Her commissioned portrait paintings cost tens of thousands of pounds but, as David Clensy discovers, things haven't always been easy for Wiltshire artist Hazel Morgan. Pictures: Richard Hudd

IT had been a slow spiral of decline. From being a brilliant young artist as a teenager and developing a promising career as a portrait painter in her 20s, Hazel Morgan found herself increas- ingly ill as she reached her 30s.

The Salisbury artist had no idea why she would wake each morning feeling depressed, lethargic and often physically ill.

Her studio – which had once been the place where she was most at peace – had become abhorrent to her. She was consumed by revulsion at the thought of spending time there.

"I had no idea what was happening to me," Hazel explains. "I had the most dreadful artist's block. I couldn't focus to work.

"It was like my body was actually telling me I shouldn't be there – that it was dangerous somehow."

In fact, Hazel should have paid closer attention to the messages her body was giving her.

She was suffering from toxic poisoning – the classic painters' affliction that reputedly drove Van Gogh to cut off part of his ear.

"It was the lead in the paint," Hazel says. "It had been slowly poisoning me for decades without my realising it.

"I'm very fortunate it was spotted. A friend had introduced me to a self-empowerment book called Awaken The Giant Within by Tony Robbins.

"I was so taken with the positive messages in the book that I paid to go on a health and well-being course with Tony Robbins in Fiji.

"The first thing they do is take a blood test, and the doctor couldn't believe the levels of lead and toxins he found in my bloodstream.

"He put me on an immediate detox, and I replaced all my traditional oil paints with toxin-free substitutes.

"I felt the difference almost immediately.

"Within a few weeks, I was back in my studio working away happily – and I've never looked back since."

The Fiji course was a pivotal moment in Hazel's life – she also met her future husband Stephen during the seminar.

The couple have now settled in a tranquil cottage on the outskirts of Salisbury where they are bringing up their 18-month-old baby Sophie.

The hub of Hazel's working life is the studio at the end of the garden. With oil paintings filling the walls and sumptuous velvet drapes hanging from the ceiling, it's an inspiring place.

It looks like the sort of studio where you might have found a Victorian portrait painter hard at work.

A rainbow-coated palette, thick with layers of oils, rests expectantly on the edge of a desk and an easel stands prominently in the middle of the room.

"I've loved painting for as long as I can remember," Hazel says.

"My parents bought me my first set of oil paints when I was eight years old, but I'd already been drawing for years.

"My father should have been an artist, but when he was young he simply didn't have the opportunities to follow his heart – he felt he had to get a 'proper job', so ended up doing all kinds of things.

"He eventually became a fabulous painter and decorator. But he never forgot that he'd wanted to go into fine art, so he encouraged my interest enormously.

"He even used to bring home dead animals for me to draw so that I could develop my skills by capturing the texture of the feathers on a bird or the fur on a rabbit.

"Growing up in Salisbury, surrounded by the Wiltshire countryside, there were plenty of opportunities to make studies of animals."

By the age of 17, Hazel had developed another passion – horse riding. She would pay for riding lessons by working as a groom for a local eventing couple, John and Deborah Johnston.

"It was perfect for me, because when I wasn't looking after the horses I could sit down and draw them," she says.

"My great inspiration was a painter called Sir Alfred Munnings. As a teenager, I'd study his paintings closely to try to learn the techniques. My father also used to buy me books of Constable paintings so I could learn directly from one of this country's greatest artists."

But Hazel wasn't keen to follow the conventional route of formal education at an art school.

"I wanted to draw and paint from life," she says.

"I didn't want to be stuck in a classroom. I wanted to learn my trade from being out there in the real world – just like Constable and Munnings would have done.

"So I decided that I wouldn't put myself through a fine-art course when I finished school. At the age of 19, I did go down to Bournemouth and studied for a time on the much less formal illustration course at the town's college.

"By this time, I'd also started doing commissions. It was just a portrait or a horse painting here or there for friends and people I met at the stables. But it wasn't long before I'd developed a good reputation, purely by word of mouth.

"By the time I left college at the age of 21, I was able to just plunge myself into my commissions.

"I carried on, steadily building up my commissions until I was 27, but by then I was starting to feel as if I was somehow lacking, having not gone through the formal education route.

"So I decided I should do what artists would have done in the 19th century – go on the Grand Tour to Italy and learn the techniques while being inspired by the works of the old masters in Florence.

"I had been approached by one of the local Rotary clubs. They were keen to give out a bursary to an artist to spend time studying abroad.

"I went for a series of interviews along with other local artists, and I got through to the final few, but failed to win the award. They told me they hadn't given it to me because they felt I had the drive to go and do it myself.

"So I decided to work hard, save up my money and prove them right."

Within 18 months, Hazel had scraped the money together.

"The course I wanted to do involved three years of study at an artist's studio in Florence. But I had enough money to sign up only for a few weeks.

"So I threw myself into it and tried to cram three years of work into a matter of weeks.

"Amazingly, I managed it, and came away having done a full oil portrait from life – which is what students would normally tackle in their third year.

"That was an amazing experience. My understanding of my art just blossomed in Florence.

"The techniques they taught me suddenly combined with my own natural ability. By the time I was painting the portrait from life, it was as if something had taken over. I could see this incredibly naturalistic image just appearing on the canvas in front of me.

"It was as if I wasn't in control."

With her talents flourishing, Hazel's career started to go from strength to strength.

"Your reputation compounds," she says. "The more work you do, the more your name gets known and the work just starts flowing in.

"Things were going well for me. My tutor in Italy, an American called Charles Cecil, had been so impressed with my work he invited me to spend six months each year in Florence teaching with him on the course and painting for myself in every spare moment.

"For the other six months of the year, I'd go home to Wiltshire and work on the English commissions that had built up through the spring.

"It was a fabulously exciting time for me. I lived like this – half in England, half in Italy – for a few years from the age of 27 to 32.

"But throughout this time, the toxic poisoning was building up in my system, and as I reached my 30s I was starting to feel the effects badly.

"From the age of 32 to 36, the poisoning was seriously effecting my mind and stopping me working almost entirely.

"Of course, you fall quickly into a spiral of decline. The less you work, the more depressed you become.

"I'm just incredibly thankful that I went on the Tony Robbins course and had the blood test, otherwise I don't know what would have happened to me."

Since detoxing and buying lead-free oil paint, Hazel's life has got back on track.

In fact, things are better than ever.

Even though she wasn't working in her early 30s, her reputation continued to grow.

Hazel, who is now 41, has seen great success in the past few years.

She now counts the likes of the Aga Khan and Prince Khalid bin Abdullah of Saudi Arabia among her admirers.

"It's the same as ever, everything tends to come by word of mouth," she says. "Only when you start doing work for people at that level, their equally influential friends are seeing your work."

The big change is that as her reputation grows so, too, does the amount she can charge for her work.

Her paintings now start at £25,000, with some clients paying as much as £100,000 for extraordinary pieces.

"It's going well," she admits, "but I still have a lot to learn.

"The way I see it, I might hopefully have another 40 or 50 years of painting in me.

"I can only imagine what I'll be able to learn in that sort of time.

"That's something that excites me enormously."

To find out more about Hazel Morgan's work, log on to her website at www.hazelmorgan.com or call her on 0800 077 6998.