The kitchen has a nice collection of sculptures crafted out of scraps of wood and tin, and there is evidence of similar works in progress left around the barn.

The studio also holds boxes of charcoal as well as oil pastels and there are also his wood block prints, which can be found around the barn, as well as in some catalogs of his work.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in the barn, largely working, making photographs or reading or writing, but often times I just sit and absorb another individual’s life. While it’s been at least a good few years sine the Paces lived here in Stonington, and in the years that have sine passed the house has gone through what I presume were certain renovations to make it more suitable for the residency program, it’s hard not to imagine walking up into the studio and seeing Stephen bent over a painting, furiously at work, or Pam in the garden picking fresh blueberries or harvesting the rhubarb.

Working

Living The Dream

Pirates

Elanor Typing A Letter

Ba and Nor

Ba and Mama by Elanor

Cookware

Beach Supper

Girls Made Biscuits

Kathleen Typing

Make Art Elanor

Working

Studio

Horsing Around in the Studio

Pace House Residency

Once I was given news of my acceptance to this residency program, I immediately started brainstorming various projects to work on while I was here. I have to admit that I didn’t have much in my mind when I first got here. Of the maybe 6 or 7 different projects in my head, the one I was most excited about was a suite of photographs entitled “14 Pictures From The Place That Stephen Painted”. My inspiration came from a painting Stephen made from the hill behind the house, a painting that depicted a panoramic view of the house and the property it sits on. I was really excited about this project, as I felt like it embodied much of my conceptual leanings and durational activities but also provided me with the framework to create pieces that were uncharacteristic of the rest of my practice, in this case more or less traditional landscapes. My frustrations about the project were quickly realized upon arrival, as I found that the literal place that Stephen made the painting from has been, at this point (almost 40 years later), been obscured by trees and bushes that have grown large since the painting was first made. Or, perhaps the view from which he made the painting was an interpreted view and didn’t actually exist. Either way, the camera equipment I brought wasn’t suitable enough to make the exact photographs; my lenses are just not wide enough to shoot the entire length of the house and barn and the surrounding property.

So, not to be defeated, I’ve still been making the images as intended, only I have been forced (and am patiently allowing) the work and project to be re-informed by the situation with which I have been presented. Kathleen has been the biggest help in showing me how to re contextualize this work. She has stressed to me the need to not let the piece (or any work for that matter) be bound to the confines of the original concept. This is amazingly hard for me, being normally bound to the idea than to any formal revelation at hand.

Additionally, much of what I have been making has been conceived and executed after my arrival.  I’ve been working fairly productively, but for every one or two ideas that I brought with me, I have three or four that have been presented to me after spending time at the Pace house.