Hidden Canopy
A Collection by Mische:
Collaboration of Stephanie Blank, Chuck Hodges, & Minh Dang
The Collection
Hidden Canopy is a body of original work grounded in the landscape, natural habitat, light, and spirit of the Southern Appalachians — made specifically for people who have made this special place their own. Each piece in this collection starts with a story. What that story becomes — in oil, acrylic, or watercolor — is the work of three people whose backgrounds, instincts, and sensibilities are genuinely different from one another, and whose collaboration is better for it.
The Artists
Stephanie Blank is a native of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and the beauty of the Appalachian mountains has informed her eye since childhood. She graduated with a degree in interior design and a minor in art and spent years working as a designer with Home Depot — building a practiced sense of how color, texture, and space work together in the rooms where people actually live.
In Atlanta, where she and her husband Chuck Hodges live, Stephanie is widely known as a committed community advocate for pediatrics, early childhood development and working families. After raising three children, she returned to her own work as a painter — drawn particularly to watercolor, where unpredictability is part of the process, and to acrylics, where texture and layering allow for a different kind of expression.
Chuck Hodges also grew up in the mountains of Appalachia, in West Virginia — and those origins have shaped his sensibility as an artist and collector. His professional background is in economics and law, and his path to art was unconventional: years of looking for works that told a personal story and, not finding ones that captured his visions, deciding to design them himself.
Chuck and his wife Stephanie are avid collectors, and it was through that pursuit that he encountered Minh Dang, whose paintings had already found their way to international collectors who recognized something uncommon in them. That introduction became a working partnership. More than thirty paintings later, Chuck's contribution to each collaboration remains the same — he brings the story. The painting follows. Every piece in this collection is built on that sequence.
Minh Dang was born in Vietnam in 1999 and has been developing his craft through years of mentorship and studio training in both oil and acrylic painting. His technical foundation — layered glazing, tonal control, precise color mixing — came from sustained, disciplined practice, and it shows in work that is confident without being showy.
Minh has completed over one thousand commissioned oil paintings for private collectors across North America, Europe, and beyond — a remarkable body of work that has earned him long-term relationships with international collectors who return to him again and again. In this collection, Minh's realism provides the foundation on which the three artists build — precise where the work calls for precision, accompanied by the more expressive abstraction from Stephanie.
