Mona Dukess, a Truro artist known for her paintings and handmade paper whose work is in the permanent collection of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, died on July 5, 2025 at Phelps Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. The cause was complications from surgery. She was 89.

“She was very gentle, very quiet, very loving, and got very funny in her later years,” said her daughter Karen. “And she created things all the time. She couldn’t stop herself.”

Mona was born on Aug. 29, 1935 in New York City to Stephen S. Bernstein, an attorney, and Josephine, a schoolteacher who painted and did ceramics.

She grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, studied religion at Mount Holyoke, and then transferred to Columbia University, where she earned her B.A. She also spent time at her family’s cottage in Peekskill, where she fell in love with townie Carleton Dukess, who lived a few houses down. They married, Carleton became a successful real estate attorney and developer, and they raised three daughters in Larchmont, N.Y. and Truro, where Mona had long spent summers with her family.

Mona was always dabbling in arts and crafts — she started painting in the early ’70s and did collaging and needlework and made hook rugs, said Karen. When the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill was founded in 1975, Mona studied with abstract painter Budd Hopkins, prompting her first serious foray into the art form.

She moved on to making pigmented handmade paper, learning the craft at the Dieu Donné Paper Mill in downtown Manhattan. “She’d go from the suburbs to this Soho loft, where she’d buzz at the entrance, and they’d throw a key down,” said Karen.

Mona later taught papermaking at Castle Hill and enrolled in many more classes there. “She took photography, painting, papermaking, working with paper pulp, drawing,” said the center’s Cheri Mittenthal. “She loved all we were doing to make Castle Hill a destination for artists.” Carleton was on the board, and together they came to all the events; in 2006, Mona curated a show there called Reflections: Water as Metaphor and Muse.

Mona combined her papermaking with other media, including medieval gold leaf application and large format Polaroid and digital photography, with her work shown at Kobalt Gallery, Kendall Gallery in Wellfleet, and PAAM.

PAAM’s CEO Chris McCarthy, who once curated a small show of her photographs, was “really taken by the work she did on the homemade paper,” she said. Soon after meeting her, she took Mona up on her invitation to do a studio visit. “I was fascinated by how she could consistently reinvent herself, especially when using digital technology” to photograph the brooks behind their Truro house, said Chris. “She created such movement in the photos that you swore you saw the water rippling. There was a lot of rhythm in her work.”

Mona also worked her artistic magic on the land surrounding their Truro home.

“She was known in Truro as a great gardener,” said Karen. “People used to come to the house to see the garden, which she did like an artist — the colors and the composition, the flowers. It was like a palette.”

“It was always a treat to see what she’d been doing around the yard, with its breathtaking views of marshes,” said Chris, adding that, through the landscape, “you could see where she got her artistic inspiration.”

She and Carleton also had a gift for human connection. “They were the couple you wanted to hang out with,” said Chris, who recalls their help when she began running the museum in 2001. “They offered solid advice. They’d be honest but in a really kind way. Mona was an unbelievably kind person, and we always had a lot of laughs.”

“She was always listening, always cheerleading, and always there,” said her friend Francie Randolph. “Mona was so warm and so generous with her thoughts and ideas and so excited about life and metamorphosis and change and not afraid, ever, of something in the unknown.”

She was a voracious reader and visitor of museums and galleries — including when she was a young mother who brought her daughters to exhibits. “She would stand forever in front of a painting,” said Karen, making such museum trips boring for a kid — except for the time Mona allowed them to release Matchbox cars on the top floor of the spiraled Guggenheim Museum.

Her mother’s deep appreciation of others’ artwork grew on her in adulthood. “I took her two summers ago to an opening at Castle Hill,” said Karen, “thinking we’d pop in for five minutes, but she was walking around the room so slowly, peering at all the paintings.”

Karen, who is a novelist, welcomed advice from her mother about how to nurture her creativity. “She always said to me, ‘You know, taking a walk is part of the process,’ ” she said. “I learned from her about giving things time.”

Mona is survived by her daughters, Linda and wife Jody DiPerna of Pittsburgh, Laura and husband Roger Schwed of New York City; and Karen and husband Steve Liesman of Pelham, N.Y.; her brother, Daniel Bernstein, and wife Carol; and her grandchildren, Joanna Bernstein, Sam Bernstein, Ben Schwed, Stephen Schwed, Joe Liesman, and Johnny Liesman.

Plans for a memorial service have not yet been announced. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to Sustainable CAPE and Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill.