One day in 1947, Stephen Pace paused in a New Orleans bus station on his way back from Mexico after a year of study. "I knew if I went back to the Midwest they'd put me to work on the farm, so I flipped a coin: heads, New York; tails, San Francisco." It came up heads so it happened that Pace was drawn into the orbit of nascent Abstract Expressionism, the Hans Hoffman School, and the heady atmosphere of New York in the late forties and early fifties. This style of the decision-making-allowing chance a role-remains an essential part of his approach to painting. Pace practices a kind of Zen acceptance of what happens when his brush hits the canvas or paper. The ability to take risks and to allow the paint to surprise him are fundamental to Pace's artistic gambit. There is nothing casual, however, about the lucid paintings that this seemingly fatalistic attitude spawns. Rather, what we witness is a spontaneous performance founded on careful preparation and years of discipline.

Untitled, 1959
oil on canvas
 

While making abstract paintings, Stephen Pace continued to draw the figure. the transition in 1961 came naturally. "I felt the figure trying to come back into my painting." His palette lightened, his paint thinned, and he began to paint from modes and sketch from nature. His subjects are usually taken from the familiar; the dark hair of his wife Pam, the seasonal changes in their vegetable garden, and the dockside activity of Stonington, Maine; not infrequently, the artist himself appears in the work. It is Pace's intimate relationship with his visual environment that makes possible the kind of daring improvisation he undertakes as he tries to find the rhythm that will pull together all the elements of a given theme.

Nude on Red and Green Ground, 1972, oil on canvas

Pace has retained the action painter's insistence on registering every stroke, giving it value as both shape and gesture. However, instead of a tussle on canvas between clashing forces, his post-1960 watercolors and oils became the fruit of long preliminary thought, contemplation, and preparation of both mind and materials. He requires that the execution be spontaneous, direct, and irrevocable, with each stroke essential to the whole.
 

-Martica Sawin
Excerpted, with revisions, from "Stephen Pace: Action Painting in Two Modes", ARTS, April 1987