Six Decades of
Jack Boynton
“Firewall II” Acrylic/Canvas 48 x 70 2006
February 13 - 28, 2009 William Reaves Fine Art
Exhibition Portfolio Forward —
As an artist and teacher, Jack Boynton has had a long and profound influence on the local art scene. Arriving in Houston over fifty years ago from his native Fort Worth, Boynton was catapulted immediately into a distinguished and accomplished career, firmly establishing himself as one of the state’s leading modernists. His edgy, intellectual style of abstraction has captivated Houstonians for years, and earned him high acclaim at the national level. His works are included in the permanent collections of America’s foremost art museums, and as this show conveys, he’s still going strong! This exhibition provides Houstonians
a rare opportunity to examine the creative progressions of this gifted local artist over a period of six decades, presenting examples of Boynton’s work from midcentury to present. In addition to works in oil, watercolor and acrylic, included in this exhibition are recently discovered drawings from the late 50s, as well as prime examples of Boynton’s distinctive envelope paintings. All are presented as alluring fare for avid Texas art enthusiasts. In keeping with our gallery’s mission of showing legacy artists, William Reaves Fine Art is proud to host this first comprehensive show of Boynton’s work in the 21st century. Enjoy the moment!”
“Gothic” Oil/Board 46 x 72 1956
Collectors Preview: February 13 - 14 Opening/Artist’s Reception: February 21, 6 - 9 pm Artist’s Talk: February 28, 2 - 4 pm Gallery Open Friday - Saturdays | other times by appointment
Six Decades of Jack Boynton The term “breakthrough” is often used to denote a major accomplishment of an artist, the works in which he achieves indisputable progress. But what determines a “breakthrough”? What happens when an artist begins a new style? Doe he shut off one room before entering another? Or does he extend the space that already exists? Spanning some six decades, Jack Boynton’s paintings and works on paper allow us to measure the way that one person’s experiences and sensibility have been expressed in visual impulses. Significantly, Boynton turns arbitrariness into a fine art and does so without sticking to any one approach or medium. Rather, each encounter with a cultural symbol, everyday object or personal memory is reflected in the physical sensuality and structural clarity of his art. Oscillating between past and present, formal elegance and pressurized energy, the exhibition reveals Boynton to be an artist constantly changing and enlarging the sphere in which he functions. The sources that inspire Boynton’s works never come from just one place, but are a combination of many different references and ideas – the baked flatness of the Texas landscape, stick fetishes and evil eye talismans, the alchemical combustion of natural elements – air, fire, earth, water. Always working in tandem with his obsessiveness, however, is a lack of inhibition, an almost wide-eyed innocence that has made him unafraid of pushing and clarifying his concerns even further. Whatever medium Boynton works in, he always returns to certain highly charged motifs of formal and iconic richness whereby meanings proliferate and mundane images become multivalent. All of the pieces on display are carefully worked and composed, even inviting us to retrace his every move. Each seems to offer solutions to problems raised in a previous work while serving as a site for experiments that will develop in a later piece. In doing so, Boynton engages viewers in a much more challenging and refreshing manner. Through hard thinking and tough labor, he pushes each work – and us – into slightly unknown territories. As a whole, the show offers proof that Boynton, 81, has been an artist of even greater range than he has been credited for. Consider the delicate graphite drawings (1957-59) – intimate abstractions that explore organic shape as symbolic content in psychicallycharged spatial contexts. Crisply drawn, wiry lines loop, curve and sometimes clump like eggs, nests or marbles. Circles predominate, a modernist allusion that signals the attainability of wholeness and perfection. Some glow like cellular formations in the process of splitting and growing on a backlit slide under a microscope. Others are finely calibrated, but appear almost offhand and arbitrary, as though offering a single glimpse of an infinitely larger cosmos. At the core of Boynton’s drawing is the mark. His crackling, hatching, bramblelike clusters can be seen as attempts
