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Former graphic designer Pinkie Mistry now spends her days painting images from the Smokies.
Photo Above: “The Swimming Hole,” to Mistry’s right, is one of the painter’s favorite works, for its calmness. Courtesy of Pinkie Mistry.
Of all the paintings she’s created over the years, Pinkie Mistry’s favorite is “The Swimming Hole,” a calming depiction of her favorite respite in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
“I swim there now. I actually went there yesterday,” she says. “It’s one of those secret spots. It’s not marked, so tourists don’t go there. They don’t really know about it, which I love.”
A former graphic designer who now concentrates on her first love — painting — Mistry is finally living her dream from her East Tennessee home, where her brush strokes bring to life scenes from the Smokies.
“I get to be creative and paint all day. It’s like my favorite thing,” she says. “It’s very soothing. A lot of people don’t get to do what they love, as work, but I do.”
Born in Canada to Indian parents, Mistry was a year old in 1978 when her dad found a business opportunity in Sevierville and moved the family there. When relatives visited, it was a given that they’d all load up in the car and drive to the Smoky Mountains.
“Back then, we didn’t have the Tanger Outlet and all the attractions,” Mistry recalls. “So we would go off the spur to get to the river, which was my favorite. I loved getting to climb the rocks and play in the water.”
Long before she started school, her mom taught her to draw birds with stick feet. “A lot of us, in our family, have a love for art in some form or fashion,” Mistry says. “I was really drawn to it, and I just kept doing it all through my childhood.”
By the time she entered high school, those bird sketches looked a lot more lifelike. But her dad’s warning — “You can’t make money doing that” stopped her from pursuing a career as a fine artist and steered her toward graphic design, a new-at-the-time profession made possible by Adobe and other computer software. “So I got into that to make a living and still be in the art field,” she says.
Maryville [Tennessee] College offered no graphic design program, so after one semester of fine art, she left and enrolled at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville. For the next two decades, she focused strictly on graphic design.
Eventually, clients started learning about her fine arts skills and commissioned her for their projects. One of the first, which she did for the Rocky Top Wine Trail in Sevierville, involved miniature paintings used as labels for special bottles sold to raise funds for American Cancer Society research during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Trading a mouse device for a paintbrush, she says, was “my dream come true. My goal in life was to get away from the computer and just paint for a living. I don’t mind the graphic design so much, but you get to the point where sometimes it’s just like typesetting, and for an artist, that’s painful.”
After doing freelance design work from home for a while, about 12 years ago she left the commercial design world to focus on illustrations and paintings, mostly impressionistic landscapes from Appalachia, along with female silhouettes, dancers from her family’s native India, and a series of perfectly coiled roses. Her most popular subject is a black bear; she donated the original to Friends of the Smokies to auction off at a fundraiser and now sells the prints. Oil is her chosen medium; the colors blend well, take long enough to dry so that she can go back and revise, and lend themselves to thick textures that give depth to the images.
Her first mural, completed during the early days of the pandemic and commissioned by the Sevierville Commons Association as part of the city’s historic downtown revitalization, is still her favorite. Inspired by Dolly Parton’s love of butterflies and the captivating fall migration through the Smokies, Mistry created “Wings of Wander,” a 16-foot-by-24-foot monarch with intricate henna-style designs, a nod to her Indian heritage.
Since then, she has created more murals, including a bear for a restaurant in Gatlinburg, bluebird wings for Anakeesta and scenes for a pediatric office and a couple of libraries.
In 2022, five years after moving to Maryville with her new husband, Mistry opened her first art gallery above a downtown bookstore. In 2024, she moved to a bigger space one street over. But rent kept going up, and the store hours felt too confining, so in the summer of 2025 she closed the shop to focus on painting at home.
“Having a schedule and being put in a box is hard,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of freedom to get out and be on my own. … Sometimes I don’t get into that creative process till like 5:00 in the afternoon, and that’s when I had to close up and go home. It wasn’t vibing with me. [Closing the downtown studio] was kind of freeing, to not have to worry about that anymore and just be able to focus on my art.”
Right now, she is doing mostly commission work, including a new mural in downtown Maryville on an exterior wall of Great American Cookies that shows five Bluetick hound puppies eating ice cream, and two whimsical scenes in the kids’ and teens’ sections at the Seymour Branch Library in Kodak, Tennessee. She is also illustrating her third children’s book for Anakeesta.
Capturing the nuances of the Smokies brings her great joy, she says, noting that she visits the park more than ever since relocating to Maryville.
“I love where I live, and I always have. We traveled a lot growing up, and I was always so happy to come back home. At other places, the land was so flat. Getting back home and seeing the mountains — I always loved it. It’s a beautiful place. It’s a paradise, a rainforest, and it’s so green and lush.”
Mistry’s work will be on exhibit at the Clayton Center for the Arts at Maryville College through mid-December.
Pinkie Mistry’s 3 Favorite Smokies Subjects to Paint
- The river. “There’s just something about the water, and of course it being [the place] where I go swimming. That little spot is just a little slice of heaven on earth. It’s quiet. There’s no cell service. It’s just the most wonderful, peaceful place.”
- The animals. “I’ve only painted the bear [in a tree in Cades Cove] and the butterflies. But I am dying to paint a deer and the bigger animals.”
- The mountains. “I love the ridgelines, sunsets and sunrises and skies. It goes back to traveling, when we’d come back home and we would see the mountains. It made me happy, like, ‘Okay, we’re close. We’re almost home.’”
The story above first appeared in our November / December 2025 issue.
