Gretchen Hatfield Illustrations

Gretchen Hatfield is an illustrator with a studio at One Washington Center Mill in downtown Dover, NH. Ms. Hatfield attended Champlain Regional College, Lennoxville QC, and New England School of Art and Design, Boston: her major was Fine Arts at both schools.

Her paintings are mostly acrylics; drawings are in graphite, pen and ink, pastel pencils and oil sticks. Landscapes are a favorite subject; always animals and anything with a fluid line to it. Children’s book illustrators such as N. C. Wyeth, Sir John Tenniel and Ernest Shepherd are a huge influence but there are so many ‘favorites’ it is difficult to single out a few.

Gretchen’s work has been sold through Connecticut galleries such as the Maritime Gallery at Mystic Seaport, and New London’s Hygienic Gallery and Golden Street Gallery. In 2006 she received a fellowship from the Griffis and Orpheus Foundations who select artists to participate in a Bulgarian-American artist exchange program. She spent a month painting in the Rhodope Mountain region of the country, near the Greek border, in Polkovnik Serafimovo village. This work was exhibited at the Smolyan Art Museum, who kept one of the pieces for its American artists’ collection, and the National Palace of Culture in Sofia.

Other work includes a 17 year affiliation as an illustrator with Twenty-Third Publications in Mystic, Connecticut. Twenty-Third publishes Catholic books, children’s videos and meditational booklets for churches and schools worldwide. Other work experiences – product display painting for FAO Schwarz, Saks, Macy’s, and Burberry’s in Manhattan, mural work for the Exhibits department of Mystic Seaport Museum, and scenic painting for the Goodspeed Operahouse in East Haddam, Connecticut. Gretchen also co-owned Image Associates, an art and framing business, for 10 years. Animal portraiture(mostly showhorses) murals, and handcrafted picture framing were the specialties; the business was purchased by Mystic Seaport Museum Stores in 1996.

Recent projects include illustrations in the just-published children's Christmas story "Old 97 Saves the Day," written by J. David Conrad. In the story, Santa finds himself stranded at an abandoned railroad yard, and is rescued by a train engine and two resourceful children who help get him back to the North Pole. Posters of “The ABC of Wolfeboro, NH” and "The ABC of New London, CT" are both currently available, along with notecards of many designs. For more information, please visit the Exhibit Calendar, or contact me directly. I look forward to hearing from you.