Stephen Pace, whose exuberant style applied Abstract Expressionist scale and directness to figurative painting, died on Sept. 23 in an assisted-living center in New Harmony, Ind. He was 91 and until two years ago had divided his time between homes in New York and Stonington, Maine. The cause was pneumonia, said Katharina Rich Perlow, his New York dealer since 1985. Pace was born in Charleston, Mo., in 1918, the second of four brothers who grew up helping their parents run a farm and a grocery store. He drew from an early age, improvising art materials until the fourth grade, when a teacher gave him a sketchbook and he saw unlined paper for the first time. In the mid-1930s the family, still farming, moved to Harmony. Pace was entranced by the austere brick buildings of the town, which had been built as a utopian community. At 17 he began to study with Robert Lahr, a WPA artist in Evansville, Ind., who emphasized anatomical studies and watercolor. He also worked as an architectural draftsman. He served in the Army during World War II and studied art in Mexico on the GI Bill. He ended up attending a school in San Miguel de Allende, where he met the painter Milton Avery, who was on vacation. Avery encouraged him to move to New York and became a lifelong mentor and friend. After living briefly in New Orleans, Pace moved to New York in 1947 and studied at the Art Students League and with Hans Hofmann. In 1949 he married Palmina Natalini, who worked as an art buyer for the McCann Erickson advertising agency and was often their main means of support. She is his only survivor. Over the years Pace taught at several schools, including Pratt Institute, Bard College and American University. By the early 1950s, Pace was meeting with considerable success as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, known for dark, energetically worked abstractions achieved through a distinctive blend of brushwork, drawing and staining. He exhibited in several Whitney Annuals, had his first New York show at the Artists Gallery in 1954 and was subsequently represented by the Poindexter Gallery and then the A.M. Sachs Gallery. Reviewing an exhibition of his 1950s work for The New York Times in 2007, Karen Rosenberg praised it as 'boisterous, confident and colorful' and said the show 'proves that when he wanted to, he could gesture with the best of them.' In 1960 Pace began spending time outside New York, first in Pennsylvania and then in Maine, which reignited his interest in working from nature. By 1963, he had developed a broad-brushed representational style and a range of subjects that celebrated everyday life and labor. Some, like horse-drawn farm wagons and harvesting scenes, drew on childhood memories. Others were more current: Maine lobstermen tending their traps, his wife gardening, homey interiors and nudes in the studio or the landscape. The force of these images resides in their deft command of bodies in space balanced by saturated colors painted patchily on bare canvas. The result is a magnified Fauvism or Post-Impressionism that takes inspiration from Avery, Matisse and Bonnard, as well as Chinese painting. These works seem executed at high speed, with a once-over-lightly panache that leaves little margin for error. In fact, Pace was adept at discreet reworking. 'You might call me a fake Zen painter,' he once said. 