to preserve and embody a certain kind of physical motion. In general, the works on paper are emblematic of a looser, quieter pace, a slow ravishment that seduces us with craft and playfulness. The world is understood as dancing energy patterns interweaving a single continuum. Indeed, Boynton’s line has a siren’s quality to it – seductive, elusive, utterly graceful. It curls and flows lithely, sinuously. Patterns form irregular, undulating shapes; lines can be open and airborne like swelling mounds or approach the pooled density of magnetic fields. Smudged vertical strokes suggest fence posts, highway markers or tombstones. Circles and ovoids serve as catalysts for metaphysical meditation – an otherworldly light emanates from behind a dark mass, evoking a solar eclipse. The form is softened, however, by the transparent caress of the graphite. The velvet fluency of the mark is informed by the texture of the paper in a similar way the weave of the canvas governs the application of paint. Here, the search for an internal rightness or balance is expressed through a measured yet riveting sensuality. These early drawings may have been regarded as curious missteps at the time, but now seem unpretentious, perhaps a bit naïve and tentative, but also characterized by urgency and raw passion, an unabashed curiosity and a searching quality that would take Boynton through the ebbs and flows. They are part of the stream of forces, colliding, separating, floating apart and jostling together. The overwhelming content is one of ambiguity, mystery, the equivocal nature of spirituality and doubt, balance and chaos. At the very least, the series divines the presence of an expressive force that moves us to think about our memories and blind spots, our feelings and follies. All of the works retain the immediate marks of the hand that formed them as well as the traces of time. Similarly, paintings from the late ‘50s, built with quick slaps of brush against canvas, are keyed to impenetrable mysteries that depend on the contradictoriness of both light and space. In Gothic and Bird, Boynton presents an ambivalent light, both dark and glowing, muted and intense. Space is both airy and constraining. Boynton conjures fields of fluctuating depth, playing off ambiguities of negative and positive space. His restrained but virtuosic handling of paint shifts subtly and endlessly from shimmering eluvial drifts to pungent opacities and back again. The effect is another Boynton stratagem – the forced contradiction between illusionistic space and physical space, between image and material. Through painting, Boynton reflects the natural world in order to heighten awareness of our place in the universal order. As his imagery evolves, however, the work consistently invokes personal experience while addressing the most primal of human concerns: the difference between self and other, between transcendence and metamorphosis, between that which can be controlled and that which cannot.
No thoughtful viewer can examine the recent Fire paintings without reacting to their electrifying vortex of gestural energy. These contained furies seamlessly fuse raw strength and refinement, impending disorder and resilient structure. They quicken the pulse, making us aware that there is no one place to stand before the vaporous smears and wiggling, visceral strokes, no perfect vantage point from which to take in the superimpositions of intoxicatingly vibrant hues of red, orange, yellow and peach. Within a single painting, Boynton structurally melds control, whimsy and randomness. Each work teeters between chaos and intention. Layers upon layers result in a depth and luminosity of color that holds the entire surface in stasis, transforming it into a vibrantly transparent membrane. In Meltdown, we almost feel the intensity of heat as everything becomes engulfed by fiery red and orange serpentine and tubelike forms. Some of the configurations are accented by bursts of diaphanous purple and metallic splatters. A vehement, loaded stroke at the top of the canvas allows thinned paint to drip down, evoking falling liquid. In Firewall, the ground becomes the implicit landscape of an unstable, even insubstantial field of pigment that suggests continual flux, both physical and spiritual. The forms that occupy the evolving field are integral with it – below it, fused with it, immersed in it. Grand sweeps of paint – red-pink to blood-red and silver-gray - gnarly clusters of line and brushy strokes seemingly hover, at once defiantly confrontational