Ray Boynton

He worked at Coit Tower painting murals with Ralph Stackpole, Bernard Zakheim, and Edith Hamlin (wife of Maynard Dixon).

Upon completion of his studies at the academy, he moved to Eastern Washington state because a brother lived there; Boynton resided there for seven years.

[5] Although efforts were made to raise funds to restore it, the mural was eventually sold and is now in private hands (according to emails with Spokane's Museum of Art and Culture - known as the MAC).

[6] Finally, luck broke his way around 1914 when he became a judge for the Northwest region of art that was to be sent to San Francisco for the 1915 World's Fair called the Panama–Pacific International Exposition (PPIE).

A biographer later stated:To be thrown into sudden contact with thousands of paintings, after so long an isolation, was like surrounding a starving man with food.

After PPIE left town, and many of the makeshift buildings were torn down, the social elite of San Francisco began looking for artists to "beautify" the city with large murals and mosaics.

[10] Mary Fabilli, a former art student of Boynton, who helped put together a posthumous exhibition of his work in 1976, provided another possible reason for his hiring besides being well traveled.

She wrote:His ability to speak, to write, his versatility, variety of work experience and affable personality endeared him to journalists and to the general public.

There was nothing dandified or effete about him, and the shaggy crop of hair and woolen tweeds [he wore] carried conviction of rough hewn 100% American masculinity.

His writing served him well, as Fabilli notes: "His contact with the newspaper business stood him in good stead, for in later years there was no difficulty about getting a sympathetic hearing from the press, and he was often consulted when other artists or teachers might be avoided or ignored.".

Boynton, although sympathetic, was far enough removed so that his name was untarnished and he brought stability to the art scene when supporters of the artists began to grow tired of extremism by the mid-to-late 1930s.

On his arrival in Mexico he found Rivera at work on his massive Communist-inspired series at the Ministry of Education and the grand monumental panels at Chapingo.

"[12] Having first-hand instruction from Rivera seemed to help Boynton earn another commission - the murals at Mills College - but did little to temper the criticism he received for his final product.

Although in an interview he is noted as saying, "...a commission which he feels is his most important work,"[15] Anthony W. Lee writes that opinions of others, at the time, were not equal to Boynton's.

After intense mudslinging by journalists, editorial writers, and competing groups of artists, the location was changed to a private lunch club at the Stock Exchange.

These ghost towns were drawing people who were down on their luck and thought they could eke out a living finding left over gold flakes.

Lee writes, "By June, Fleishhacker was leading a movement to destroy the murals, finding the work of some painters wholly unacceptable and, as we will observe, dangerous.

"[21] In 1936 Boynton was commissioned as the lead artist to paint thirteen murals in the Modesto, California Post Office known as El Veijo.

The post office originally contained a series of thirteen tempera lunette-shaped depicting agricultural scenes in the Central Valley.

The museum guild purchased a large collection of Boynton's drawings and paired them with accounts from those men and women who came to look for gold during the Great Depression.

After reading about the renovation of the post office and of the missing murals, a local Modesto man thought he had seen the artwork at a family member's house.

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.

His paintings in oil, tempera, and 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.

This discipline of the wall creating in place and within the proper limitations of materials and method is perhaps the most vital single factor in great mural design.

The shallow worship of sunlight in landscape, the doctrinaire ideas of ‘true’ color that deny the validity of the earth colors with their somber magnificence of reds and browns, the banal tricks of oil painting, have left us stammering before the wall, repeating shopworn theatrical commonplaces, making empty gestures for design, helpless with gold, not knowing the difference between enrichment and display, without even the language of a design that has monumental dignity of the authority of true decoration.