Among the shows currently on view at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland is a true gem, “To the Lily Pond: Recent Watercolors by Stephen Pace.” The title refers to the Stonington artist’s daily ritual: After breakfast he walks down the road from his house to partake of the solitude offered by this lovely pond.

Upon returning from his morning constitutional, the painter heads to his studio to work. Sometimes the memory of lilies massed upon the water returns with him, to reappear in one of his marvelous watercolors. The Farnsworth show includes several images of this special spot.

Memories of more distant times, from a childhood on a subsistence farm in Missouri, resurface in other paintings in the show such as “Family with Goat” and “Feeding Chickens.” There are also several of Pace’s acclaimed studies of galloping horses, inspired by visits to Chincoteague Island in North Carolina. A number of watercolors relate to the artist’s Maine surroundings, including studies of clam diggers, their bodies bent double as they rake the mud flats; a blueberry field after burning; and a handsome rendering of two lobster boats with stay sails.

Pace turned 85 this past December and he has been on a proverbial roll for honors and recognition. A year ago last May, he received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Maine College of Art in Portland, which cited his “lifetime of artistic achievement, commitment to teaching young artists and vision to encourage future generations of painters inspired by Maine.” More recently, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York presented him with the Jimmy Ernst Award in Art.

The artist’s ninth one-person exhibition at the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan took place in April. This summer, the Portland Museum of Art presented a small but choice selection of his work and the Farnsworth is currently offering its display of 15 watercolors (through Oct 17).

Both Maine venues tied their showings to the publication of a major monograph on Pace’s work published in the spring. “Stephen Pace” (Hudson Hills Press, 144 pages, hardback, $50) offers a full-bodied retrospective of the artist’s work. There are watercolors of the English countryside painted while Pace was serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, as well as examples of the abstract work that garnered him his first critical notices in the 1950s as a member of the New York School. A majority of the reproductions feature the fresh and lively figurative oils and watercolors that have gained him a wide following over the past decades.

The art historian Martica Sawin, who spends part of the year in Harpswell, wrote the text for the book, which is richly illustrated. She characterizes Pace as a risk taker, an artist who values spontaneity. “The body of work produced by Stephen Pace in its entirety,” she writes, “is profoundly connected to the American experience and to its rural-urban duality.” The painter, she writes, is “attuned to the rhythms of nature” and possesses “a highly sophisticated knowledge of the great artist traditions and the experimental art of his time.”

Pace first came to Maine in 1953 to visit fellow abstractionist Michael Loew on Monhegan Island. On the same trip he traveled further down the coast and discovered Deer Isle. “I guess you could say it was love at first sight,” the painter told Bruce Brown, curator of Maine Coast Artists (now the Center for Maine Contemporary Art) in Rockport, on the occasion of the exhibition “Stephen Pace: Maine and Reminisces, 1953-1993.”

Since 1954, Pace and his wife and muse, Pam, have summered in Stonington nearly every year. In the early years, the couple camped out at the Ames Farm across from the lily pond. In 1973, they purchased their “dream house,” a turn-of-the-century sea captain’s house set on ledge overlooking the Deer Isle Thorofare. Pace had painted a watercolor portrait of the yellow mansard-roofed Victorian, “Shepard House,” with its attached barn, placing the family car in the yard – wishful thinking that turned into a wish fulfilled.

The Paces recently bequeathed their treasured home to the Maine College of Art for use as a study center for young painters. With its barn studio and well-lit rooms, this house will fulfill the dreams of future generation of artists, who will find inspiration on the Maine coast as Stephen Pace has and maybe make the pilgrimage to a lily pond down the road.

Carl Little can be reached at little@acadia.net.