Commissioning a Portrait in Oklahoma
Hazel Morgan provides a bespoke portrait painting service to clients throughout Oklahoma. 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 Oklahoma. Each commission begins with a personal consultation and results in a work of enduring artistic merit.
Portrait Artist Oklahoma Area
As your trusted Portrait Artist Oklahoma, Hazel Morgan serves portrait clients in Oklahoma and the surrounding communities. Portraits are shipped directly to your door with professional packaging and full insurance coverage.
How to Commission a Portrait from Oklahoma
Commissioning a portrait from Hazel Morgan is a collaborative and enjoyable experience, regardless of where you are located in Oklahoma. 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 Oklahoma, 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 Oklahoma typically receive their portrait within one to two weeks of completion.
Why Clients in Oklahoma 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 Oklahoma
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 Oklahoma 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 Oklahoma. 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 Oklahoma
Hazel admires Oklahoma for its quiet, unhurried sense of dignity - a quality she finds increasingly rare and genuinely moving. There is something in the way people here carry themselves, rooted in the red earth and wide open skies, that speaks directly to her instincts as a portrait painter. The land itself has a kind of visual honesty to it, and that honesty seems to live in the faces of the people she meets. Whether she is working from her studio or spending time with a new client over coffee, Hazel finds that Oklahomans have a natural ease in front of her - an openness that makes the whole process of creating a portrait feel less like a formal sitting and more like a genuine conversation.
Hazel loves the cultural richness that runs through Oklahoma far deeper than most outsiders expect. The Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, with its extraordinary collection of art and artifacts rooted in the American West and Indigenous heritage, has long been a source of quiet inspiration for her. Walking through those galleries reminds her that portraiture is not merely about likeness - it is about legacy, identity, and the stories a face holds across generations. She also has a deep fondness for the vibrant, walkable energy of Oklahoma City's Paseo Arts District, where local creativity feels organic and community-driven rather than curated for effect. That neighbourhood's spirit of honest artistic expression aligns closely with her own values as a painter.
Hazel also admires the people who have shaped Oklahoma's story and given it its distinctive character. The legacy of figures like Woody Guthrie, who grew up in Okemah and carried Oklahoma's soul into his music, reminds her that this state has always produced individuals with remarkable depth and authenticity - exactly the qualities she strives to honour in every portrait she creates. Knowing that her clients come from a place with such layered, meaningful history makes her work feel more significant, not less.
Hazel also loves the warmth she consistently receives from Oklahoma families when she delivers a finished portrait. There is a generosity of spirit here - a genuine appreciation for something made slowly and by hand - that never fails to move her. It is, she says, one of the most rewarding places in the world to do the work she loves.
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 Oklahoma.
Request a Free ConsultationOklahoma Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In
Adair, Alfalfa, Atoka, Beaver, Beckham, Blaine, Bryan, Caddo, Canadian, Carter, Cherokee, Choctaw, Cimarron, Cleveland, Coal, Comanche, Cotton, Craig, Creek, Custer, Delaware, Dewey, Ellis, Garfield, Garvin, Grady, Grant, Greer, Harmon, Harper, Haskell, Hughes, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnston, Kay, Kingfisher, Kiowa, Latimer, Le Flore, Lincoln, Logan, Love, Major, Marshall, Mayes, McClain, McCurtain, McIntosh, Murray, Muskogee, Noble, Nowata, Okfuskee, Oklahoma, Okmulgee, Osage, Ottawa, Pawnee, Payne, Pittsburg, Pontotoc, Pottawatomie, Pushmataha, Roger Mills, Rogers, Seminole, Sequoyah, Stephens, Texas, Tillman, Tulsa, Wagoner, Washington, Washita, Woods and Woodward.
Towns in Oklahoma Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live
Oklahoma City, Nichols Hills, Heritage Hills, Mesta Park, Crown Heights, Edmond, Oak Tree, Deer Creek, Yukon, Norman, Moore, Mustang, Piedmont, Guthrie, Stillwater, Shawnee, Chickasha, Tulsa, Maple Ridge, Midtown Tulsa, Brookside, Utica Square, Southern Hills, Jenks, Bixby, Broken Arrow, Owasso, Sand Springs, Sapulpa, Claremore, Bartlesville, Pawhuska, Ponca City, Enid, Woodward, Elk City, Weatherford, Clinton, Lawton, Duncan, Ardmore, Ada, Durant, Muskogee, Tahlequah, Grove, Grand Lake, Miami, McAlester, Idabel, Broken Bow and Altus.
