Artwork by Carla Kiernan
Carla Abbott Kiernan of Cape Neddick doesn't want pity or sympathy, but she does merit admiration by the boatload.
And the admiration is for both strength of character and talent.
We met Carla for the first time just last week, when, acting on a tip that she'd illustrated a little book that was making a small splash about town, we sought her out at her house and ended up chatting comfortably with her there for close to three hours.
Central to the story we heard then was the fact that, 10 years ago, at a time when her marriage had just ended and her children were 16 and 21 - and when she herself was only 40 - she'd suffered a stroke. The prognosis was not good: she'd been working, statewide, as a professional mediator as well as locally in the office of Abbott Brothers Tree Service, her family's business, and she was told that her brain lesion was such that she would never be able to speak properly again.
Today, she puts the lie to that forecast: her speech pattern seems virtually normal, and, as she explains how she effected her recovery, she reveals what she calls "a huge faith" behind it and behind all she does. It's a faith that, as she puts it, "all things happen for a reason," and that "everything will be all right. You just have to keep on going."
That in spite of the fact that she also battles Crohn's Disease!
Carla would spend a year after her stroke in outpatient therapy in Portland, and she strongly credits the help she got there. At the same time, in illustration of a rare imagination and tenacity, she reports that, during that period, on occasions when she couldn't sleep at night, she'd get into her shower to let water run over her lips. The running water, she discovered, made her better able to shape words, so that she could gleefully report an unexpected progress when she returned to therapy the next day.
There, she told us, she also helped spark other stroke victims' spirits by arranging for them indulge themselves in treats like hairdos and manicures, and so to share, with Carla, in hope.
In this process, Carla found herself craving another route to expression besides speech, and a way to tell others what she was feeling.
She found it in art.
In 1999, a year after the stroke, she had friends help her drag an old dresser up from her cellar, along with a door cadged from a down-Maine camp outhouse, and the door laid across the dresser top became a table upon which she began to paint.
Her first image showed the silhouette of a woman seated in the lotus position and viewed from the back. All around her was a deep and somewhat sinister blue, with images like leaves and stars only faintly visible in deeper blue within it, but inside the body's shape all was light, and, growing from buttocks to brain: attractive and appropriately colorful grass, ivy, flowers.
"It was how I felt," Carla told us simply.
Carla Abbott Kiernan has been painting up a storm ever since.
She works in watercolors, her images, quite varied, are of local scenes and objects in nature around her, and, unlike that haunting symbolic self-portrait that was her first, they're executed entirely realistically.
Think, for example, of a pair of puffins; boats at the Perkins Cove footbridge; a still life of two lobsters next to a picnic basket; facades of buildings in downtown Ogunquit; lily pads in the wild; a moose in a swamp; an orange blaze of sun rising behind Nubble Light; the house and barn of her family's Logging Road farm; a lone youngster in a snowy country scene, pulling a Christmas tree along behind him on a red wagon; a flock of bright goldfinches ranged vertically on a full bird feeder.
Carla is entirely self-taught, so there is a slight air of the primitive about her work. But make no mistake: they're charming, and (though we confess that we're not, ourselves, officially qualified as judges of art), they seem to us remarkably sophisticated in matters of composition, perspective, color distribution, and painstaking detail.
When we asked Carla about the book we'd heard she'd illustrated, she brought us a copy and inscribed it.
Twelve glossy eight-and-one-half-by-eleven pages long, plus stapled cover, all of them, including front and back, broadly and richly illustrated by Carla, it's a children's book about a starfish who lives at Nubble Light. His name is Oliver Stinkwell, and that's the name of the book, which chronicles his adventures after he gets blown away from home by a storm. "Stinkey," as he's called, is rescued, successively, by a mussel named Millie, a pilot whale named Walter, a seal named Camille and, finally, a little boy named Charlie, who kindly returns Stinkey to his Nubble home.
The book's author is Carla's friend Nancy Canfield (who also happens to be postmaster at York Harbor) and Carla told us that the two cooked the project up last winter "when we had nothing to do."
The book's tale is part old-fashioned morality play with a modern environmental twist.
"In helping a scared and lonely starfish," it reads, "Charlie learns about compassion and how good it feels to help someone in need. Charlie also learns a great deal about nature and the ocean" - for example, that "Camille the seal's favorite foods are cod and squid," and that Walter "vacations to the south in warmer waters."
But the book is also more modern than tomorrow's newspaper. On its last page it invites its readers to contact Stinkey at oliverstinkwell@yahoo.com. "He would love to hear from you and talk about his exciting adventures," it says.
Now, says Carla, after learning from readers about where they'd like Stinkey to go next, Nancy has already written another Oliver Stinkwell book, and it's just awaiting Carla's illustrations.
The current Oliver Stinkwell is available at, among other places, the Marketplace next to the Cat N Nine Tails on Route 1 in Cape Neddick, Norma's Restaurant, the gift shop at The Goldenrod, the gift shop at Sohier Park, Mike's Clam Shack in Wells, the gift shop Revelations on Shore Road in Ogunquit, and the Sea Bells Gallery on Shore Road, where Carla also has prints on display. (Carla turns almost all of her works into prints, via giclee, and keeps the originals. Many of them are also available as note cards in some of these same shops.)
Before we left Carla's, we asked quite a bit about her background and we ended up coming away with a conviction that, while we have no idea where her remarkable talent comes from, much of her personal strength may derive from her being strongly rooted. She's lived in only two houses in her life, and they're right next to each other, just two and three doors down, respectively, from the Abbott family's business. The house she's living in now was originally built on another site by her maternal grandfather, a Warner; her father gutted it and renovated it and presented it to Carla on her 21st birthday.
Now the dresser-and-old-door that Carla had been using as a desk has been supplanted by another birthday present - a stunning giant white cabinet with multiple gliding drawers capped by a big slab of polished granite. Carla's partner George Drew, a carpenter, built it, and presented it as a gift this year from him and Carla's children.
Those children are now 31 (Mathew) and 26 (Nicole), and Carla, very strong on family, is enormously grateful for the support they've long lent her, as well as pleased at the fact that both are very successfully pursuing careers in the helping professions - a measure of the respect for compassion and caring that Carla sees as singularly important. She remains a licensed Maine mediator though she doesn't now practice, and at the heart of her commitment to mediation is a belief that the process represents "help for both parties," more effective in the long run than, as she put it, "just judge and jail."
We said that Carla had not pursued art before her stroke, but there was one exception that's now atypical of her work but very relevant to that "caring" side of her. It's a 1984 painting of two-year-old Nicole standing in rain under an umbrella. Details in it are indistinct, as if the rain were washing them away, and the effect is touching. Close friends Bob and Maura Reed paid to have the painting transformed into a signed, numbered and limited-edition print, and half the proceeds from the sale of these are going to the Child Abuse Prevention Council of York County.
Carla is currently working on a natural-scene mural at Clay Hill Farm (the restaurant), and you can see 26 of her prints on display now at Fogarty's Restaurant in South Berwick.
And there's a website under construction: http://www.watercolororiginals.net/. Visit it when it's up and running. You won't be disappointed!
