Commissioning a Portrait in Alaska
Hazel Morgan provides a bespoke portrait painting service to clients throughout Alaska. 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 Alaska. Each commission begins with a personal consultation and results in a work of enduring artistic merit.
Portrait Artist Alaska Area
As your trusted Portrait Artist Alaska, Hazel Morgan serves portrait clients in Alaska and the surrounding communities. Portraits are shipped directly to your door with professional packaging and full insurance coverage.
Portrait Services in Alaska Communities
How to Commission a Portrait from Alaska
Commissioning a portrait from Hazel Morgan is a collaborative and enjoyable experience, regardless of where you are located in Alaska. 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 Alaska, 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 Alaska typically receive their portrait within one to two weeks of completion.
Why Clients in Alaska 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 Alaska
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 Alaska 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 Alaska. 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 Alaska
Hazel admires Alaska with a depth of feeling that goes far beyond the obvious grandeur of its landscapes. There is something about the sheer scale and wildness of the place - the vast tundra, the glaciers calving into cold bays, the skies that shift from bruised violet to burning amber in a matter of minutes - that reminds her why she became a painter in the first place. She has spoken often about visiting the Anchorage Museum, where the collections celebrating Alaska's Indigenous cultures and natural history sit side by side in a way that feels honest and thoughtful. Standing there, she says, she is always reminded that great art is really just a careful act of attention - and that is exactly what she tries to bring to every portrait she creates.
Hazel loves the people of Alaska most of all, and she is candid about the fact that her Alaskan clients are among the most meaningful she has worked with. There is a quiet self-possession that she notices in so many of the faces she paints here - people who have chosen a life that demands resilience, creativity, and a genuine relationship with the natural world. That quality is a gift to a portrait artist, because it means the character is already there, already written into the lines of a face and the way someone holds themselves. She has painted clients from Fairbanks and from the hillside neighbourhoods overlooking Anchorage, and in each sitting she finds a story worth telling slowly and with care.
Hazel also admires the cultural richness woven into everyday Alaskan life, something that visitors can easily miss if they are only looking at the mountains. The traditions of Alaska Native communities - their storytelling, their relationship with the land, their extraordinary visual artistry - have quietly shaped the way she thinks about portraiture as an act of preservation and respect. She feels a responsibility, when painting someone, to honour what makes them singular rather than simply flattering them.
Hazel also loves returning to places like Denali National Park between commissions, not to paint the landscape directly, but simply to sit with the vastness and let it recalibrate her eye. Alaska, she says, teaches you to look properly - and for a portrait painter, there is no more valuable lesson than that.
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 Alaska.
Request a Free ConsultationAlaskan Boroughs and Census Areas Hazel Paints Portraits In
Alaska has no counties. It is divided instead into boroughs and, where no borough has been organised, census areas: Aleutians East Borough, Aleutians West Census Area, Anchorage Municipality, Bethel Census Area, Bristol Bay Borough, Chugach Census Area, Copper River Census Area, Denali Borough, Dillingham Census Area, Fairbanks North Star Borough, Haines Borough, Hoonah-Angoon Census Area, Juneau City and Borough, Kenai Peninsula Borough, Ketchikan Gateway Borough, Kodiak Island Borough, Kusilvak Census Area, Lake and Peninsula Borough, Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Nome Census Area, North Slope Borough, Northwest Arctic Borough, Petersburg Borough, Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area, Sitka City and Borough, Skagway Municipality, Southeast Fairbanks Census Area, Wrangell City and Borough, Yakutat City and Borough and Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area. The North Slope Borough alone is larger than Utah.
Towns in Alaska Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Anchorage, South Addition, Turnagain, Bootleggers Cove, Hillside, Rabbit Creek, Bear Valley, Eagle River, Chugiak, Girdwood, Alyeska, Indian, Bird Creek, Palmer, Wasilla, Big Lake, Willow, Talkeetna, Trapper Creek, Denali Park, Cantwell, Fairbanks, Ester, Fox, Chena Hot Springs, North Pole, Delta Junction, Tok, Valdez, Cordova, Whittier, Seward, Moose Pass, Cooper Landing, Soldotna, Kenai, Nikiski, Kasilof, Ninilchik, Anchor Point, Homer, Halibut Cove, Seldovia, Kodiak, Juneau, Douglas, Auke Bay, Haines, Skagway, Gustavus, Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell, Ketchikan and Nome.
