Portrait Artist Arkansas

Arkansas Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Arkansas, Ashley, Baxter, Benton, Boone, Bradley, Calhoun, Carroll, Chicot, Clark, Clay, Cleburne, Cleveland, Columbia, Conway, Craighead, Crawford, Crittenden, Cross, Dallas, Desha, Drew, Faulkner, Franklin, Fulton, Garland, Grant, Greene, Hempstead, Hot Spring, Howard, Independence, Izard, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, Lafayette, Lawrence, Lee, Lincoln, Little River, Logan, Lonoke, Madison, Marion, Miller, Mississippi, Monroe, Montgomery, Nevada, Newton, Ouachita, Perry, Phillips, Pike, Poinsett, Polk, Pope, Prairie, Pulaski, Randolph, Saline, Scott, Searcy, Sebastian, Sevier, Sharp, St. Francis, Stone, Union, Van Buren, Washington, White, Woodruff and Yell.

Towns in Arkansas Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Little Rock, Heights, Hillcrest, Riverdale, Chenal Valley, Pleasant Valley, North Little Rock, Maumelle, Sherwood, Cammack Village, Benton, Bryant, Conway, Cabot, Searcy, Hot Springs, Hot Springs Village, Malvern, Arkadelphia, Pine Bluff, Stuttgart, Helena, Bentonville, Rogers, Bella Vista, Springdale, Fayetteville, Farmington, Prairie Grove, Siloam Springs, Eureka Springs, Berryville, Harrison, Fort Smith, Van Buren, Alma, Russellville, Dardanelle, Morrilton, Petit Jean, Clinton, Mountain View, Mountain Home, Bull Shoals, Batesville, Jonesboro, Paragould, Blytheville, West Memphis, Camden, El Dorado and Magnolia.

Crystal Bridges and the Arkansas Portrait

In 2011 one of the most important collections of American art in the country opened in a town of forty thousand people in the Ozarks. Crystal Bridges changed what it means to look at American painting in Arkansas, and it did it more or less overnight.

The land is Quapaw, Osage and Caddo homeland. The French claimed it, Arkansas Post was founded in 1686, and the Louisiana Purchase brought it into the United States in 1803. Cotton in the Delta, timber in the south, bauxite near Little Rock and rice in the Grand Prairie made the economy; Stuttgart still calls itself the rice and duck capital of the world, with some justification.

The Ozarks and the Ouachitas gave the state its other character. The Buffalo National River, designated in 1972, was the first national river in the United States, and the mountain counties held onto ballads, fiddle tunes and craft traditions that had largely disappeared elsewhere. The Ozark Folk Center at Mountain View still teaches them.

Hot Springs is a chapter of its own. The federal government protected the springs in 1832, making it effectively the oldest federal reserve in the country, forty years before Yellowstone. Bathhouse Row was built in marble and tile in the early 1900s; Oaklawn has raced Thoroughbreds since 1904; and for a couple of decades the town was an open city where Al Capone and Owney Madden wintered comfortably.

Eureka Springs, in the north-west, is a Victorian spa town built vertically into a hillside, with the whole of its downtown on the National Register. Above it stands Thorncrown Chapel, built in 1980 by E. Fay Jones, a Fayetteville architect who had apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright. It is a wooden lattice of glass and pine in the woods, and the American Institute of Architects voted it one of the finest American buildings of the twentieth century.

Then Bentonville. Sam Walton opened a five-and-dime on the square in 1950 and built the largest retail company in the world from it. His daughter Alice Walton spent two decades buying American art and in 2011 opened Crystal Bridges, designed by Moshe Safdie, in a wooded ravine with pavilions built over spring-fed ponds.

For anyone interested in portraits it is a serious collection. Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington, Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Sully, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, and Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman-Wilson House was dismantled in New Jersey and rebuilt on the grounds. Admission is free.

Little Rock has the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, rebuilt and reopened in 2023, whose collection of works on paper is one of the strongest in the region. Central High School, where nine students walked in under federal escort in 1957, is a National Historic Site and still a working school.

Arkansas has produced remarkable people out of small places. Maya Angelou grew up in Stamps in Lafayette County. Johnny Cash was raised in a New Deal resettlement colony at Dyess, now restored. Winthrop Rockefeller left New York for a cattle ranch on Petit Jean Mountain in 1953 and ended up governor.

Commissions come from a few clear areas. North-west Arkansas — Bentonville, Rogers, Bella Vista and Fayetteville — which has grown enormously around Walmart, Tyson and J. B. Hunt. Little Rock’s Heights, Hillcrest and Chenal Valley. Hot Springs and Hot Springs Village. Fort Smith. El Dorado, where oil money built a fine downtown in the 1920s. And the Delta towns of Helena, Stuttgart and Pine Bluff.

Institutional portraiture is steady: the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and Little Rock, Arkansas State, Hendrix, Ouachita Baptist, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, the state capitol — a smaller copy of the national one, which is why several films have used it — the federal courts and the older Little Rock firms.

The commonest Arkansas commission involves the outdoors. Duck-hunting subjects from the Grand Prairie, retrievers, quarter horses, and Thoroughbreds around Hot Springs. Families here often want the dog in the picture and are entirely serious about it, which is generally a good sign.