Portrait Artist Nevada

Nevada Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Carson City, Churchill, Clark, Douglas, Elko, Esmeralda, Eureka, Humboldt, Lander, Lincoln, Lyon, Mineral, Nye, Pershing, Storey, Washoe and White Pine. Carson City is an independent city that functions as a county, and Nye County is the third largest county in the United States.

Towns in Nevada Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Las Vegas, Summerlin, The Ridges, Queensridge, Spanish Trail, Rancho Circle, Scotch 80s, Anthem, Seven Hills, MacDonald Highlands, Southern Highlands, Henderson, Green Valley, Lake Las Vegas, Boulder City, North Las Vegas, Mount Charleston, Blue Diamond, Pahrump, Mesquite, Laughlin, Reno, Old Southwest Reno, Caughlin Ranch, Arrowcreek, Somersett, Montrêux, Sparks, Verdi, Incline Village, Crystal Bay, Zephyr Cove, Glenbrook, Stateline, Minden, Gardnerville, Genoa, Carson City, Dayton, Virginia City, Fernley, Fallon, Yerington, Winnemucca, Elko, Spring Creek, Lamoille, Ely, Eureka, Austin, Tonopah and Caliente.

From the Comstock to Las Vegas: Portraiture in Nevada

Nevada has gone from the richest silver strike in American history to the most photographed city on earth in about a hundred and sixty years, and almost nothing in between has been ordinary. It is a state built on booms, which makes its portrait market unlike anyone else’s.

The land is Northern and Southern Paiute, Washoe and Western Shoshone homeland. The Washoe have lived around Lake Tahoe for at least six thousand years, and their basketry — above all the work of Dat So La Lee, whose degikup baskets are among the finest ever made anywhere — is one of the great American art traditions. Nevada became a state in 1864, rushed into the Union in the middle of the Civil War partly for its silver and partly for its votes.

The Comstock Lode was found under Virginia City in 1859 and produced something like four hundred million dollars in silver and gold. At its height the town had a population of twenty-five thousand, an opera house, an international stock exchange and a newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise, whose young reporter Samuel Clemens first signed himself Mark Twain there in 1863.

The Bonanza Kings who came out of it — Mackay, Fair, Flood and O’Brien — became four of the richest men in America. John Mackay commissioned from Tiffany a silver service of well over a thousand pieces, made from half a ton of his own Comstock silver, which took two hundred craftsmen two years. His statue stands on the campus at Reno, made by Gutzon Borglum before Borglum went to Mount Rushmore.

Nevada then legalised what other states would not. Quick divorce in 1931, which brought a stream of the wealthy to dude ranches around Reno for the six-week residence, and gambling in the same year. The Reno divorce trade lasted three decades and left the town with an unusual visiting population — Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and the cast of The Misfits shot there in 1960.

Painting in Nevada has a real if quiet history. Robert Cole Caples, working from the 1930s, made portrait drawings and paintings of Washoe and Paiute sitters that are among the most sensitive done anywhere in the Great Basin. Hans Meyer-Kassel, a German portraitist who had painted in Europe, settled at Genoa and painted Nevadans for twenty years. Both are in the Nevada Museum of Art.

That museum, in Reno, is the only accredited art museum in the state, and it has done something original: its Center for Art + Environment collects the archives of artists who work on and with landscape — Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria. Heizer has been building City, a mile-and-a-half earthwork, in the Nevada desert since 1972.

Las Vegas is the other extreme. It grew from a railway watering stop in 1905, to a Hoover Dam construction town in the 1930s, to something with no real precedent. The resorts now hold serious art — Bellagio has run a gallery of fine art since 1998, and the Strip has commissioned major sculpture and design. Nevada also holds the Black Rock Desert, where Burning Man builds and burns a temporary city of seventy thousand people each August.

Ranching persists across the north and is the oldest continuous business in the state. Elko County, larger than nine American states, has cattle families going back to the 1870s, and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering has met in Elko every winter since 1985. Sheep were run for a century largely by Basque herders, and Elko’s Basque festival is one of the largest in the country.

Commissions come from three quite separate worlds. Las Vegas and Henderson — Summerlin, The Ridges, Queensridge, MacDonald Highlands, Lake Las Vegas — where much of the money is recent and the houses are modern and very large. The Reno–Tahoe corridor, including Incline Village, Glenbrook and the Carson valley at Genoa and Minden, which has drawn a steady migration of families out of California. And the ranching counties around Elko, Winnemucca and Ely.

Institutional portraiture exists too: the University of Nevada at Reno and Las Vegas, the Desert Research Institute, the medical schools, the state capitol at Carson City, the federal courts, the gaming corporations and the older Las Vegas and Reno firms.

Two Nevada commissions stand out. The ranch portrait, with horses and a great deal of sky, which has not changed much in a century; and the Tahoe house portrait, painted for a room with a wall of glass over the lake. The light in the Great Basin is extremely clear and the shadows go blue-violet, which is a gift to a painter and a trap to a careless one.