Lawrence.com

Missy Hamilton has come full circle. After completing undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine art, followed by years of laboring in various fields associated with commercial photography, commercial art, and pre-press production and sales, she is once more a professional, visual artist. And after many years pursuing her creative endeavors far and wide, she's back home in Lawrence.

Born into the academic family of KU professors Robert Green (painting and drawing, now Professor Emeritus) and Miriam Green (music/voice), after growing up in Lawrence, Hamilton spent one year in the fine arts program at KU before transferring. After a year of being the professor's daughter she opted for Kansas State, where she could free herself from the political atmosphere.

Hamilton got her Masters of Arts in metal-smithing at the University of Oklahoma. After a brief stint as an instructor at Kutztown State College in eastern Pennsylvania, she pulled up stakes and headed for the state of Washington, where she began a seventeen-year career in the world of commercial photography, pre-press, design and editing.

During that period, serendipity led to relocation from the Northwest to San Francisco. On a visit to the city, her car broke down, and upon taking the first off ramp, the first door she came to, on the first building read "Banana Republic, Special Effects." She asked the people there if they were the folks that painted the zebra stripes on Jeeps. Upon confirmation she told them "I'd really be good at that!" and provided them with a resume, and thus began the California portion of her career.

As a metalsmith, her work was three-dimensional and iconic in its forms. And though it was in 1998 that she decided to fully commit herself once more to her personal work, she had never ceased creating her art during the intervening years.

Now a painter, Hamilton creates beautiful and subtle works on large sheets of Masonite, which she builds up with layers of gypsum that she sculpts and shapes with a variety of tools and techniques before applying pigment.

Once the physical structure has been created, Hamilton applies watercolors, waxes, and metal gilding to the surfaces.

It's not difficult to see a continuous through line from her three-dimensional metal works, to her paintings, sculpted reliefs with applied metal surfaces.

Hamilton's re-commitment to her career as a fine artist coincided with her decision to return to Lawrence to care for her parents. Her mother recently passed away, and her father, still active at age 91, lives in a retirement center and returns to the family home on weekends.

Hamilton's work is represented by the Phoenix Gallery in Topeka, where she will be hanging a full show of new work later this summer. She's also begun to once again create her trademark photographic backgrounds, working with local photographer John Gladman on images for his Heart of Gold Ball project.