Commissioning a Portrait in Arizona
Hazel Morgan provides a bespoke portrait painting service to clients throughout Arizona. 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 Arizona. Each commission begins with a personal consultation and results in a work of enduring artistic merit.
Portrait Artist Arizona Area
As your trusted Portrait Artist Arizona, Hazel Morgan serves portrait clients in Arizona and the surrounding communities. Portraits are shipped directly to your door with professional packaging and full insurance coverage.
How to Commission a Portrait from Arizona
Commissioning a portrait from Hazel Morgan is a collaborative and enjoyable experience, regardless of where you are located in Arizona. 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 Arizona, 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 Arizona typically receive their portrait within one to two weeks of completion.
Why Clients in Arizona 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 Arizona
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 Arizona 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 Arizona. 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 Arizona
Hazel admires Arizona for its extraordinary sense of depth and light - a quality that feels almost painterly in itself. The vast Sonoran Desert stretches out in hues of amber, rust, and sage, and the way the afternoon sun settles across the landscape reminds her of a carefully applied glaze on canvas. She finds the state's natural drama endlessly thought-provoking, and it feeds directly into how she thinks about tone and atmosphere when she sits down to paint a new portrait. There is something about Arizona's sky - wide, luminous, and unapologetically bold - that encourages her to be braver with colour and more generous with warmth in her work.
Hazel loves the people she meets through her Arizona commissions, and she believes the state has shaped a particularly genuine, grounded kind of character in its residents. Many of her clients come from communities in and around Tucson, where the Tucson Museum of Art has long nurtured an appreciation for fine art and cultural heritage. She finds that people who live close to institutions like that tend to bring a thoughtful, unhurried energy to their portrait sittings - they understand that a painting takes time, and they trust the process. That mutual respect makes the work richer and the connection between painter and subject far more meaningful.
Hazel also admires the layered cultural history of the region, which gives her portraits of Arizona clients an added dimension of storytelling. The Heard Museum in Phoenix, dedicated to the art and culture of Native peoples, has deepened her understanding of how portraiture can carry identity, memory, and dignity all at once. Walking through its galleries has reminded her that a portrait is never just a likeness - it is a record of someone's place in the world, and that responsibility sits with her every time she picks up a brush.
Hazel also loves the neighbourhoods of Scottsdale, where a thriving arts district and a community of collectors have welcomed her work with open arms. The warmth she receives there feels genuine rather than performative, and she always leaves with her sketchbook full and her enthusiasm renewed. Arizona, for Hazel, is not simply a place where clients happen to live - it is a source of creative nourishment that quietly shapes every portrait she paints.
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 Arizona.
Request a Free ConsultationArizona Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Apache, Cochise, Coconino, Gila, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pima, Pinal, Santa Cruz, Yavapai and Yuma. They are few in number but very large - Coconino County alone is bigger than nine American states.
Towns in Arizona Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Phoenix, Arcadia, Biltmore Estates, Encanto, Willo, North Central Phoenix, Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, Old Town Scottsdale, McCormick Ranch, DC Ranch, Silverleaf, Troon, Grayhawk, Desert Mountain, Cave Creek, Carefree, Fountain Hills, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Tempe, Ahwatukee, Litchfield Park, Goodyear, Peoria, Sun City, Anthem, Tucson, Catalina Foothills, Sam Hughes, El Encanto, Oro Valley, Marana, Dove Mountain, Tubac, Tumacácori, Patagonia, Sonoita, Elgin, Bisbee, Sierra Vista, Sedona, Oak Creek, Jerome, Prescott, Flagstaff, Williams, Page, Lake Havasu City, Wickenburg, Yuma and Green Valley.
Desert Light, the Heard and Portraiture in Arizona
Arizona has the best light in the United States for painting, and painters have been saying so since the 1880s. It is not just brightness - it is the length of the shadows, the reflected warmth off red rock, and the way a face holds colour in it.
The land holds twenty-two federally recognised tribes and a quarter of the state is tribal. The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the country; the Hopi mesas include Old Oraibi, continuously inhabited since around 1100 and one of the oldest settlements in North America. Before them, the Hohokam built several hundred miles of irrigation canal across the Salt River valley, some of which Phoenix still follows. Spanish missions came in the 1690s - Father Kino’s San Xavier del Bac south of Tucson is the finest Spanish colonial building in the United States. Arizona was the last of the contiguous states, admitted in 1912.
The first great pictures made here were of the canyon. Thomas Moran came with the Powell survey in 1873, and his enormous Grand Canyon canvases persuaded Congress that the place was worth protecting. Photographers followed - the Kolb brothers built a studio on the rim in 1904 and worked there for seventy years.
Portrait painting arrived with the Native art trade. Fred Harvey’s company and the Santa Fe Railway commissioned painters and photographers from the 1890s to record Hopi, Navajo and Apache sitters, and while the motives were commercial the results included serious portraiture. E. A. Burbank, working from 1897, painted well over a thousand named Native sitters across the Southwest.
The Heard Museum in Phoenix, founded in 1929 by Dwight and Maie Heard, is the outcome. It is the leading museum of Native American art in the country and has moved, over a century, from collecting objects to showing the work of living Native artists on their own terms. Its Hopi katsina doll collection is unmatched.
Frank Lloyd Wright came for the winters and stayed. He began Taliesin West at the foot of the McDowells in 1937 and built it from desert stone and canvas, working there every winter until his death in 1959. It is a World Heritage Site and it did more than any single building to teach American architects how to build in a desert.
Then Scottsdale happened. In 1965 a group of painters and sculptors met at the Oak Creek Tavern in Sedona and founded the Cowboy Artists of America - Joe Beeler, Charlie Dye, John Hampton and George Phippen. Their annual exhibition made Scottsdale a market, and today the city has one of the largest concentrations of galleries in the United States, with a Thursday night art walk that has run since the 1970s.
The Phoenix Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Desert Botanical Garden, the Musical Instrument Museum and the Sedona Arts Center round it out. Ted DeGrazia’s Gallery in the Sun in Tucson, built by the artist himself from adobe and open since 1965, is the most idiosyncratic art building in the state.
Winter residence shapes the commissioning here more than in most places. A great many Arizona clients keep houses elsewhere - the Midwest, the Northwest, Canada - and are here from October to April. Portraits are very often commissioned during the season and hung in the other house, or the reverse.
The geography is clear. Paradise Valley and the Biltmore corridor in Phoenix, and Arcadia under Camelback. North Scottsdale - Silverleaf, DC Ranch, Troon, Desert Mountain. Carefree and Cave Creek. Tucson’s Catalina Foothills and El Encanto, and Dove Mountain to the north-west. Sedona and Oak Creek. Prescott and Flagstaff. The wine and ranch country at Sonoita, Elgin and Patagonia. And Wickenburg, which has been dude-ranch country since the 1920s.
Institutional work is substantial: Arizona State, the University of Arizona, Northern Arizona, Embry-Riddle at Prescott, the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, the Banner and Barrow medical centres, the state capitol, the federal courts and the older Phoenix and Tucson firms.
The distinctive Arizona commission is an outdoor one. Families want saguaro, red rock or the Catalinas behind them, and they want the light to look like the light they moved here for. It is a demanding thing to paint honestly - the shadows are violet and the reflected light off the ground is orange - but when it is right, nothing else looks like it.