0.6 Jack boynton, b. 1928

In town to teach

I moved to Houston in 1955 to take a job at the University of Houston in the art department…teaching painting, a drawing course, a design course and advertising design, which I didn’t like much. That same fall I was winning a couple of prizes and Ann Holmes

I was brought in to teach four courses and [there was] a big bunch of part-time faculty including Lowell Collins and various and sundry other ones. Lowell was very kind to me in the beginning. He let me use his studio and gave me rides to school. We rode together for a semester or two in his old jeep.

I was at U of H from ’55 to ’57, and then I spent three years [in Houston] doing odds and ends—I didn’t have to go find a job for another three years. Then I moved to San Francisco and taught at the California School of Fine Arts…while I was there it became the San Francisco Art Institute. I was there from 1960 to 1962. I finished up my contract there and moved back here in 1962.

Early successes

At the first, I sort of had some strokes of good luck. I had a show up already in Fort Worth that was a one-man show in the Fort Worth Art Center. This was the fall of 1955 and I moved just in time to get to classes because we were pretty backed up to get the stuff done. The big prize I won that year was the D. D. Feldman prize, which was $1500—a lot of [money] in those days. And then I won—I split first prize—in a local show with David Adickes. Before I ever got to Houston I had already been in the Younger American Painters show that Sweeney

As it turned out I moved to Houston the same month that Jerry MacAgy did, and naively, I sort of took my [Fort Worth] catalog over to her. I don’t know how I got in, but I asked her who might be good to send the catalog to in Houston, and she was very kind and gave me some names to put on the list. I didn’t realize at the time how difficult Jerry could be on occasion; Sy Fogel