Commissioning a Portrait in South Dakota
Hazel Morgan provides a bespoke portrait painting service to clients throughout South Dakota. An award-winning artist with over four decades of professional experience, Hazel creates hand-painted oil portraits of exceptional quality for individuals, families, corporations, and institutions across the state.
From the boardroom to the family home, Hazel’s portraits have graced the walls of distinguished collectors, university halls, and corporate headquarters throughout South Dakota. Each commission begins with a personal consultation and results in a work of enduring artistic merit.
Portrait Artist South Dakota Area
As your trusted Portrait Artist South Dakota, Hazel Morgan serves portrait clients in South Dakota and the surrounding communities. Portraits are shipped directly to your door with professional packaging and full insurance coverage.
How to Commission a Portrait from South Dakota
Commissioning a portrait from Hazel Morgan is a collaborative and enjoyable experience, regardless of where you are located in South Dakota. The process has been refined over hundreds of commissions to ensure a seamless experience for every client.
Step 1: Initial Consultation
The process begins with a complimentary consultation - by telephone, video call, or email - during which Hazel discusses your vision for the portrait. This covers the subject, preferred composition, size, background, clothing, and any particular details you would like to include. There is no obligation at this stage.
Step 2: Photographs & References
For clients in South Dakota, Hazel can work from professional photographs, high-quality personal photographs, or a combination of multiple reference images. She provides clear guidance on the types of photographs that produce the best results. Where feasible, live sittings can also be arranged.
Step 3: The Painting Process
Once the composition is agreed, Hazel begins painting. The process typically takes between six and twelve weeks depending on the complexity of the piece. Clients receive progress photographs at key stages so you can see the portrait taking shape and provide feedback before completion.
Step 4: Delivery & Framing
Completed portraits are professionally packaged for shipping. Shipping and framing costs are provided once the painting is complete. Hazel can also recommend master framers who specialise in fine art framing to complement your finished portrait. Clients in South Dakota typically receive their portrait within one to two weeks of completion.
Why Clients in South Dakota Choose Hazel Morgan
Hazel Morgan brings a rare combination of artistic excellence, professional reliability, and personal warmth to every commission. Here is what sets her apart:
Over 40 years of professional experience - Hazel has been painting portraits professionally since the early 1980s, amassing a body of work that spans hundreds of commissions for private, corporate, and institutional clients worldwide.
Award-winning recognition - Her work has been exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and other prestigious venues. She is a member of several leading art societies.
A personal, one-to-one service - Unlike studio operations, every portrait is painted entirely by Hazel herself. You deal directly with the artist from first consultation through to delivery, ensuring your vision is faithfully realised.
International shipping expertise - Hazel regularly ships completed portraits to clients across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond. Every painting is professionally packaged to arrive in perfect condition.
Complete satisfaction guaranteed - Hazel works closely with each client throughout the painting process. Progress images are shared at every stage, and adjustments are made until you are completely happy with the finished portrait.
Frequently Asked Questions - Portrait Commissions in South Dakota
Hazel provides personalized quotations after an initial telephone consultation, during which she discusses your specific requirements. The consultation is complimentary and entirely without obligation. Please get in touch to arrange a convenient time to talk.
Not at all. The majority of Hazel’s commissions are painted from photographs, which makes the process convenient for clients in South Dakota and beyond. Hazel provides guidance on the best types of photographs to supply. Live sittings can be arranged where practical.
Most portraits are completed within six to twelve weeks from the start of painting, depending on the complexity of the commission. Hazel provides a realistic timeline during the initial consultation. Rush commissions can sometimes be accommodated for special occasions.
Hazel has extensive experience working with a range of photographic references, including older or lower-resolution images. She can often combine multiple photographs to create a single cohesive portrait. During the consultation, she will advise on whether your available photographs are suitable.
Completed portraits are professionally packaged using custom-built crating and shipped via insured courier directly to your address in South Dakota. Shipping and framing are quoted separately after the portrait is completed.
Client satisfaction is paramount. Hazel shares progress photographs at key stages throughout the painting process so you can provide feedback and request adjustments. This collaborative approach means that by the time the portrait is complete, it faithfully reflects your vision.
Why Hazel Loves South Dakota
Hazel admires South Dakota for the same reason she admires a beautifully composed portrait: there is always more beneath the surface than first meets the eye. The state carries a quiet, unhurried dignity that she finds genuinely rare. From the vast, wind-shaped grasslands of the Badlands to the storied peaks of the Black Hills, South Dakota holds a landscape that seems almost painted itself - full of shadow, texture, and unexpected warmth. Hazel has found that this environment shapes the people who live within it in remarkable ways, and it is those people she feels most privileged to paint.
Hazel loves the clients she meets across South Dakota because they bring something honest and unguarded to the portrait process. There is no pretension here, no performance - just a genuine willingness to be seen. Many of her clients have shared stories rooted deeply in the land, in family histories stretching back generations, and in a fierce, quiet pride in where they come from. She finds that sitting with someone from Sioux Falls or the Missouri River valley, listening before she ever picks up a brush, gives her portraits a soulfulness that she treasures. The face, she often says, tells the story the words cannot quite reach - and South Dakotans give her extraordinary stories to work with.
Hazel also admires the rich cultural life that South Dakota quietly sustains. The Journey Museum & Learning Center in Rapid City, with its layered telling of the Northern Plains' human history, has deepened her understanding of the faces she paints - the heritage, resilience, and complexity woven into every individual she meets. She leaves visits there feeling more attentive, more curious, and ultimately more thoughtful as a painter.
Hazel also loves the sense of connection she feels whenever she returns. Mount Rushmore draws millions of visitors each year, yet Hazel is more moved by the everyday faces she encounters in the towns nearby - people who carry their own quiet monumentality. South Dakota reminds her why portraiture matters: it is an act of attention, a way of saying that this person, this life, this particular set of eyes and weathered hands, deserves to be remembered. She is deeply grateful that so many South Dakotans have trusted her with that gift.
Ready to Commission Your Portrait?
Begin with a complimentary, no-obligation consultation. Hazel would love to discuss your portrait ideas and provide a personalized quotation for clients in South Dakota.
Request a Free ConsultationSouth Dakota Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Aurora, Beadle, Bennett, Bon Homme, Brookings, Brown, Brule, Buffalo, Butte, Campbell, Charles Mix, Clark, Clay, Codington, Corson, Custer, Davison, Day, Deuel, Dewey, Douglas, Edmunds, Fall River, Faulk, Grant, Gregory, Haakon, Hamlin, Hand, Hanson, Harding, Hughes, Hutchinson, Hyde, Jackson, Jerauld, Jones, Kingsbury, Lake, Lawrence, Lincoln, Lyman, Marshall, McCook, McPherson, Meade, Mellette, Miner, Minnehaha, Moody, Oglala Lakota, Pennington, Perkins, Potter, Roberts, Sanborn, Spink, Stanley, Sully, Todd, Tripp, Turner, Union, Walworth, Yankton and Ziebach.
Towns in South Dakota Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Sioux Falls, McKennan Park, All Saints, Prairie Green, Dakota Dunes, Brandon, Harrisburg, Tea, Hartford, Dell Rapids, Madison, Brookings, Volga, Watertown, Aberdeen, Huron, Mitchell, Yankton, Vermillion, Elk Point, North Sioux City, Pierre, Fort Pierre, Chamberlain, Winner, Gregory, Rapid City, Black Hawk, Piedmont, Sturgis, Spearfish, Deadwood, Lead, Belle Fourche, Hill City, Keystone, Custer, Hot Springs, Hermosa, Wall, Kadoka, Philip, Faith, Lemmon, Mobridge, Eagle Butte, Fort Thompson, Kyle, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Mission, De Smet and Milbank.
Mount Rushmore, Harvey Dunn and the South Dakota Portrait
South Dakota contains the largest portraits ever made. Four heads sixty feet high, cut into a granite batholith over fourteen years by a sculptor working from plaster models scaled up twelve to one. Whatever else Mount Rushmore is, it is portraiture, and it forces the question of what a likeness is for.
The land is Lakota, Dakota and Nakota homeland, along with the Arikara. The Black Hills - Ȟe Sápa - are sacred ground, guaranteed to the Lakota by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and taken back after gold was found there in 1874. In 1980 the Supreme Court found the seizure unlawful and awarded compensation; the Lakota nations have refused the money, now grown to well over a billion dollars, because accepting it would confirm the sale. That refusal is the necessary context for anything made in these hills.
Gutzon Borglum began Rushmore in 1927 and worked until his death in 1941; his son Lincoln finished it. Some four hundred workers drilled and blasted ninety per cent of the stone away, then carved the last of it by hand, hanging in bosun’s chairs. Nobody died. The eyes are cut with a projecting shaft of granite in each pupil, which catches the light and makes the figures appear to look back at you - a very old portraitist’s trick, executed at a scale nobody had attempted.
Seventeen miles away, Korczak Ziolkowski began the Crazy Horse Memorial in 1948 at the invitation of Chief Henry Standing Bear, who wrote that the red man had great heroes too. Ziolkowski worked on it alone for decades, refusing federal money twice. His family continues. When finished it will be the largest sculpture in the world, and it is deliberately not a portrait - no authenticated likeness of Crazy Horse exists, and he refused to be photographed. The face is meant to stand for a people rather than a man.
Oscar Howe is the state’s great painter. Born on the Crow Creek Reservation in 1915 and Yanktonai Dakota, he trained at the Santa Fe Indian School and later taught at the University of South Dakota. In 1958 his work was rejected from a national Indian art exhibition as not authentically Indian, and he wrote back asking who had decided that Native artists must be held to one style forever. The letter changed the field. His paintings - angular, prismatic, rooted in Dakota form and utterly modern - are at the Oscar Howe Gallery in Vermillion.
Harvey Dunn is the other. Born in 1884 in a homestead shack near Manchester, he studied under Howard Pyle in Delaware, became a major illustrator, and served as a combat artist in France in 1918 - the drawings he made under fire are held by the Smithsonian. In later life he painted the prairie of his childhood from memory: sod houses, women walking through grass, harvests. He gave forty-two of those paintings to South Dakota in 1950, and they are the heart of the South Dakota Art Museum at Brookings.
Dunn’s prairie pictures are essentially portraits, even where no face is close enough to read. The Prairie is My Garden, showing a mother and two daughters cutting wildflowers under an enormous sky, is the state’s best-loved painting and one of the most honest images of homestead life anyone made.
The rest of the state’s history is written on the ground. Deadwood and Lead, where the Homestake Mine ran from 1876 to 2002 and is now a deep underground physics laboratory. De Smet, where Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family homesteaded and which she wrote into five books. Wounded Knee in Oglala Lakota County. The Badlands, the Missouri breaks, and Sturgis, which fills with half a million motorcycles every August.
Commissions come from a few places. Sioux Falls and its suburbs, which hold a third of the state’s population and most of its professional families. Rapid City and the Black Hills towns - Spearfish, Custer, Hill City, Piedmont. Brookings, Vermillion and Aberdeen around the universities. Pierre and Fort Pierre. And the ranching counties west of the river, where operations run to many thousands of acres.
Institutional portraiture is steady: the University of South Dakota, South Dakota State, the School of Mines at Rapid City, Augustana, Dakota Wesleyan, Sanford and Avera health systems, the tribal colleges, the state capitol at Pierre - whose terrazzo floor was laid by Italian craftsmen each allowed to set one blue stone as a signature - the federal courts and the older Sioux Falls firms.
The ordinary South Dakota commission is a ranch or farm one, often at a centennial, and horses feature heavily. Rushmore is not much use as a model for it, but Harvey Dunn is: paint the person, put the country behind them, and do not make either of them prettier than they are.