In Paper Whites, a dark, thinly-clad woman poses, face in profile, holding an extirpated narcissus, roots in her lap, leaves splayed across her torso, blossom at her breastbone. In Mrs. McGregor, the same striking woman stands in a white-on-white environment dangling a dead rabbit behind her back.
Felice Boucher, Mrs. McGregor.
Felice Boucher, The Redheads, digital photograph.
In The Redheads, a young girl with her red hair in a crown braid atop her head holds a chicken with red comb and wattle. Butterflies, Beauty, and Peony features an Asian girl wearing a kimono and a butterfly ornament tiara.
Felice Boucher, Butterflies, Beauty, and Peony, digital photograph.
These are four of my favorite photographs by my Brunswick neighbor Felice Boucher. As portraits go, they are gorgeous and mysterious. Boucher has had a long career both as a commercial and fine art photographer, yet she somehow seems to be better-known out of state than she is in her native Maine. Let’s see what we can do about that.
J. Felice Boucher (J for Joanne) grew up in Lewiston where she dropped out of high school her senior year because she wanted to study graphic design and “only boys were allowed to take graphic design.” At seventeen, she got married and moved to Chicago where her new husband was going to college. She intended to study graphic design herself, but she became a mother before she could start art school. Boucher has been making her way in the world on her own pretty much ever since. Back in Maine, Boucher’s marriage ended in divorce, leaving her a mother of two, working three jobs to make ends meet. Still the desire to study art was such that she managed to attend the Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art & Design) while raising two kids and working three jobs. The dream of becoming a graphic artist died, however, when Boucher discovered photography in art school. “It was magic,” Boucher says of the common reaction people have the first time they see images emerge on paper in solution.
There are photographers who take photographs and photographers who make photographs. Boucher is the latter. At PSA, where she graduated in 1984, her mentor was Rose Marasco, perhaps Maine’s premier conceptual photographer, an artist who excels at constructing and orchestrating images.
Felice Boucher, Willa, digital photograph.
The photographs for which Boucher is best known are portraits, often of young people, which are often populated by animals as well. The lighting and color manipulation is such that her photographs resemble paintings, Old Master paintings at that.
Felice Boucher, Feathered Crown, digital photograph.
“Felice has taken one of photography’s historical and traditional uses, that of portraiture, and elevated it to an iconic status,” says Marasco. “She does this, at first glance, in a simple and straightforward manner. Typically she photographs a single individual in the center of the frame dressed well and often holding something of interest. The surprising aspect about these is that the portraits become more universal than merely specific to that individual and their friends and family. We can’t help but respond favorably to these images as they are infused with beauty, mystery, and elegance.”
Felice Boucher, Mind’s Eye, digital photograph.
Boucher’s portraits are haunting and romantic figures akin to the paintings of Jamie Wyeth and the photographs of Joyce Tenneson, but she worked her way up to this visual poetry very gradually.
Just out of art school, Boucher was a straight-shooting street photographer, documenting the street life of Lewiston’s gritty Lisbon St. neighborhood including projects on the Webber Avenue Social Club (a men’s drinking club) and The Cage (a classic downtown watering hole). Boucher’s street work came to an end when her Auburn apartment was inundated by the 1 April 1987 flood and she lost all of her early work. Over the years, she photographed studio portraits, weddings, and then home interiors and exteriors for real estate websites. She excelled in each commercial endeavor, becoming one of the most decorated members of the Maine chapter of Professional Photographers of America.
A turning point in Boucher’s art career came in 1992 when she was diagnosed with cancer, a disease that has recently recurred. “My health is a big part of my work,” observes Boucher. “I did my first big series at forty-one when I was diagnosed with bladder cancer and took a year off. This time around my health was the reason I stopped photographing people and started photographing flowers in order to protect myself during COVID.”
That first big series consisted of figurative photographs Boucher made by physically constructing the space around her subjects using a huge Plexiglas box that enabled her to arrange people and objects and thus layer images. This construction and deconstruction of images is now accomplished using Photoshop.
Felice Boucher, Artist’s Muse, digital photograph.
In one portrait series, Boucher cut pictures in two and reassembled them such that the sitter’s face was fashioned from two left halves or two right halves. More often, she essentially stage managed her portraits, selecting costumes and props for her subjects. As such, a J. Felice Boucher portrait is not so much a likeness as it is a little visual melodrama in which the subject is an actor performing a possible self.
Felice Boucher, Three Hearts, digital photograph.
“I like the timeless look,” says Boucher. “Even the people I work with tend to have that look.”
In 2019, Boucher was featured in a solo show at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts. Entitled Center of Quiet, her Griffin exhibition consisted of portraits of women in quiet, reflective moments.
Felice Boucher, The Quiet Girl, digital photograph.
“I do try to capture the strength of women in a direct sensuous but not sexual way,” Boucher said at the time. “For me there is a huge difference between the two: sensuous and sexual. The light and texture in the Old Master paintings are compelling to me. So I add texture of colors over my photographs to give them a painterly look.”
Felice Boucher, The Orange, digital photograph.
Felice Boucher, Goddess Cloak, digital photograph.
Boucher’s support system as she faces a renewed battle with cancer starts with her daughter Sydney Bella Sparrow, a painter, and her son Todd Bernard, co-founder of both Space Gallery and Empire Chinese in Portland. In September 2023, close friends and fellow artists Dozier Bell and Janvier Rollande set up a GoFundMe page for Boucher that has raised close to $50,000 toward paying medical bills and keeping her in her Brunswick home.
Felice Boucher, For Love, digital photograph.
“Felice’s portraits are complex, even when they’re seemingly straightforward,” says Bell. “Her backdrops aren’t usually identifiable as ordinary spaces; the surfaces are sfumato evocations of old materials, the spaces often oddly shallow. Ordinary people appear as idealized versions of themselves, but also as characters out of an unspecified narrative: a Chekhov play, a French opera, a story from the Brothers Grimm. The gaze is usually unsettlingly direct, as though we really should know what that narrative is—but we don’t.”
Felice Boucher, Poppies in Green Vase, digital photograph.
Boucher’s new flower photographs are not floral still lifes; they are portraits of flowers, often individual blossoms, most from the gardens of friends, including that of my wife Carolyn.
Felice Boucher, Ferns in Green Vase, digital photograph.
“The recent flower photos have a dream-like immediacy that brings to mind Morris Graves’s flower paintings of the 1960s and 70s,” says Bell. “Having had to close her photography business, she undertook them as a way to play with photography again; but as with all good art, the subject is an active agent in the process unfolding between it and the artist, and that dialogue is evident in the image. The range of emotions evoked by one or two flowers in a vase is remarkable, and poignant.”
Felice Boucher, Echinacea, digital photograph.
There is something very special about the relationship between artist and subject, whether that subject is a person or a flower. Boucher ups the ante of that specialness, elevating it to an act of grace.
“For me,” Boucher says of her approach to the portrait, “it was like a dance. I wanted a partner who could find their way into the camera and meet me there.”
Image at top: Felice Boucher, Paper Whites, digital photograph.