Portrait Artist Alabama

Alabama Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Autauga, Baldwin, Barbour, Bibb, Blount, Bullock, Butler, Calhoun, Chambers, Cherokee, Chilton, Choctaw, Clarke, Clay, Cleburne, Coffee, Colbert, Conecuh, Coosa, Covington, Crenshaw, Cullman, Dale, Dallas, DeKalb, Elmore, Escambia, Etowah, Fayette, Franklin, Geneva, Greene, Hale, Henry, Houston, Jackson, Jefferson, Lamar, Lauderdale, Lawrence, Lee, Limestone, Lowndes, Macon, Madison, Marengo, Marion, Marshall, Mobile, Monroe, Montgomery, Morgan, Perry, Pickens, Pike, Randolph, Russell, Shelby, St. Clair, Sumter, Talladega, Tallapoosa, Tuscaloosa, Walker, Washington, Wilcox and Winston.

Towns in Alabama Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Birmingham, Mountain Brook, Crestline, English Village, Homewood, Vestavia Hills, Hoover, Indian Springs, Shoal Creek, Chelsea, Trussville, Bessemer, Tuscaloosa, Northport, Montgomery, Old Cloverdale, Garden District, Pike Road, Prattville, Wetumpka, Auburn, Opelika, Lake Martin, Alexander City, Dadeville, Huntsville, Madison, Twickenham, Athens, Decatur, Florence, Muscle Shoals, Tuscumbia, Gadsden, Anniston, Talladega, Selma, Demopolis, Eufaula, Dothan, Enterprise, Troy, Monroeville, Mobile, Spring Hill Mobile, Oakleigh, Fairhope, Point Clear, Daphne, Spanish Fort, Gulf Shores, Orange Beach and Magnolia Springs.

Gee’s Bend, Mobile and Portraiture in Alabama

The most celebrated pictures made in Alabama in the last century were not painted at all. They were quilts, stitched by women in an isolated bend of the Alabama River, and when they were finally shown in New York in 2002 critics compared them to Klee and Matisse and meant it.

The land was Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee homeland, and Moundville on the Black Warrior River was one of the largest settlements in North America around 1250. The French founded Mobile in 1702 as the first capital of Louisiana, which is why Mobile has celebrated Mardi Gras longer than New Orleans has. Alabama became a state in 1819, and cotton, then iron and steel at Birmingham, then rockets at Huntsville made its successive economies.

Gee’s Bend sits in Wilcox County, on a peninsula the river almost encircles, and its families have made quilts there since the nineteenth century — bold, asymmetric, improvised from work clothes and feed sacks. The Whitney showed them, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston toured them, and the United States Postal Service put them on stamps. They are now among the most admired American artworks of their era.

Alabama produced painters too, though they are less known than they should be. Anne Goldthwaite, born in Montgomery in 1869, studied in Paris, exhibited at the Armory Show of 1913, and painted portraits and Southern scenes with real economy. Kelly Fitzpatrick founded the Dixie Art Colony at Lake Jordan in 1933, the first artists’ colony in the state. Clara Weaver Parrish of Selma designed windows for Tiffany.

The museums are better than the state gets credit for. The Birmingham Museum of Art holds the largest municipal collection in the Southeast and — improbably — the finest collection of Wedgwood outside England. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts has the Blount Collection of American Art, two centuries of American painting assembled by one Alabama businessman and given to the city.

Mobile is the state’s old-world corner. The Mardi Gras societies date from before the Civil War, the Carnival Museum keeps the robes and trains, and the azalea-lined streets of Oakleigh and Spring Hill hold Creole cottages and Greek Revival townhouses. Across the bay, Point Clear and Fairhope have been summer resorts since the 1840s, and the Grand Hotel has been receiving the same families for generations.

The Black Belt — Dallas, Marengo, Perry, Hale, Greene, Lowndes and Wilcox counties — is named for its soil, and its antebellum towns still hold remarkable houses. Selma, Demopolis, Eutaw, Marion and Greensboro have concentrations of nineteenth-century domestic architecture that few places in America can match, and Auburn’s Rural Studio has been building for those communities since 1993.

Huntsville is the opposite pole. Wernher von Braun’s team came to Redstone Arsenal in 1950, the Saturn V that reached the Moon was designed there, and the city now has one of the highest concentrations of engineers and doctorates in the country. Twickenham, its antebellum quarter, is the largest such district in Alabama — engineers living in 1820s houses.

Commissions come from those distinct worlds. Birmingham’s Mountain Brook, Crestline and Vestavia Hills. Montgomery’s Old Cloverdale and Garden District, and Pike Road. Huntsville’s Twickenham and Madison. Auburn, Opelika and the Lake Martin houses. Mobile’s Spring Hill and Oakleigh, and across the bay at Point Clear and Fairhope. And the Gulf at Gulf Shores and Orange Beach.

Institutional portraiture is very active. The University of Alabama, Auburn, UAB and its medical centre, Samford, Birmingham-Southern, Tuskegee — where Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver worked, and whose campus was largely built by its own students — Spring Hill College, the state capitol, the federal courts and the older Birmingham and Mobile firms all keep and add to portrait collections.

Sporting subjects are common. Bird dogs above all — Alabama quail hunting is serious and the dogs are bred, trained and remembered by name — along with horses, and increasingly the Robert Trent Jones golf trail has brought its own kind of commission.

What the Gee’s Bend quilters understood, and what runs through the best Alabama picture-making, is that a made object stands for a person. A quilt is signed by its stitching the way a face is signed by its lines. That is a good frame of mind to bring to a portrait.