Lorraine B. W. Hitchcock, Artist, 82

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Lorraine Berman Wehrli Hitchcock, a Chicago, Illinois-area portrait
artist in the 1950s and 1960s who helped create the Oak Park Art Fair,
died of Parkinson's disease Tuesday, March 11, 2003, at the Park
Regency Care Center in Chandler, Arizona, at the age of 82.

Mrs. Hitchcock largely taught herself art as a child growing up in Oak
Park, Illinois, until her mother was stunned by the accuracy of a
sketch she did of someone's face. Her mother then enrolled her in art
classes. That evolved into a career that grew into a part-time
business while she raised two children. She did charcoal sketches at
local art fairs and formal oil paintings of families and individuals
who came to her home to pose.

"She was a very fine portrait painter with a droll sense of humor
[which] probably helped," said her son, Michael Wehrli. "She could
really get into their personality with a painting."

By the late 1950s, Mrs. Hitchcock was well-known enough that she was
asked to become the quick-sketch artist on disc jockey Howard Miller's
Saturday night television variety hour. During Miller's interviews
with such guests as Nat King Cole and Rod Serling, Mrs. Hitchcock
would do a charcoal sketch in about 10 minutes, sometimes getting to
know the stars afterward.

After sketching Serling, Mrs. Hitchcock invited him to her home to
have dinner with her family "because she thought he must be lonely on
the road," said her daughter, Kimbeth Wehrli Judge. Mrs. Hitchcock
helped found the annual Oak Park Art Fair in the late 1950s when she
and her first husband, Roger Wehrli, lived there.

Painting was a daily ritual for her and commissions for portraits
regularly came in. She always painted in her home, either on her side
porch or kitchen in Oak Park, or later in a home studio built by her
second husband, George Hitchcock, when she moved to Barrington,
Illinois. She continued painting into her late 70s, when Parkinson's
made it too unbearable to paint, her daughter said. "It was horrible
to watch an artist lose what she loved to do," her daughter said. "I
think art was her deepest pleasure."