Day Three, Tuesday

Pace House Residency

I knew from the beginning of Monday morning that it wasn’t going to be a very productive day. Even at 8:24 a.m., when Elanor and I climbed downstairs, the day was already filled with warm, bright light, and the air was still and dry and hot. At that early hour I new I wouldn’t be as productive as I had been the day before; for some reason there was something about the dour grey fog that had engulfed the island on Sunday that really got me motivated to work and with the absence of that weather today I felt minimal creative spirit.

We tried to let Kathleen sleep in, while Elanor and I made some eggs for ourselves, but Elanor can’t be without mom for to long these days, and soon enough she was back upstairs begging Leen to get up.

I ended up eating breakfast more or less by myself on the front porch, a country style two egg omelet with some havarti, fried in some bacon fat in my beloved orange skillet.

I really had no idea what to do with myself, as the sun was just to bright to make any photographs outside, and the weather in general was making me feel pretty lazy and apathetic and in pure vacation mode. Kathleen insisted that I didn’t always need to feel like I had to produce things, and after assessing some work I did want to accomplish later in the day, the girls and I set out for a walk into town.

We got back from our walk, and after a quick rest I made a pot of coffee and set out to the barn to do some work. The afternoon passed by relatively quickly, having made a few images in and around the house as well as scouting out some locations and camera positions for more elaborate image making later this week.

I was going to make a video piece that I have long been thinking about once Elanor got down for a nap. This video piece involves two cameras at different positions filming the same activity. It was only after I moved the cameras all over the yard, finding their optimal location based on factors of light and space while taking into consideration the fact that the cameras will remain in the same space for a good amount of time, did I then realize that I neglected to pack one of the camera chargers in my bag before I left. I need the charger to plug in to the camera so it will have enough juice to keep the camera going for a good hour and a half.

Lame.

By this point I had been running all over the house and yard, drinking coffee like mad and wearing nothing but my cut off shorts.  My back and shoulders were starting to feel pretty sunburned and it seemed like a good time to take a lunch break with Kathleen.

Together we made a batch of dough for some French bread, and afterwards we retreated to the front porch were I spent the rest of the afternoon drinking the remainder of wine from the previous nights bottle, having some sausage and mustard along with it.

Tuesday (this morning), on the other hand, started off with a bang. Elanor woke early, about 6am, and she insisted that Kathleen get up with her and I was left to finish sleeping by myself. It wasn’t till 9 am that both girls woke me up and so I slowly stumbled downstairs and began my morning coffee making routine.

After a quick breakfast of eggs over easy fried in the bacon fat remaining from the slabs of bacon I cooked, I retreated to the barn for some reading and coffee.

Of the half a dozen or so books I brought with me, one of them is Serious Pig by John Thorne. A cooking or eating memoir in the most flexible sense, my primary interest in the book right now is the first section entitled “Here.” John goes in to detail about growing up in rural Maine, and his return there as a young adult and how the life and culture of Maine is reflected in the foods that Mainers eat.  I brought the book because I wanted to absorb as much of the Maine way of life as I possibly could through the act of cooking and eating things like baked beans, potatoes, lobster, and other historically Maine foods.

I have had great pleasure in finding traces of the Paces’ love for and appreciation of food scattered throughout the house. Stephen’s wife Palmina was of Italian heritage and must have had a deep-rooted love for cooking; you can find notes and maps of the vegetable garden out back for every year they lived in the house, showing the different crops the planted every year. There’s also a small library of books on mushrooms and Pam (as she was called) was an expert mushroom hunter. I imagine that Stephen, (having been born and raised in the Midwest), had a culinary upbringing very similar to the one that many rural Maine families have. High starch and carbohydrate foods, potatoes and beans, and simple rustic breads cooked in an old oven or woodfire stove. There’s a box of pamphlets and manuals for canning and preserving foods as well as information on vegetable gardening in Stephen’s studio and the kitchen contains a nice library of cookbooks, most interestingly are the few on Chinese cooking which probably go along with the two different size woks we have found here. Eating and meal making is a very important part of our family life and it’s soothing to know that it played a part in the Paces’.

