Edgar Allen Beem – Maret Hensick: Flowers Past and Present

From just after her mother died in 2019 until shortly before her own death in 2025, artist Maret Hensick worked on a series she called Flowers Past and Present. The mixed-media paintings presented flowers from her own garden in Woolwich almost as botanical illustrations combined with collaged elements from a box of her mother’s mementoes—letters, postcards, stamps, cards, wine labels, maps, and other printed matter.

The first painting in the series, The Past Will Always Be There, began with a stem of white phlox to which Hensick added black-eyed Susans, bee balm, campanula, and clematis. Most of the flowers are casually arranged in a bottle that is fashioned from a Chinese paper cutout of warriors on charging horses, and are investigated by a pair of butterflies.

Flowers Past and Present brought together Maret Hensick’s life and art, her love of flowers, travel, of words and writing, her successful career as a commercial artist, and her triumph as a fine artist.

“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,” she wrote. “My mother was a traveler and as I painted she was with me all along.”

Maret Hensick was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1953. Her father was a Ford Motor executive, which enabled the Hensick family to live abroad when Maret and her two sisters were young, first in Belgium and then Germany. She attended the American School in Switzerland.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, Hensick studied printmaking with Leonardo Lasansky at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was there that she met her future husband, painter Tom Paiement, who had been studying at the University of Iowa with Leo Lasansky’s father, Mauricio Lasansky, one of the stars of 20th-century American printmaking along with the likes of Gabor Peterdi, Stanley Hayter, Leonard Baskin, and Rico Lebrun.

Paiement had taken over for Leo Lasansky at Hamline while he was on sabbatical. In 1986, he brought Maret Hensick back to his native Maine. Together they lived in a Shelter Institute owner-built home in Woolwich and shared a two-story studio, Paiement on the first floor, Hensick on the second.

Paiement, who studied engineering at the University of Maine, supported his art career early on doing soil testing. Hensick made money creating hand-painted T-shirts that she sold at local fairs. Then one day Paiement took some of Hensick’s hand-painted T-shirts to L.L. Bean in Freeport. The catalogue retailer liked Hensick’s designs and licensed them for a line of T-shirts.

Hensick’s Flowers Past and Present series thus has aesthetic roots in the floral T-shirts she created for L.L. Bean and eventually Liberty Graphics. In 2004 she created a flower calendar that ascribed personalities to each featured bloom.

Her commercial art career took off in 1992 when she and her husband discovered SURTEX, the New York showcase that bills itself as “the premier surface design and art licensing marketplace.” The couple had a booth at SURTEX in the Javits Center for some fifteen years.

“By then she was selling designs to L.L. Bean and that, we knew, would be a selling point to potential buyers,” says Paiement. “It snowballed from there.”

Hensick’s Woolwich studio is filled with flat files, albums, and notebooks that attest to the success of her commercial career. Her paintings and drawings were licensed for everything from T-shirts and cards, to posters and calendars, wrapping paper, and Christmas ornaments. Her subject matter included not only flowers but seashells and insects, the sun, moon, and stars, and cats and dogs.

“What she brought to the commercial ventures of her work was a different viewpoint on familiar themes,” says Hensick’s former agent Maria Kent. “She hit her stride when the industry was looking for a looser, casual style, with lots of spontaneous color. But her artistry and classical training was always apparent with her ability to capture imagery in a bold, simpler representation, particularly with her line rendering.”

Hensick “retired” from commercial art in 2019 in order to concentrate on her personal work, paintings and drawings she exhibited at Greenhut Galleries and Cove Street Arts in Portland.

The Flowers Past and Present series that occupied most of her creative attention deals with the passage of time, the seasons, travel, and family, and features titles that are thoughtful, at times even poetic. In her private paintings, words came to animate her images both as text and elements of design.

No Need to Go to Mexico This Spring, for example, is an arrangement of red and yellow tulips, dandelions, and apple blossoms that features a twenty cent Soil & Water Conservation stamp, a postcard of a cathedral in Florence, and butterflies cut out of the ephemera.

It’s Not Spring Yet But It’s Getting There is composed of irises, daffodils, primroses, hyacinth, and snowdrops, some in a vase cut from a map of New Zealand, as well as coasters made from fragments of letters.

In I Took a Walk to See the World, Hensick depicted sweet William, wild roses, Queen Anne’s lace, grass, and daisies in a hand-drawn pitcher and a single blossom in a vase cut from a paper bearing the words “Write the answers to these questions in complete statements.”

“Maret wrote as much as she did art,” says Tom Paiement.

“I am an artist. I have always been an artist, which sounds strange, but it is just the way someone looks at the world and works out its challenges even as a young child,” wrote Hensick in one of her musings. “I love reading and writing too and poetry. Sometimes I think that if I could paint poetry with paint, it would be the best of worlds.”

Maret Hensick’s vision may not be the best of worlds, but the world is a better place for the way she perceived, painted, and pronounced it good.