and vulnerable. Everything seems ready to burst apart or collapse together. The more we look at Boynton’s surfaces, the more they reveal a dizzying sequence of moody vertical or horizontal spatial disjunctions. Still, Boynton manages to take an unabashedly beautiful lavender, or an intense burning orange, and make it float, as if it were as light and ethereal as air. In Updraft, a large scrap of paper seemingly floats atop veils of hot-keyed hues writhing with vectors suggesting chemical transformation – burning, eroding, melting. The vertical drips and transparent washes of paint drape like a fine curtain or bleed unevenly across the surface, letting the reds and yellows appear from underneath. The method produces vertiginous spaces only slightly tempered by the seepages and splatters that aspire to pull attention back from the depth to the surface. Overall, the works manage to glow with the sinister beauty of fate’s terrible indifference. Our awe of fire, it seems, is not a natural respect, but one that has been taught – a poignant lesson that became a personal tragedy for Boynton in 1994 when his studio caught fire and burned to the ground. With its elusive spatial realm of flat plains and stormy skies, Boynton’s rendition of a South Texas landscape exudes an unsettling, if hypnotic appeal. Here, the white line of a two-lane blacktop and powerful lightning strike simultaneously converge as an “event” on the far horizon. The artist weaves dark indigo and lavender strokes around scumbled areas of pink and daubs of
white, modulating the lights and darks to evoke turbulent winds and light-suffused shadows. His rhapsodic brushwork has a liquid translucent quality. The landscape fairly glints like a mirage, then dissolves into full abstraction. We sense Boynton’s drive to focus the South Texas experience, compressing or expanding its physical and psychological space, opening up a seemingly infinite scale of grays and an almost obsessive level of lush pictorial incident, keeping each aspect of presentation, each successive decision firmly in hand. The entirety is marked by tuftlike swirls, whiplash lines and organic shapes giving impressions of constant, restless movement. Discovering a unique and subtle spatial construct within the environment, and perhaps also imposing it, he registers near and far, of the specific and inspecific. This spatial quality, of course, is known to those who understand the characteristics of the landscape where a small town presents a panoramic yet finely articulated planar surface and the horizon indelibly alters one’s sense of space and light. Like the landscape, ever in flux yet soothing in its permanence, Boynton’s process stimulates a tension between change and constancy, those variations of hand and mind which record a moment in time and our awareness of the act of painting itself. Traveling along the highway, we see ourselves as part of the environment, connecting with everything, continuing forever. For Boynton, making art is a daily activity and a necessity. For some thirty years, the artist has been collecting envelopes – an extinct form of personal communication that he redeems by “collaborating” with the original sender. On paper, Boynton is nimble of touch and materially inventive, demonstrating an ease and freedom that has only recently shown up in his paintings. These clean, crisp displays look familiar yet never conclusively definable. Approximating a range of icons and hieroglyphs – stamps, words, bits of cartoons and landscapes – these ensembles are mesmerizing in the suggestiveness of simple shapes and joyful strokes. Colors flow, lines whirl and patterns intertwine, forming dynamic compositions that embody a complex field of contrasts: language and image, the mechanical and handmade, the gridded and the free. At the same time, the grounds of printed matter are themselves suffused with imagery, as well as with verbal reference to the visual. All in all, Boynton brings together drawing, painting, writing, reality, fantasy, charm and perishability - the idea that these envelopes could be crumpled up and tossed away. The lovingly crafted works embody Boynton’s intuitive, yet meticulous visual language – a language that continues to evolve. Throughout, Boynton aims for an inclusive abstraction that is expansive in its physical presence, an abstraction charged with referential and metaphorical forms that engage the imagination and invite us to look again.
— Susie Kalil
Exhibition Checklist 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.
