Meanwhile, his mother, Mary Ellen Stribling Bouldin, a gynecologist and obstetrician, maintained a practice 75 miles away in Memphis and flew herself back and forth in a small airplane. The elder Bouldin painted subjects including Richard Nixon’s daughters, astronaut Ronald McNair, writer William Faulkner, and all manner of Southern political leaders. Side by side, the portraits tell a story, “of a life cut short and a life that carried on.”īouldin grew up on his family’s cotton farm in Clarksdale, playing alongside his three older brothers in the henhouse that his father, portrait painter Marshall Bouldin III, had converted into a studio. In 2013, the Mississippi Museum of Art commissioned him to paint Medgar Evers and his widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights leader’s assassination in Jackson. It’s a visual image reminding you of who you are and to whom you belong.” His work hangs in federal buildings (including the House of Representatives), courthouses, museums, offices, and college campuses Bok’s portrait is in the Harvard Art Museums. “A lot of people think portrait painting is all about prestige,” he says, “but for me it’s more about memory. Medgar Evers and his widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, painted on the 50th anniversary of Evers'1963 murderīouldin has painted hundreds of portraits this way: governors, senators, judges, clergymen, corporate leaders, university presidents (including Harvard’s Derek Bok), scholars, firefighters, museum employees, and private collectors. Once everyone agrees to the design, he starts putting paint on the canvas.
Back in his studio, he produces several small color sketches and a life-size charcoal drawing-“my blueprints,” he calls them. It takes Bouldin six months to a year to execute each portrait, a process that begins with several in-person meetings, where he asks questions, snaps photos, and gathers ideas.
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(At first, she did not want her hands included, but Bouldin persuaded her, believing they were meaningful and important.) Behind her, filling the top half of the portrait, hangs a massive abstract painting that decorated Murphy’s chambers titled Trinity, it was created by a Minnesotan monk, and its presence here, Bouldin says, communicates-along with her hands, robe, and weary eyes-the moral weight of Murphy’s work: “The idea of both a body and a spirit, the written code and the spirt of the law, and the judge as the intermediary between them.” Half-smiling, her black robe zipped to the collar, she sinks deep in her chair, head leaning on a hand disfigured by rheumatoid arthritis, a disease she lived with for decades. The feeling in Bouldin’s portrait of federal judge Diana Murphy, painted a few years before her death in 2018, is a mix of strength, fatigue, and ironic humor.
Bouldin, who was head usher at Memorial Church his senior year (“Jason, my boy!” he remembers the minister roaring down the aisles), painted the portrait for Roxbury Latin School, where Gomes was a board member.īouldin's 2002 portrait of the late Reverend Peter Gomes In the lines of fabric stretching from the jacket button fastened at his generous belly, you can almost hear Gomes’s booming voice. Similarly, Peter Gomes, the late Plummer professor of Christian morals and Pusey minister in Harvard’s Memorial Church, sits, in a Bouldin portrait from 2002, with his knees relaxed open and one hand on his hip, a scarlet academic robe billowing from his shoulders. A former dean of the Washington National Cathedral and rector at Boston’s Trinity Church, Lloyd stands with his hands at his waist and his legs in lanky motion, an unguarded posture that matches the easy smile radiating from the canvas. Here’s what Episcopal priest Sam Lloyd “feels like” in Bouldin’s rendering: buoyant and warm, comfortable and comforting, a man who, as one parishioner told the painter, is more pastor than preacher.
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