INTERVIEW: JEAN PILK

A PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

By Frank R. Giordano Jr.

Photography by Todd Lista

Jean Pilk immortalizes world leaders on canvas and creates ‘visual biographies.’

Imagine a photo of a 5-year-old sitting at the kitchen table and earnestly drawing her great-grandfather’s face, struggling to get the walrus mustache just right. Let’s call this study “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl.” Click.

Picture a mother of several babies, carrying an infant in her left arm, while painting another child’s countenance with her right hand, as other children vie for her attention. This study is “Portrait of the Mother Nurturing Her Artistic Talents.” Click.

Now, visualize the accomplished woman, chatting amiably with a U.S. senator, trying to relax him and get him to display the appealing self that led his constituents to send him to Washington. This most recent snapshot is “The Acclaimed Portraitist at the Peak of Her Career.” Click.

Since the portraitist relies heavily on photographs to illumine the inner personalities of the complex characters she paints, it seems appropriate to borrow her technique in painting her portrait.

These various studies show the same person, at three key stages of her fascinating life:

• The prodigy Jean Bolefahr of Kansas City, when her talents began to develop under the encouragement of her family and friends;

• The mother with her five greatest masterpieces — three daughters and two sons; and

• The Jean Pilk of today, acclaimed as one of the United States’ foremost portraitists and regularly engaged in capturing on canvas the faces and lives of many of the country’s important historical figures.

Other brief studies will come into focus as we proceed, such as the “Portrait of the Portraitist as Military Wife,” “Portrait of the Struggling Breadwinner,” “Portrait as Benefactor of Her Nation,” and, in Pilk’s own whimsical description, a little lady who also paints flowers and intricately patterned lace. As her greatest ancestors among portraitists — Michelangelo and Rembrandt — have shown, the artist is often as fascinating and complex a subject as any she paints.

In Jean Bolefahr’s case, the creative impulse emerged and was nurtured very early.

“We lived near a wonderful museum, and my father was a good friend of Walt Disney,” she remembers. “He knew the man who drew Red Ryder, so I constantly saw there were men making a living doing what I wanted to do. And, to a kid, that was pretty encouraging.”

When visiting her grandparents and great-grandparents, Pilk loved to pass the time by drawing their hands and faces. Although she believes her desire for drawing is something she was born with, she was nourished in the desire by a resourceful grandfather. While baby-sitting young Pilk, he would place a blank sheet of paper under the covers of the Saturday Evening Post and, with a pin or needle, prick holes around the faces of Norman Rockwell’s characters. After removing the cover, Pilk would connect all the dots on the blank page, filling in the facial features.

Imagine the 5-year-old’s glee when her audience instantly recognized her subject. Nothing was more gratifying to the prospective portraitist than to have her work praised for its verisimilitude, a style she has cultivated throughout her career.

At the age of 12, Pilk became a serious student of painting, taking her first lessons in Kansas City, continuing as an undergraduate at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, and advancing to the competitive hotbed of the prestigious Art Students League in Manhattan. Fortunately, Pilk minored in child psychology at college, training that was crucial to surviving her future challenging vocations as military wife, mother, and portraitist.

KEEPING THE SPIRIT ALIVE
To avoid the fate of the starving artist, Pilk took assignments in fashion art by drawing newspaper ads, a job barely suited to keeping the artistic spirit alive and, more pressingly, the pot boiling at home. One fascinating assignment fell in her lap when Pilk met her boss’ husband, Charles Flanders, artist for the Lone Ranger comic book series. Flanders admired Pilk’s talents and employed her as his substitute when he needed vacation time. The answer to the question, “Who was [the painter of] that masked man?” was often Jean Bolefahr.

When she married Jack Pilk, a graduate of West Point and currently a retired Army colonel, her vocation changed dramatically. Though she continued to paint and hone her skills, the business of rearing five babies and making a home — many homes, including one in Bolivia, as his career took them in several directions — became more than a full-time job.

While in Bolivia, she painted a portrait of that country’s president, as well as the countenances of some of its impoverished masses. And she established an art and advertising department for a well-established merchandiser for whom she worked part time.

Long before “super moms” became the norm, Pilk played the role to the hilt.

“I love being a mother,” Pilk says.

Affirming this as fact are the many portraits of her children, at various stages in their lives, in her current home on the golf course at Woodside Plantation Country Club in Aiken, South Carolina. Less formal, naturally, than the “official” portraits lining the corridors of power in the U.S. Capitol, Pilk’s paintings of a daughter in a denim blouse looking out the window (and others depicting her daughters wearing attractive hats) would bring very large fees were they hung in any of the galleries exhibiting Pilk’s works. Pilk does not draw caricatures or cartoons, because “that’s a totally different kind of work.” However, she does paint landscapes and still lifes.

“Jack literally had to boot me out of the house to get me working again,” is the way Pilk describes her return to the work force and, eventually, the competition for commissions for portraits. Before long, Pilk won so many commissions that the Washington Post identified her as one of the Capitol’s most important, and sought after, painters of political figures. The Los Angeles Times listed Jean Pilk among the top four portrait artists in the country, the only woman among them.

MAJOR WORKS
Along with the many individual portraits of important public figures, celebrities, astronauts, and politicians, Pilk has executed three significant series of works.

