When her father was transferred to Wilhelmshaven in 1930, the Schmidt family lived there until 1941 when the bombardments during World War II made them retreat to the paternal property in the Hessian village of Stockhausen near Leun.
In 1946 she attended another drawing course by Prof. G. Kranz in Lauterbach, entered the local artist association Oberhessischer Künstlerbund, and began to exhibit her portraits and watercolor landscapes in Dillenburg, Giessen, Marburg, Wetzlar, and other cities within the province.
In 1952 the wealthy building contractor and industrialist Hermann Lindemann (1897–1954) became her patron and procured for her and her sculptor cousin Giselher Neuhaus apartments in the Bonn suburb of Bad Godesberg.
[citation needed] When her son finished his schooling, Ruth Schmidt Stockhausen felt free to leave Bad Nauheim and return to her native turf East Frisia in 1983.
She converted the barn of an old farmhouse in Dornum on the German coast—within eyeshot of Norderney—into a summer atelier, where many more large abstract paintings—her own variant of Informalism—and sculptures took shape under the influence of her coastal surroundings.
The artist's estate and property are now part of a museum managed by the Ruth Schmidt Stockhausen Stiftung, a not-for-profit foundation for the furtherance of her legacy in the fine arts.