Maret Hensick
“I can only speak for myself when I say an artist starts working in any given direction based on an enthusiastic albeit delusional concept of where she is going. You have an idea. You think you know where you are headed. Hours or maybe days later, the painting looks absolutely nothing like your original idea. Whatever concept you began with has disappeared, though you are not sure exactly how or why. This is where art gets interesting, inventive, exploratory and, for the artist, thrilling . The first piece I created in the Flowers Past and Present series was The Past Will Always Be There. The initial painting was a white phlox in the center of the paper. I started the painting in July of 2019 4 months after my mother had died. I was finally back in my studio in Maine, which has always been a place of refuge and solace. White phlox had bloomed in my garden and the idea hanging in front of me was a big, white-on-white flower of impressive delicacy to express all the love and grief I was harboring. What came out was a tight, narrow, shrunken phlox floating all alone on a piece of paper. It both puzzled and irritated me so to have so obviously failed.
Slowly, I kept adding flowers, picking what grew in the garden, painting them around the original phlox. I wanted to capture both their beauty and their imperfect character. For a few days, the flowers just floated on the paper until I added first one vase and then another. I wanted the vases to share the delicate character of the flowers without using the same approach so I began to constructed them from matte varnish and tissue paper. Rooting around in my studio looking for something else to use, I came across a box of things my mother had kept : old letters, stamps, wine bottle labels, Chinese cutouts, cards from the twenties and thirties, postcards from all her travels, maps. We lived in Europe through the sixties and seventies and in that small box, I found a little treasure trove of my mother’s mementos to use in this painting and the ones to follow. My mother loved to travel and she loved flowers. From then on through all 9 paintings, I had an accurate concept of where to go and how to get there. The series honors my mother, our lives as expatriates, and the fragile connections we all have to our worlds and to each other, past and present. My mother was a traveler and as I painted she was with me all along.” - Maret Hensick
EDUCATION
1975 Graduated University of Pennsylvania
1980-1986 Studied Printmaking in the Hamline University studios with Leonardo Lasansky
TIMELINE
In 1986 I moved to Maine with my husband, Tom Paiement, so we could be artists. It was what we dreamed of being together. He had a small, self built house on the edge of the woods in Woolwich and a soils license; two things that allowed us to live and still have free time to create. I hand painted t-shirts and sold them at craft fairs to make money. Each shirt was different and the themes varied widely: flowers, celestial, landscapes, humor, fish, people, animals. Fabric painting requires a certain fearlessness or maybe just a "devil may care" attitude. I painted free hand with no outline or predetermined design just a general idea of what I was after. Standing in front of a piece of white fabric with a dripping, loaded brush is exciting. I learned long ago that drips, splatters, mistakes with line or color all have to be worked into the final piece. At the prodding of my sister, I photographed each design and in 1989, on a whim, Tom took the portfolio to LLBean. They licensed three shirts initially and put them on the back cover of their catalog and continued to license shirts for 6 years. I also began licensing designs to Harborside Graphics in Belfast, Maine
1992-2019 I exhibited at SURTEX in New York, NY. During that time, I licensed designs to over 60 companies around the world including Papyrus, Department 56, Excell Home Fashions, Pier 1, Boston Warehouse, Sellers Productions, IHR and Pictura to name a few.
2020 Stepped down from licensing.
1986-Present I never stopped painting what captured my interest using all kinds of mediums and techniques: oil pastels, watercolors, monoprints, Ipad drawings, collages, fabric paints, tissue paper, pencil. I recycle my paper, use paperbags, old file folders, old fabrics whatever is at hand.
SERIES
I Hate Winter. I Love Summer
File Folder Fruit and Veg Love Letters
Mainers
Ipad drawings
Maine Landscapes
Flower Series Tissue
Paper Bag Paintings
Flowers Past and Present
