About me: Melissa Bounty

I've been a painter all of my life, something many people don't know about me.  

I graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Johnson State College. I’ve been fortunate to study painting with Jane Pack at the Aegean Center of the Fine Arts on Paros, Greece, in the early 2000s and more recently with the incredible Natalia Fabia. I am incredibly grateful to have twice been a full fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. I currently serve on the Board of Directors for the Center for Arts and Learning. Thanks to the many friends, educators, fellow painters, and family members who have supported me in making the art I want to see.

About: “Third Mountain”

Welcome to my first solo art show, Third Mountain.

These 12 oil paintings are named for a line from the Donovan song “There is a Mountain”:

First there is a mountain
Then there is no mountain
Then there is

when I was young, my good friend Jayme and I loved the absurdity of that line. Donovan wrote it referring to a Buddhist saying by Qingyuan Weixin as translated by D. T. Suzuki in Essays in Zen Buddhism: “Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instructions of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.”

I have always thought about the lines of the song a little differently. When we are young, we see the mountains as mountains. In our middle age, life gets so chaotic that we see trees and rocks and skies but we lose touch with the knowledge that we are looking at a mountain. We are traversing them, and we lose the forest for the trees. But when we are able to overcome the challenges around us, we look back and see the mountains, for what they were, as simply mountains again.

My life has had a lot of waters and mountains lately.

I spent two years helping people impacted by devastating floods in Central Vermont.

To honor the incredible people I met doing that work, all proceeds of these paintings goes to the following organizations:

(Most paintings)
Migrant Justice for helping give a voice to Vermonters who have come here from other places
Center for Arts and Learning for offering us an inclusive space to experience creative joy in challenging times
"Mountain"
To Sam at Pho Thai Express and his family, to help restore his son Tank's college fund after flood costs depleted it

"US Department of Agriculture Yearbook 2025"
To Neeraj and Thida at Namaste to welcome their new baby girl

Thanks to everyone who invited me in to your hearts, kitchens, storefronts, and back rooms these last few years.