Portrait Artist Wisconsin

Wisconsin Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Adams, Ashland, Barron, Bayfield, Brown, Buffalo, Burnett, Calumet, Chippewa, Clark, Columbia, Crawford, Dane, Dodge, Door, Douglas, Dunn, Eau Claire, Florence, Fond du Lac, Forest, Grant, Green, Green Lake, Iowa, Iron, Jackson, Jefferson, Juneau, Kenosha, Kewaunee, La Crosse, Lafayette, Langlade, Lincoln, Manitowoc, Marathon, Marinette, Marquette, Menominee, Milwaukee, Monroe, Oconto, Oneida, Outagamie, Ozaukee, Pepin, Pierce, Polk, Portage, Price, Racine, Richland, Rock, Rusk, Sauk, Sawyer, Shawano, Sheboygan, St. Croix, Taylor, Trempealeau, Vernon, Vilas, Walworth, Washburn, Washington, Waukesha, Waupaca, Waushara, Winnebago and Wood.

Towns in Wisconsin Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Milwaukee, Shorewood, Whitefish Bay, Fox Point, River Hills, Bayside, Mequon, Cedarburg, Thiensville, Grafton, Elm Grove, Brookfield, Wauwatosa, Delafield, Oconomowoc, Hartland, Pewaukee, Nashotah, Chenequa, Lake Geneva, Fontana, Williams Bay, Delavan, Madison, Maple Bluff, Shorewood Hills, Middleton, Verona, Waunakee, Sun Prairie, Spring Green, Mineral Point, Baraboo, Wisconsin Dells, Green Bay, De Pere, Appleton, Neenah, Menasha, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Sheboygan, Kohler, Manitowoc, Racine, Kenosha, Door County, Fish Creek, Ephraim, Sister Bay, Eagle River, Minocqua, La Crosse and Eau Claire.

Taliesin, Lake Geneva and Portraiture in Wisconsin

Wisconsin has produced two of the most important figures in American art, and neither of them is a name people associate with the state. Georgia O’Keeffe was born on a dairy farm at Sun Prairie. Frank Lloyd Wright was born at Richland Center and built his own house and school in the Wyoming valley near Spring Green.

The land is Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Oneida homeland. The Menominee have lived in this region for as long as anyone can trace. The southwestern corner escaped the last glaciers entirely — the Driftless Area, with its bluffs, coulees and cold trout streams, which looks like nowhere else in the upper Midwest. Lead mining brought the first settlers there in the 1820s; Cornish miners built the stone cottages that still stand at Mineral Point.

Then came the great immigration. Germans above all, but also Norwegians, Poles, Belgians, Swiss, Finns, Czechs and Danes, arriving in such numbers that by 1900 a third of the state’s population was foreign-born. That inheritance is visible everywhere: in Milwaukee’s churches and beer halls, in the Norwegian farmsteads collected at Vesterheim across the border, in the Belgian settlements of Door and Kewaunee counties, in the Swiss dairying town of New Glarus.

Immigrant families brought a habit of the painted likeness with them. Nineteenth-century Wisconsin has an unusually rich vernacular portrait record — farm families, brewers, shopkeepers, pastors — much of it now in the Wisconsin Historical Society and the county museums. It is not grand painting, but it is honest and there is a great deal of it.

Milwaukee’s brewing and machinery fortunes built the first serious collections. The Pabst Mansion of 1892 survives complete. The Milwaukee Art Museum grew from the merger of two earlier institutions and now occupies Santiago Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion of 2001 — the winged brise-soleil that opens and closes twice a day and put the city on the architectural map for a second time.

Frank Lloyd Wright is the deeper Wisconsin story. He built Taliesin at Spring Green in 1911, rebuilt it twice after fires, and ran a fellowship there from 1932 that trained architects for the rest of the century. Taliesin, the Johnson Wax headquarters at Racine, Wingspread, Monona Terrace and the Unitarian Meeting House at Madison are all in the state. Taliesin is a World Heritage Site.

The other institutions are strong: the Chazen at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, one of the largest university art collections in the country; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center at Sheboygan, which has done more than anyone for American self-taught art; the Racine Art Museum, with the finest craft collection in the United States; the Paine at Oshkosh; and the Leigh Yawkey Woodson at Wausau, whose Birds in Art exhibition draws wildlife painters from all over the world.

Lake Geneva is the state’s Gilded Age chapter. After the Chicago fire of 1871, Chicago families built summer estates along the shore — Wrigley, Maytag, Schwinn, Sears, Wacker — and the lakeside footpath still runs past them by ancient right of way. Green Lake, Oconomowoc and the Waukesha lake country did much the same for a slightly quieter crowd.

Commissions come from those places still. Milwaukee’s North Shore — Whitefish Bay, Fox Point, River Hills, Mequon. The Lake Country at Delafield, Oconomowoc, Chenequa and Nashotah. Madison’s Maple Bluff and Shorewood Hills. Lake Geneva and Fontana. The Fox Valley from Neenah to Appleton, where paper money built substantial houses. Door County. And the northwoods lake places at Minocqua and Eagle River.

Institutional work is steady: the University of Wisconsin at Madison and its sister campuses, Marquette, Lawrence, Beloit, Ripon, the Medical College of Wisconsin, the state capitol — which has the only granite dome in the country — the federal courts and the older Milwaukee and Madison firms.

A Wisconsin commission is often tied to a family business or a family farm, and frequently to a lake house. Sporting and dog portraits are common; so are pictures that include a shoreline, a boathouse or a stretch of water that has meant something to four generations.

O’Keeffe left the state at twelve and did not paint it, but she said the Wisconsin sky was the first thing she remembered looking at properly. That is a reasonable place for any painter to start.