Around a decade ago, the Supreme Council of the Masons commissioned Pilk to produce portraits of famous American Masons. Today, more than 30 are hung in the council’s Hall of Honor at the Temple of the Scottish Rite in Washington, D.C. Her subjects include President Harry S. Truman, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr., actor Gene Autry, Gen. James Doolittle, humorist Will Rogers, and author Norman Vincent Peale. She also drew a pencil sketch of President George Bush Sr., his wife, and several of the grandchildren, which the Masons eventually presented to the Bushes.

These portraits were painted from photos taken when the individuals held their positions or offices. For her paintings of Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, however, Pilk was able to paint her figures while they sat in her studio. Astronaut and Sen. John Glenn is the latest of Pilk’s works in this ongoing commission. His portrait will be launched soon.

A second series of portraits developed through the serendipity of work well done. While preparing U.S. Rep. Don Fuqua’s portrait, Pilk learned that he and members of his House Science and Technology Committee wanted their first chairman, the late Overton Brooks of Louisiana, memorialized. Although funds were not available for the portrait, Pilk donated her services and completed the portrait that now hangs in the committee’s hearing room. Because she has painted portraits of three of the first four chairmen, staff members have jokingly dubbed the chamber “Jean Pilk’s Room.”

The magnum opus of Pilk’s career is her series of portraits of the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces. The series began when Pilk received the commission to paint Gen. Colin Powell’s portrait four years ago. When the portrait was completed, however, Powell refused to have his portrait hung unless his predecessors as chairmen were so honored. After a lengthy pursuit of the ways and means to accomplish his objective, Pilk’s portraits of the military leaders currently hang in the Chairmen’s Corridor at the River Entrance to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Pilk’s admiration for all the subjects of her portraits — many of the greatest military heroes of what newsman and author Tom Brokaw calls “the greatest generation” in his book of the same name — is boundless.

“When I met these men, I found they were all totally and absolutely dedicated to their country. And most of them were just very simple men. Some were graduates of the military academies, but others were really just off the cornfields who worked their way up the ranks,” she says. “When I first met Sandra Day O’Connor, and she walked into the room in the U.S. Supreme Court Building, I just felt chills all over, thinking, ‘I am meeting and talking to the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Wow!’ ”

VISUAL BIOGRAPHY
To complement the effects of her subjects’ faces, hands, and poses in representing their character, Pilk uses the recurring motif of the “picture within the picture” to emphasize important personal and historical associations in what she calls “visual biography.”

“Several of the chairmen are painted in their offices, with photos of family members, meetings with political leaders, and aircraft and vessels associated with their careers. General Colin Powell chose a picture of the Buffalo Soldiers, the original battalions of black soldiers who fought so heroically against the Indians in the late 19th century, to accompany photos of his own family members and a bust of Thomas Jefferson.”

Powell is perhaps Pilk’s favorite subject: “I’ve never met a man so knowledgeable of himself, and so comfortable with the knowledge.” In the portrait, the casual pose and the confident demeanor of the born leader cannot completely mask the sadness in the eyes of Powell, a most sensitive and civilized warrior.

Pilk’s portrait of Gen. George Brown shows his bomber returning from the famous raid on the Ploesti oil fields in World War II, a most perilous and costly mission. Brown’s plane was one of only four to return from the massive mission. Gen. Omar Bradley’s portrait includes a background cartoon by Bill Mauldin depicting Bradley conferring in front of a tank at the Normandy beachhead with the famous Willie and Joe, Mauldin’s favorite GI characters. And her rendering of Gen. Maxwell Taylor contains a photograph of his reviewing the troops with Winston Churchill during World War II.

Has she ever done a portrait of Jean Pilk?

“Everybody asks me that,” the artist acknowledges. “There was a time when Rembrandt couldn’t afford the money to pay a model, so he used himself. I’ve seen artists I knew who painted themselves — they kind of made themselves a little too grand. I think the temptation would be to give myself too long eyelashes and … ” Her sentence dissolves in full-throated laughter.

Free-lance writer Frank Giordano Jr. is a former English professor who retired to South Carolina.

JEAN BOLEFAHR PILK
Occupation: Portraitist.
Residence: Aiken, South Carolina.
Membership: Woodside Plantation Country Club.
Family: Husband, Jack Pilk, and five children: Roberta MacDonald of Williamstown, Vermont; Frank Pilk of Arlington, Virginia; Candace Karu of Cape Elizabeth, Maine; Stephanie Pilk of Yarmouth, Maine; and Jack Pilk Jr. of Arlington, Virginia.
Career highlights: Hailed as one of America’s premier portrait artists, Pilk has been awarded commissions for members of the U.S. Cabinet, Armed Forces and Congressional leaders, as well as the officers and directors of leading U.S. corporations and associations.
Gallery exhibits: Still lifes and landscapes are currently exhibited in three galleries in the United States — the Atlantic Gallery in Washington, D.C.; Cudahy’s in Richmond, Virginia; and the Charlotte Inn in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard.
On the art of portraiture: “A painting allows you to tell something important about the person. There’s something more than just eyes, nose, and a mouth.”Web site: www.jeanpilkportraits.com.