Day Two, Monday

Pace House Residency

Elanor on a Plane

Natural Born Traveler

Picture of Mama and Papa by Elanor

View from the front porch of the Pace House

Pace House Utility Room

Pace House Hallway out to the Studio

Pace House Hallway to the Studio

Pace House Hallway to the Studio Looking Back at the Utility Room

Firewood lift to Upper Studio

Woodshop

Woodblocks

Mama and Papa in front of the Pace House by Elanor

Day Two, Monday

Pace House Residency

I came here with a small handful of rock solid projects, all of them manifesting into videos or photographs, eventually, but I have so far spent much of my time making images I had never intended to make. I always have to ask myself why am I making this photograph, (or video/sculpture/installation/etc) and I have serious psychological barriers that prevent me from creating things when given the opportunity to spontaneously and creatively make work. As an example, Kathleen and Elanor went into town yesterday, and I spent much of the afternoon working on a couple of pieces of work I had been planning on making before I got here, but I also began work on some things that were presented to me after we arrived and I began to get both familiar and comfortable with our new temporary surroundings. I was out back of the house, exploring the woods that line the edge of the property, and I took notice of the compost pile that sits alongside the vegetable garden of the Pace House. I became instantly in awe of the compost heap, its decomposing beauty illuminated by the grey, late afternoon light filtering through the coastal rain clouds. My mind instantly thought “Why, Brett, you should take a photograph of this,” while the other part of my mind simultaneously said, “Why the hell would you take a picture of this? It has absolutely no bearing on the rest of your work.”  My body, ignoring all logical advice from my mind, made a gut reaction and ran inside the house and grabbed my tripod so I could begin setting up the picture.

This situation is a common example of the dilemma of my practice. I have a natural urge to create things, as much as possible and as frequently as I can. I also have a strong desire to only make things that have purpose and conceptual relation to the rest of what I do. So as you can imagine, when one is motivated to make pictures of a pile of decaying food resting in the grass out beyond an old house, you can maybe only imagine the conundrum that arises.

Needless to say, I made the image, for better or for worse, and it may be nothing more than a personal exercise, or it may become something that re-enforces other works I have made or yet to make and I am just not aware of it now. I already have noticed an interest in this house as a museum of sorts. It is as if Stephen and his wife just walked out one day, leaving things intact: his studio seems alive as it ever was, except for maybe wet splotches of paint.  All sorts of personal items can be found in the cupboards and closets throughout the house. Along with the compost heap, I’ve been making images of various items that show both time and life frozen in their material conventions. It’s odd, because I have been thinking a lot about my work with regard to anthropology lately, largely because my work is significantly influenced by cultural artifacts such as movies and music. In a way, I am acting the part of the anthropologist here in this house, creating records of the past lives that have lived here or spent time here, and am using these records as meditative tools in the creation of new work.

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.

A Right To Exercise: Chapter 8, 2010
Digital Video (8 of 26 segments)

A Right To Exercise: Chapter 7, 2010
Digital Video (7 of 26 segments)

A Right To Exercise: Chapter 6, 2010
Digital Video (6 of 26 segments)

A Right To Exercise: Chapter 5, 2010
Digital Video (5 of 26 segments)

Another Yelp review:

so far the best latte in town together with farm:table on post street.
my favorite barista is the zz top guy, he makes it perfect!
today though i was kinda disappointed. some other barista made my latte, it was alright. but, they need to catch up in the dishwashing department! pronto!!!!
the saucer had a greasy film on it, the cup was chipped, and i’m not really sure if it was clean coz’ it was full of coffee….
guys and girls, don’t let it slip!!!

A Right To Exercise: Chapter 4, 2010
Digital Video (4 of 26 segments)