Sydney Laurence, Eustace Ziegler and the Alaskan Portrait
Alaska is a place where a portrait usually has to account for where the sitter is standing. The country is so much larger than the person that leaving it out would be dishonest, and the painters who have worked here best have understood that from the beginning.
The land has been inhabited for at least ten thousand years and is home to Iñupiat, Yupʻik, Alutiiq, Unangax̂, Athabascan, Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples. Their art is among the most sophisticated produced anywhere: Tlingit and Haida carving and Chilkat weaving, Yupʻik dance masks that so struck the Surrealists in Paris in the 1940s that André Breton and Max Ernst collected them, Iñupiat ivory engraving, Athabascan beadwork. All of it is living practice, not history.
Russia claimed the coast from 1741 and made Sitka its colonial capital. What the Russians left, besides place names, was an Orthodox tradition of icon painting - St. Michael’s Cathedral at Sitka, rebuilt after a fire in 1966 with its icons carried out by townspeople, holds the Sitka Madonna, said to work miracles. Icons are portraits of a particular kind, made to rules, and they were the first painted faces in Alaska.
The United States bought the territory in 1867 for seven million dollars, a purchase widely mocked at the time. Gold at Juneau in 1880, at Nome in 1899 and in the Klondike stampede through Skagway in 1897 changed the arithmetic. Oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968 and the pipeline that followed changed it again, and the Permanent Fund now pays a dividend to every resident.
Sydney Laurence is the painter Alaska claims as its own. An Englishman’s son from Brooklyn who had exhibited at the Paris Salon, he came north in 1904 for gold, failed at it, and turned to painting. His Mount McKinley canvases - the mountain in alpenglow above the Tokositna - defined how the rest of America pictured Alaska, and he painted the subject well over a hundred times.
Eustace Ziegler is the one who painted people. An Episcopal missionary priest sent to Cordova in 1909, he ran a mission and painted the men who came through it: prospectors, trappers, railway workers, Athabascan and Tlingit neighbours. He gave up the priesthood for painting in 1924 and produced several thousand works. Ziegler’s Alaskan heads are the closest thing the territory has to a portrait record of its frontier years, and they are far better paintings than they are usually given credit for.
Later came Fred Machetanz, who arrived in 1935 to visit an uncle and stayed sixty years at Palmer, painting Iñupiat life and sled dogs in a distinctive blue-toned glazing technique; and Rie Muñoz, who taught in a one-room school on Little Diomede and made a body of joyful, flat-patterned work about village life.
The institutions are strong and widely spread. The Anchorage Museum holds the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center and a major Alaska Native collection. The Sheldon Jackson Museum at Sitka, in the oldest concrete building in Alaska, holds objects collected in the 1880s and has an octagonal gallery that shows them beautifully. The University of Alaska Museum of the North at Fairbanks occupies a striking modern building above the Tanana valley, and the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage is run by the peoples it represents.
The light is the technical problem and the technical gift. In June, Fairbanks has around twenty-two hours of usable daylight and a sun that circles rather than arcs; in December it has under four. Winter light at these latitudes is low, long and blue, and snow throws an enormous amount of it back up under a face. Painting here means deciding what season the portrait belongs to.
Commissions come from a handful of places. Anchorage and its hillside neighbourhoods, Eagle River and Girdwood. The Mat-Su valley at Palmer, Wasilla and Talkeetna. Fairbanks. The Kenai Peninsula - Homer, Seward, Soldotna and Halibut Cove, which has a genuine artists’ community reachable only by boat. Juneau and the southeast towns of Sitka, Haines, Petersburg and Ketchikan. And Kodiak.
Institutional portraiture exists too: the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, Anchorage and Southeast, Alaska Pacific University, the Alaska Native regional corporations formed under the 1971 settlement, the Providence and Alaska Native medical centres, the state capitol at Juneau - reachable only by air or sea - the federal courts and the older Anchorage firms.
The characteristic Alaskan commission involves a boat, a plane, a dog team or a mountain, and it is not sentimental about any of them. These are working things. A bush pilot painted beside her aircraft, a skipper on his own deck in Prince William Sound, a musher with the lead dog - those are portraits of a life as much as of a face, which is exactly what Ziegler was doing in Cordova a century ago.