Consuelo (Connie) Joerns, artist and writer, died in Wiscasset, Me., in April 2020. She was 94 and had been a Vineyard Haven resident in the 1960s and 1970s.

Her Vineyard home and studio were on William street. There she painted boats and beaches and flowers and the views of the harbor she could see from her top floor studio. Always an animal lover, she adopted a stray mouse once and wrote one of her children’s books, The Lost and Found House, about Cricket the mouse and the house she had built for him. Other books were The Forgotten Bear, The Foggy Rescue, Oliver’s Escape and The Midnight Castle.

She showed her work at the Alan-Mayhew Ltd. Gallery, now the Granary Gallery.

She was also known for her large wall map of the Island that hangs in many homes and offices. The map is decorated with caravelles and three and four-masted schooners, inset drawings of Menemsha, Edgartown’s colonial houses and the Gay Head Cliffs, and edged with quotations from Bartholomew Gosnold’s 1602 first sighting of the Island.

Connie was born Oct. 21, 1925, in Evanston, Ill., a daughter of Arnold Jones and Emilie Chase Jones. She grew up in Chicago, where she attended the Francis W. Parker School and met Edward Gorey, who would remain a lifelong friend and become renowned in later years, among other things, for his art that opens PBS Sunday night television mysteries. She went on to attend Mills College and the Art Institute of Chicago, again with Gorey. In World War II, she worked as a civilian for the U.S. Armed Forces in France.

She had shows of her paintings at the time in Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer. She also exhibited in Chicago and New York and Maine.

At the end of the war, she went to Guatemala where an ocelot became her animal companion. She would frequently go walking with the ocelot draped around her neck.

Always an adventurous traveler, in her 80s she developed a fondness for Japan, going there for months at a time and studying the country’s art.

She is survived by her former sister in law, Dr. Susan Hunter-Joerns; a nephew, Dana Beowulf Christian Joerns and grand-nephews and nieces.