Portrait Artist Kansas

Kansas Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Allen, Anderson, Atchison, Barber, Barton, Bourbon, Brown, Butler, Chase, Chautauqua, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Clark, Clay, Cloud, Coffey, Comanche, Cowley, Crawford, Decatur, Dickinson, Doniphan, Douglas, Edwards, Elk, Ellis, Ellsworth, Finney, Ford, Franklin, Geary, Gove, Graham, Grant, Gray, Greeley, Greenwood, Hamilton, Harper, Harvey, Haskell, Hodgeman, Jackson, Jefferson, Jewell, Johnson, Kearny, Kingman, Kiowa, Labette, Lane, Leavenworth, Lincoln, Linn, Logan, Lyon, Marion, Marshall, McPherson, Meade, Miami, Mitchell, Montgomery, Morris, Morton, Nemaha, Neosho, Ness, Norton, Osage, Osborne, Ottawa, Pawnee, Phillips, Pottawatomie, Pratt, Rawlins, Reno, Republic, Rice, Riley, Rooks, Rush, Russell, Saline, Scott, Sedgwick, Seward, Shawnee, Sheridan, Sherman, Smith, Stafford, Stanton, Stevens, Sumner, Thomas, Trego, Wabaunsee, Wallace, Washington, Wichita, Wilson, Woodson and Wyandotte.

Towns in Kansas Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Overland Park, Leawood, Prairie Village, Mission Hills, Fairway, Westwood, Shawnee, Lenexa, Olathe, Stilwell, Bucyrus, Gardner, Kansas City KS, Lawrence, Eudora, Baldwin City, Topeka, Potwin, Auburn, Manhattan, Wamego, Council Grove, Cottonwood Falls, Strong City, Emporia, Wichita, College Hill, Riverside, Eastborough, Andover, Derby, Goddard, Maize, Newton, North Newton, Hesston, McPherson, Lindsborg, Salina, Abilene, Hays, Great Bend, Hutchinson, Dodge City, Garden City, Liberal, Pittsburg, Fort Scott, Winfield, Arkansas City and Independence.

John Steuart Curry, Gordon Parks and the Kansas Portrait

Kansas has been argued about in paint more than most states, and the argument is still hanging on the wall of the state capitol. John Steuart Curry’s mural of John Brown so upset the legislature in 1941 that the painter left the job unfinished and never signed it. It is now the most famous image the state possesses.

The land is Kansa, Osage, Wichita, Pawnee and Cheyenne homeland, and the name comes from the Kansa people. Coronado came looking for Quivira in 1541. The Santa Fe Trail ran across it from 1821, and the territorial fighting of the 1850s — Bleeding Kansas — was a rehearsal for the Civil War. Statehood came in 1861, as a free state, and the state motto still reads Ad Astra per Aspera.

Curry was born near Dunavant in Jefferson County in 1897 and became, with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, one of the three Regionalists. His Kansas paintings — the baptism in a horse trough, the tornado over the farm, John Brown with his arms out under a prairie sky — are among the most powerful American pictures of the 1930s. Kansas, at the time, mostly disliked them for showing the state as violent and weather-beaten. It has since come round.

Birger Sandzén is the state’s other great painter and a complete contrast. A Swede who arrived at Bethany College in Lindsborg in 1894 intending to stay a year or two, he taught there for fifty-two years and painted the prairie and the mountains in thick, brilliant, almost fauve colour. His portraits and figure studies are much less known than his landscapes and are worth seeking out. The Sandzén Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg holds the collection.

And Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott in 1912, the youngest of fifteen children. He bought his first camera in a pawnshop, became the first Black photographer on the staff of Life, made portraits of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Ingrid Bergman and Duke Ellington, wrote novels, composed music and directed films. His American Gothic, Washington, D.C. of 1942 — Ella Watson with mop and broom in front of the flag — is one of the defining portraits of the century, and it is a Kansan’s picture.

The state collects seriously. The Wichita Art Museum holds the Roland P. Murdock Collection, assembled after 1939 by Louise Caldwell Murdock’s bequest and containing Hoppers, Homers, Eakins, Cassatts and Bellows — an outstanding small American collection built by a decorator with an unerring eye. The Spencer Museum at Kansas and the Beach Museum at Kansas State are both strong, and the Nerman at Overland Park is one of the best contemporary museums in the Midwest.

The Flint Hills are the physical fact that shapes everything. Their limestone was too shallow to plough, so they survived as the last large stretch of tallgrass prairie on earth — some four million acres of it, still burned each spring and grazed as it has been for a century and a half. The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Strong City protects a piece of it, along with the great stone barn and ranch house at Spring Hill.

Kansas money came from cattle, wheat and aircraft. The Mennonites who arrived from Russia in the 1870s brought Turkey Red hard winter wheat with them and made the state the breadbasket it became. Wichita built Cessna, Beech, Stearman and Learjet, and calls itself the Air Capital of the World with reasonable justification. Abilene sent Eisenhower to the White House.

Commissions come from a few clear places. Johnson County — Mission Hills, Leawood, Prairie Village, Overland Park, Stilwell — which is among the wealthiest counties in the Midwest. Wichita’s College Hill, Riverside and Eastborough, and out to Andover. Lawrence, Manhattan and Topeka. The Flint Hills ranching families around Cottonwood Falls, Council Grove and Matfield Green. And Salina, Hays and the western wheat counties.

Institutional portraiture is steady: the University of Kansas, Kansas State, Wichita State, Washburn, Bethany at Lindsborg, Baker, the KU Medical Center, the state capitol at Topeka, Fort Leavenworth and its Command and General Staff College, the federal courts and the older Kansas City and Wichita firms.

The characteristic Kansas commission is a ranch or farm one, and it often includes the land. A quarter horse, a working dog, a family with a section of ground behind them that they have held since the 1880s. The sky does a great deal of the work in a Kansas picture, as Curry knew perfectly well.