Biogenetic Generator White Lines Converging South Texas Landscape With Vanishing Point New Growth Sentinels Firewall II Updraft Meltdown Untitled Landscape in Yellow Untitled Landscape Riverbank Encounters 4 Mountain Vectors Red Dawn Untitled With Pheasant’s Feather Landscape Ablaze Juggler’s Edge Snowball in Hell Sesquitex-Tomato Daucus Carrota Revisited Spaceshot Reductive Landscape With Event Untitled Drawing 1 Untitled Drawing 2 Untitled Drawing 3 Untitled Drawing 4 Untitled Drawing 5 Untitled Drawing 6 Same Old 7 and 6 Untitled 8 Bird Untitled Abstract Gothic Inland Lights
acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas watercolor acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas watercolor acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas acrylic/canvas mixed media oil/canvas graphite graphite graphite graphite graphite graphite graphite graphite oil/canvas mixed media oil/board oil/board —Envelope Paintings — MFAH G.B Galveston Art Center Cerling Lawndale 1 Lawndale 2 Crews Praise God Liveslay Morris Medical Clinic Marzio Menil Art Supply Boynton 1 Boynton 2 Boynton 3 Boynton 4 Boynton 5
36 x 48 48 x 48 48 x 48 48 x 48 30 x 48 48 x 70 60 x 48 48 x 60 14 ¼ x 41 22 x 29 48 x 48 30 x 30 16 x 16 21 x 28 ½ 34 x 48 68 x 68 40 x 40 30 x 30 30 x 30 18 x 13 61 x 44 7¾x6½ 8 ¾ x 6 7 x 7 5 ¾ x 10 ¾ 11 ½ x 6 11 x 9 5 ½ x 12 7¾x9¾ 36 x 36 11 x 6 46 x 72 41 x 63
2009 2008 2008 2008 2008 2006 2005 2005 1995 1994 1994 1989 1989 1988 1988 1986 1986 1986 1985 1978 1966-7 1959 1959 1959 1959 1959 1959 1959 1959 1959 1957 1956 1956
8 x 13 (measures for frame) n.d. 7x9½ n.d. 9 x 9 ½ n.d. 9 x 10 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d. 8 ½ x 11 n.d.
Biographical and Career Highlights Born Fort Worth, 1928 – lives in Houston BFA Texas Christian University, 1949 MFA Texas Christian University, 1955 University of Houston, Instructor, 1955-57 San Francisco Art Institute, Instructor, 1960-62 University of St. Thomas, Houston, Professor, 1969-1985
Selected Exhibitions 1954 – “Younger American Painters,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1957 – “Young America,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1957/58 – 1 of 17 artists representing USA at the Brussels World’s Fair 1958&1959 – Barone Gallery, New York (solo) 1959 - Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art 1962 – “Recent Painting: The Figure,” Museum of Modern Art, New York 1970 - Delgado Museum (Museum of New Orleans) (solo) 1972 - Fort Worth Art Center (solo) 1976 - 1986 Betty Moody Gallery, Houston (regular solo exhibitions) 1980 - “Retrospectrum” Amarillo Art Center, and circulating to Tyler Museum of Art, Art Center of Waco, Abilene Fine Arts Museum and Beaumont Art Museum. (retrospective) 1985 – “Fresh Paint: The Houston School,” Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1989, “Homecoming:a Thumbnail Retrospective”, Texas Christian University, Ft Worth (solo) 1990 & 1991 Lynn Goode Gallery, Houston (solo) 1998, David Dike Gallery, Dallas (solo) 2002, Gerhard Wurzer Gallery, Houston (solo) 2005, Tomball College, Texas (solo) 2007, “Texas Modern,” Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University
Selected Major Collections Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth Blanton Museum of Art, Unversity of Texas, Austin Dallas Museum of Art Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Modern Art, New York Museum of New Orleans Wadsworth Atheneum Whitney Museum of American Art (in addition to private collections)
“Untitled #3” Graphite 7 x 7 1959
“Untitled #6” Graphite 11 x 9 1959
William Reaves Fine Art 2313 Brun St. Houston, Tx 77019 www.reavesart.com
“Riverbank Encounters 4” Acrylic/Canvas 48 x 48 1994