Quest for Sister’s Art Draws Beauty From Pain

The artist’s spirit seemed everywhere on opening night, moving through the gallery like a gentle ghost.

It gazed out of the soulful eyes of the children she had sketched years before. It tumbled through the dark pencil lines of the picture titled “Boys Wrestling.” It flowed through the sweet smile of the little girl picking daisies and the simple strokes that captured Michael moving in sleep.

Her sister, Deborah, was everywhere too, looking almost fragile in her long black dress, a little breathless, a little nervous, but finally sure she was doing the right thing.

“I just wonder,” Deborah said, as she gazed at the crowd on that glittering night, “how does it appear to other people? Is it the tragedy that they see, or the beauty of the work?”

The simple truth is that when people view the art of Karen Carrino, tragedy and beauty go hand-in-hand.

Deborah is the survivor, the sister dragged from the car wreck that killed 19-year-old Karen, her 8-year-old brother, Michael, and a 3-year-old girl named Lisa 25 years ago.

She is the searcher who, after years of battling her family about her motives, began scouring the country for her sister’s lost art.

“I just believe Karen had this extraordinary talent and the world should know,” she says.

Her father thought so too. But grief drowned out all other emotions at the time. A month after the funeral, he gathered up his dead daughter’s drawings--hundreds of them--and hung them in the corridors of Memorial High School in West New York, the New Jersey town where Karen had been a student. They sold for about $35 each.

“How could you?” Deborah cried for years as she stood in the living room with her father, admiring the few pictures he had kept. “It was all we had.”

“Better that people enjoy it,” he responded. “Art should be hung on walls, not rolled up in closets or stuck away in portfolios.”

His curtness seemed cold at the time. But years later, as she discovered the pleasure Karen’s pictures had brought, Deborah found herself agreeing with him.

Her search started back at the high school. With faded photographs of Karen’s drawings to guide her, she sniffed out leads and hunted down owners. She paid search companies, pestered newspaper editors, coaxed galleries into exhibiting the work.

It has been a mission of memory and healing, of pain as well of love. Deborah has uncovered more drawings than she ever imagined, 275 of them so far--locked away in attics, hanging in libraries, decorating schools and living rooms.

Every picture evokes a memory. Every new find holds its own story of how Karen’s work has affected other lives.

Deborah can’t fully explain why she keeps digging. But she has finally stopped apologizing to family members who begged her to leave the past alone.

Her quest began in earnest seven years ago. But the story really begins on a dark New Jersey highway on Saturday, Dec. 9, 1972.

The four adults and three children had been stuck on the shoulder of the Garden State Parkway for hours after getting a flat tire on the way back from Karen’s 19th birthday party.

It sounded like an explosion. The stranger’s car hurtled down the highway out of the nighttime fog and slammed into the back of their Volkswagen Bug with an enormous deadly bang.

Spitting the glass out of her mouth--at first, she thought it was her teeth--Deborah grabbed the whimpering baby from the floor and leaned over to her sister. Karen looked almost peaceful behind the wheel. She might have been sleeping except for odd gurgling sounds and blood at the back of her head. Clumsily, Deborah tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, stopping in a panic when she thought she might be doing more harm.

“We were just a speck on the highway,” Deborah says. “Why did the car have to hit that speck?”

She never got an answer. The stranger who killed Karen and Michael and Lisa sped away.

They were buried together, the artist and her brother and the child she was baby-sitting. They share a single grave in a cemetery in Weehawken.

Left behind were Deborah; Karen’s boyfriend, Steven Miller; her best friend, Liliane Holding; and Lisa’s sister, 1-year-old Teresa Boudrie.

Karen was a year older than Deborah when she died, and the opposite of her sister in so many ways. A jaunty tomboy just over 5 feet tall, she trudged through the world in Army fatigues and a goofy hat, sketchbook always under her arm, baby brother Michael always trotting by her side.

No one could figure out which was more important in her life--children or art--although she always insisted that it was children. She wanted to teach in a so-called “free school” like the one she had read about in England, where children made their own decisions about what to learn, and at what pace to learn it.

Too young to teach, Karen did the next best thing: She baby-sat. She had dozens of children under her care and she drew them all, sensitive portraits for their parents, clever cartoon murals for their bedroom walls.

