Name: Maine Masters Film Festival
Start: 2024-08-25T19:00:00
Location: Opera House Arts

Opera House Arts

At the close of the WWII Stephen Pace found himself painting on the Seine River along with 50 other Parisians. Along came a woman who said she’d like him to meet a friend of hers. Turned out to be Pablo Picasso and the introducer Gertrude Stein. Post War, Pace spent 1946 on the GI Bill taking classes at Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende. In San Miguel Pace met fellow student Leonard Brooks, a Canadian painter who recently died at the age of 100 in Mexico. San Miguel and Brooks are featured in the film. In San Miguel, Pace befriended the great American artist Milton Avery who became his mentor after moving to New York City in 1947. As an abstract expressionist, Pace fell into the swim of all the New York artists who frequented the famous Cedar Tavern along with his friends Franz Kline and Jackson Pollack. Pace first visited Stonington, Maine in 1953. The Missouri-born, New York City-based American artist fell in love with the setting, engaged by that “shoveful of islands” that John Marin once mused God must have spread on the water. Pace and his lifetime muse Palmina, returned to Stonington nearly every summer thereafter, eventually purchasing a turn of the century sea captain’s residence overlooking the Deer Isle Thoroughfare. In Stephen Pace: Maine Master we experience the Pace’s final summer season in Stonington. From his morning walk to the Lily Pond to the concerts at Kneisel Hall, they left behind a Maine Coast regimen that sustained them like air and water. They departed knowing that their house would continue to be the site of artistic activity, as a study center for students and faculty from the Maine College of Art. That’s the finest kind of legacy.