Beautiful Books: Flower Diary

An excerpt from Flower Diary 

PrologueThe Open DoorShe left a door ajar, slipping through a threshold into the almost impossible-to-balance world of love and art. Over three hundred paintings and a lifelong commitment to a partner: she’s one of the artists from the past who made it possible to live and love in the present. Often, we who look for models of creativity learn the names of those who banged down doors and wrecked their own and others’ lives. But she, who mined a rich and unconventional interior life while clothed in discreet propriety, turned the handle more quietly. And handle is a word that belongs to this woman who made still lifes like diary pages and landscapes like dream logs. She planned and coped, sized up situations, then seized moments, managing a subtle ménage with her painter husband and their talented student in a stiff society, all the while making five transatlantic journeys and creating some of the most devastatingly expressive works you’ve likely never seen, signing them Mary Hiester Reid.

Images from Flower Diary 

“Nasturtiums” by Mary Hiester Reid

“Three Roses” by Mary Hiester Reid 

Click here for a short clip of how Molly Peacock discovered Mary Hiester Reid and what drew her to the painter’s work.

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Molly Peacock is a poet, biographer, essayist, and writer of tales whose multi-genre literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from poetry to prose, from words to words-and-pictures, and from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others. Photo credit Candice Ferreira