Lauren A. Mills

Lauren Ainsworth Mills is a painter, sculptor, and the author and illustrator of picture books including The Rag Coat. She earned her BA in Drawing and Painting from UC Santa Barbara, California, and her Master’s in Book Illustration from San Jose State University, California, before training at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts and the Grand Central Atelier in New York. She works in oil, egg tempera and watercolor, often applying gold or silver leaf, and paints the bond between nature and the divine feminine. Her work is shaped by the Pre-Raphaelite, Tonalist and Symbolist painters of the nineteenth century.

Mills came to painting through storytelling. She is the author and illustrator of sixteen books, among them The Rag Coat, in hardcover since 1991, and Fairy Wings, winner of the Golden Kite Award. The fairy tale has never left her work; it has moved from the page to the panel.

Her work is held in the collections of the Art Renewal Center and the Salmagundi Club, New York, and her bronze Legacy is installed on the Heritage Trail at Winona Lake, Indiana. She has exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, was invited to the 8th Florence Biennale, and has been honored by the Art Renewal Center International Salon, the National Sculpture Society, the Portrait Society of America and Allied Artists of America, which awarded her its Gold Medal.

Her paintings are available through R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Massachusetts. She lives and works in a small village in France.