Carol Rhoad Bass
POWNAL – Painter, sculptor, author, and spirited lover of family, friends, color, poetry, animals, and nature, Carol Rhoad Bass died peacefully in Pownal on July 31, 2024, in the small timber-frame home she shared with Bob Newton, her longtime companion and partner.
As she passed, she was surrounded by the family, art, books, verses, and brilliant hues she considered as essential to her life as air and water. Her beloved cat, Sappho, also sat vigil during Carol’s final weeks, alternately hunting and snoozing, and despite importing the lingering essence of a months-old skunk encounter and the occasional deer tick, was provided by Carol a prime spot on her bed.
Carol was born on Dec. 15, 1948, in Columbia, S.C., to schoolteacher and organist, Louise Goodman Rhoad and magistrate Francis Marion Rhoad and raised in the small railroad town of Bamberg. She attended Bamberg schools and studied art at the University of Georgia.
Shortly afterward, she headed north to Mount Desert Island, Maine, with three friends from UGA, where she met Peter Bass of Wilton, with whom she raised three children in Northeast Harbor and then Wilton and Yarmouth. The two joked that the UGA foursome would rather have gone abroad, but far-distant Maine seemed a less-expensive equivalent with just slightly less of a language barrier. Together, Peter and Carol founded and co-owned Maine Cottage Furniture.
In Yarmouth, Carol met Bob Newton, with whom she spent the remainder of her life. They moved back to South Carolina for nearly a decade, and then back to Maine. Bob lovingly indulged Carol’s desire to explore the back roads of South Carolina and Maine and they co-created three spectacular houses together. As multiple sclerosis took its inexorable toll on Carol, Bob cared for her with deep commitment and compassion.
Carol was the kind of person who loved swimming in the rain, who pulled her car over to move turtles out of the road, and who never wanted to come inside from the outdoors. As an artist and person, she was kinetic, her mind and body always exploring and open to delight. She made her kids fragrant apple pies instead of cakes for their birthdays and always proposed drinking water and riding bicycles as the solution to any malady.
In her art she was prolific, daring, and fearless, and the woods, rivers, coastlines, and birdcalls of South Carolina and Maine were among her many muses. As MS slowed her body, her mind quickened. Her most intense and vibrant works of art came in recent years.
Wherever she lived, Carol assembled communities of artists and thinkers to share ideas and ask questions, co-hosting art shows and conversation circles. She was eternally curious and brought that out in others. She was comfortable living in wonder and possibility and not having all of the answers. She often used her art to advocate for the natural environment and once brought copies of her book, “Ripple Effect”, a collection of poems, stories, photographs, and paintings about rivers and waterways, to every member of the South Carolina legislature.
Carol’s family remembers her with profound gratitude because of the blessings she so generously spread: her easy laughter, her quick smile, her relentless encouragement, her boundless heart, her fierce love, her gushing colors, and her loving guidance.
Her family asks that you remember her by taking quiet time each day to be in nature and observe wild birds and flowers, to think of her while riding, walking, or running with the wind in your hair and sun on your face, or while breast-stroking at your favorite swimming hole or ocean cove. She loved curling up with a hot cup of tea and a good book or enjoying a cold gin and tonic with lots of lime on a hot summer afternoon with friends. She would want all of us to make time every day to create—knit, paint, build, sew, throw, write—and give away our work to friends.
She is survived by her partner, Bob Newton; children, Sam (Ryan) Bass, Molly (Aaron) Bass, and Hannah Bass; grandchildren, Luke and Mekdes Bass and Ruby Sober; sister, Louisa Rhoad Bennett; and the countless communities and people who inspired her.
Memorial service details will be announced at a later date.
To leave a remembrance for Carol, please visit https://www.kudoboard.com/boards/tGeeuSii.
