Heather Johnson Reid Oil Painter

Heather Johnson Reid has vast experience in the art world, being trained as a fine artist and historian. She studied oil painting in Boston with Jeremy Foss, and fine art photography with Nicholas Nixon at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her fine art photography was shown in many galleries, including Viridian Gallery in New York City, and her work sold commercially including an image to Capital Records.

A later career change came after completing a graduate degree in Museum Studies at Harvard University. She became a museum curator and worked in several museums in the Boston area. While at the Lynn Museum she researched and produced an exhibit of nineteenth and twentieth century paintings from a group now called The Lynn Beach Painters. A book was published in conjunction with the exhibition, The Lynn Beach Painters, Art Along the North Shore 1880-1920. Reid's knowledge of nineteenth century North Shore painters grew while she completed research for the artists biographies, and her admiration for their ability to depict coastal areas that she was fond of inspired her to begin to paint again.

Just like the earlier painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Reid finds beauty in the coast line of New England, and considers the seaside villages with their unique architecture and changing seasons a treasure trove of  inspiration. She mostly paints in a plein-air style, beginning paintings on site, in order to capture the moment of time and place. Her works have been in numerous exhibits and galleries, and reside in many private collections.