Gilcrease, the Kiowa Six and the Oklahoma Portrait
Oklahoma holds the largest collection of art of the American West anywhere in the world, and it was assembled by an oil man who was himself Muscogee Creek. Thomas Gilcrease spent a fortune on pictures of a country his own family had been forced to walk to, and then gave the lot to the city of Tulsa.
The state is Indian Territory before it is anything else. Thirty-nine tribal nations have their headquarters here - more than in any other state - because the removals of the 1830s and the reservation policy that followed sent peoples from across the continent to this one place. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee and Seminole came over the Trail of Tears; the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Osage, Ponca, Modoc, Nez Perce and dozens more followed. Oklahoma became a state only in 1907.
That history produced an art tradition unlike any other. In the 1920s Oscar Jacobson at the University of Oklahoma took on a group of young Kiowa painters - Stephen Mopope, Monroe Tsatoke, Spencer Asah, Jack Hokeah, James Auchiah and Lois Smoky - and arranged for their work to be exhibited in Prague in 1928. The Kiowa Six became internationally known and effectively founded modern Native American painting. Lois Smoky, the only woman among them, was pushed out by tribal disapproval and by the men, and has only lately been given her due.
Bacone College at Muskogee carried it further. Acee Blue Eagle, Woody Crumbo and Dick West ran its art department from the 1930s, and the flat, linear Bacone style shaped Native painting for a generation. Later Oscar Howe and then the Santa Fe school broke away from it, but it began here.
The oil made everything else possible. The Glenn Pool strike of 1905 and the Osage headright leases produced enormous wealth very quickly, and Osage County in the 1920s had the highest per capita income in the world - a fact that ended in the murders David Grann wrote about, and in the reforms that followed.
The Phillips brothers built what they built with it. Frank Phillips made Woolaroc, a ranch and museum in the Osage hills with a bison herd and a collection of Western art and Native material. Waite Phillips built Villa Philbrook in Tulsa, an Italian Renaissance house of seventy-two rooms with formal gardens, and gave it away as a museum in 1938 after living in it for eleven years.
Gilcrease is the greatest of them. Thomas Gilcrease held a Creek allotment that turned out to sit on oil, and he spent the rest of his life collecting: Remington, Russell, Catlin, Bierstadt, Moran, Audubon, and a documentary archive including a certified copy of the Declaration of Independence. When debts threatened the collection in the 1950s, the people of Tulsa voted a bond issue to buy it and keep it in the city.
Tulsa itself is one of the great art deco cities of the United States. The Boston Avenue Methodist Church, the Philcade, the Philtower and the Mayo Hotel went up in the 1920s and 1930s on oil money, and the residential streets of Maple Ridge and Midtown are unusually good.
The First Americans Museum opened in Oklahoma City in 2021, telling the story of all thirty-nine nations in their own words, and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum has been there since 1955. Between them, Oklahoma City and Tulsa hold more serious Western and Native art than any comparable pair of cities.
Commissions come from clear places. Oklahoma City’s Nichols Hills, Heritage Hills and Crown Heights, and Edmond to the north. Tulsa’s Maple Ridge, Midtown, Southern Hills and out to Jenks and Bixby. Bartlesville and Pawhuska in the Osage. Norman and Stillwater around the universities. Ardmore, Duncan and Lawton in the south. And Grand Lake and Broken Bow, where the second homes are.
Institutional portraiture is very active. The University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Tulsa, Oklahoma City University, Bacone, the medical centres, the state capitol - which has a working oil well on its lawn and a dome added only in 2002 - the tribal governments, the federal courts and the older Tulsa and Oklahoma City firms.
Two kinds of Oklahoma commission stand out. Ranch and quarter-horse portraits, which are taken as seriously here as anywhere in the country; and tribal portraits, where a sitter may wish to be painted in regalia that carries family and clan meaning. Both call for the painter to ask questions first and paint second.