Ray Boynton, Art: Berkeley and San Francisco Art Institute

1883-1951

Ray Boynton, Associate Professor of Art, Emeritus, and well-known Western painter, died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on September 25, 1951. He was born in Whitten, Iowa, on January 14, 1883. After graduation from high school at Strawberry Point, Iowa, in 1901, he entered the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where he remained for three years. He started his professional career as an artist and artist-teacher of California in 1920, when he was appointed to the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. He became closely associated with the San Francisco Bay Region artists, and exhibited constantly in their exhibitions. In 1938 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Art Association and through serving in that capacity was influential in shaping the educational program of the California School of Fine Arts, which the Art Association conducts. In 1923 he was called to the faculty of the Department of Art of the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained until he retired in 1948. For his retirement he chose to devote his entire time to painting in the southwest Indian country, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he already had established an attractive home and studio.

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Professor Boynton's predilection for painting started at an early age, and with his schooling in the Middle West he became identified with the American tradition. He had an intense faith in the validity of a national art, indigenous to the soil of America, and free of European domination, an attitude he maintained throughout his career as artist. He loved the landscape of America, and in particular the hills and valleys of the West Coast, the desert, mesas, and pueblos of the southwest Indian country. The last years of his life were spent in long treks through unfrequented areas of Mexico, New Mexico, and Arizona, accompanied by his artist wife, Beryl. The Boynton studio in Santa Fe, which he remodeled from an ancient adobe, was the center of these explorations and has become one of the landmarks for artists and writers of the Southwest. There, as well as in Berkeley and San Francisco, Ray Boynton was honored and revered by students and artists.

There is agreement among his colleagues that Boynton was an originator and adventurous experimenter in techniques, particularly those applicable to architectural decoration. It is probable that he made the first paintings in true fresco and encaustic in the San Francisco area. Examples of mural paintings done by him in these media are to be seen at Mills College, in the Faculty Club at Berkeley, and at the California School of Fine Arts. He was a constant exhibitor in the major

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exhibitions in California and in other parts of the nation, and held many one-man shows. His paintings in oil, in tempera, in pastel are in the permanent collections of The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Mills College Art Gallery, the M. H. De Young Museum, and elsewhere.

Ray Boynton's untimely illness and death cut short a retirement of rich enjoyment and creative activity. To his widow, Beryl Boynton, his colleagues and associates on the faculty, through this memorial, express their deep sympathy.