She started drawing when she was about 13 and just never stopped. At the kitchen table, in the Laundromat, on the steps after school, she would sit hunched over her sketchbook, dashing off portraits for strangers and friends.

Her drawings--now attracting critical acclaim as Deborah displays her work--have a texture and depth and realism that is all the more remarkable for someone with no formal training. Children’s eyes glow with innocence and mischief in her subtle use of light and dark. The soft downy detail of a baby’s head seems effortless.

Some saw her art as an escape from troubles at home and the fighting that eventually led to her parents’ divorce. Others saw a talent so big that nothing could hold it back. Oils, charcoal, pencil, clay. It seemed as if she couldn’t experiment enough, or draw enough, in the short time she had.

Karen captured the heroes of her time, and especially their children: masterful reproductions of John Lennon and his son, Julian, tender portraits of John F. Kennedy Jr. as a toddler in his mother’s arms.

But by far her most precious subject was Michael, the baby brother she loved as though he was her own son.

“This one’s for you,” her mother said jokingly, handing Karen her eighth and youngest child when she came home from the hospital.

She never got him back. From the time Michael was an infant, Karen washed him and fed him and picked him up from school. She tucked him into bed and drew his face while he was sleeping. He colored in her sketches as he waited for her after school.

Everyone says they were meant to die together. One wouldn’t have survived without the other.

“Sometimes I worry that he’s the forgotten one in all of this,” Deborah says. “After all, we lost a little brother too.”

And a little girl. The opening night of the art show at the New Brunswick gallery in June would have been Lisa Boudrie’s 28th birthday.

Millie Boudrie traveled from Michigan to see the show, to be there for Deborah, to weep at her daughter’s grave.

“She was so exceptional. I can still feel her presence,” Millie says of the baby-sitter who loved her children as though they were her own. Karen’s portrait of Lisa hangs in her living room. Millie’s photographs of Karen’s collection formed the basis of Deborah’s search.

“I don’t think Debbie has been complete since it happened,” says Millie, whose own tortured path toward healing has been helped by Deborah’s efforts. “Maybe this will make her complete.”

Deborah shies away from talking about the deeper meaning of her search. It changes all the time, she says.

From the day she walked back into the high school with photographs and questions and a thumping heart, it has changed. She went with hazy hopes of finding some drawings to photograph or borrow. She makes it clear that she has no desire to keep the pictures; she just wants to record her sister’s work.

She never expected to unravel a life. But Karen had sketched her whole world, one that unfolded when Deborah went looking. From teachers who put her in touch with old classmates, to her father’s friends, to Karen’s boyfriend who left the stranded car to get help on the night of the accident, they came forward with sketches and stories and support.

Suddenly, Deborah was uncovering far more than her sister’s art: She was catching glimpses into her sister’s soul.

She found notes that Karen had scribbled in the corners of pictures, to her dad, and her teachers and John Lennon (“the greatest guy goin’ ”). She found photographs of her sister sketching in school, and the petition Karen organized to keep Lennon in the country when there was talk of deporting him.

With each new discovery, Deborah felt herself getting bolder. She wrote hundreds of letters to galleries and publishers, landing exhibitions at sophisticated galleries throughout New Jersey. She found a publisher for a book about Karen, due out next year, called “The Spirit of Children.”

Deborah is a talented artist herself who specializes in abstract earthy scenes on oil. There are times when her quest seems overwhelming, when she feels she has put her own life on hold. She worries, too, that the story of the tragedy is overshadowing the story of Karen’s talent.

But something always comes along to sweep the doubts away--a letter from one of Karen’s friends, or a phone call from a stranger who says, “I think I’ve got one of your sister’s drawings.”

Then the thrill and the joy and closeness swamp all other emotions. That’s when Deborah pauses for a moment and whispers to her sister’s spirit: “This one’s for you, Karen.”

So much has been missed by the survivors, so many years lost in pain. It’s still hard for them to admire the work without feeling the loss. But Deborah’s search has touched them in a way that makes it more bearable. And Karen’s talent is shining again.

The sister has died, someone wrote in the gallery guest book.

The artist lives.

Deborah Carrino is still searching for her sister’s work. She can be reached at P.O. Box 276, Milford, N.J. 08848.