Missy Hopkins Smith

Missy Hopkins Smith has been growing flowers and painting them since she was a little girl in Baltimore. A graduate of Calvert School and Garrison Forest, she continued her education and enrolled at Middlebury College in 1994 where she fell in love with Vermont and has been living ever since.

Having worked for the athletic department at Middlebury (including coaching some field hockey and seven seasons of women's lacrosse) while gardening, cooking, raising animals, and parenting her three young children, she has always been drawn to the connections between the home, the body, and the land.

Missy has worked as Director of Admissions, and in 2012 became the Studio Art Teacher at the Mountain School in Vershire, VT where she still teaches. Missy works in a variety of media, in particular oil, watercolor, ink, and clay. Her paintings range from still life to textured layering on found images and transparencies, as well as transformations of old books, that become a hybrid blend of found poetry and three-dimensional paintings. Art flows into life, and motherhood plays a large role in Missy’s work, as well as foraging and wandering in the forest.