David Boyd was an Australian artist and member of the renowned Boyd family, an artistic dynasty who made an immense contribution to Australian cultural life. The family story began with David Boyd’s grand parents, Emma Minnie and Arthur Merric Boyd, creators of accomplished landscapes, genre studies and seascapes. Their sons, Merric (a potter), Penleigh (a landscape painter), and Martin (a novelist), carried on the family tradition. With the third generation came the phenomenon known as ”The Boyds”, made up a remarkable group which included Merric’s sons, Arthur, Guy and David and daughter Lucy.
The fourth of Merric and Doris Boyd’s five children, David grew up at his father’s house and pottery “Open Country” at Murrumbeena, Victoria. Although David showed promise as a pianist, he chose pottery and ceramic art, with a career in painting to follow. A pacifist like his brothers, he refused military service and risked his health in hunger strikes in order to avoid bearing arms. After the war he and Guy moved to Sydney, where they established the Martin Boyd pottery.
In 1949 David married Hermia Jones, a beautiful and talented 18-year-old student of sculpture. Together they set up a pottery in a shed in Elizabeth Bay, where Hermia’s decorative art complemented David’s shaping hand. But their Sydney work was under-priced, and they moved to London in 1951 where they gained recognition and financial reward. The media claimed them as ”a golden couple”; and it would have been easy for them to stay on in Britain as makers of exquisitely crafted work. But the pull of Australia was too strong and they returned back to Melbourne in 1954. David’s transition from pottery to painting in the late 1950s was often stormy. Some critics disliked his figurative paintings and dismissed him as Arthur Boyd’s less talented younger brother. The critic Bernard Smith, however, described David’s series on the Tasmanian Aborigines as an achievement of real magnitude. As one of the seven members of the ”Antipodean” group of figurative artists, which comprised Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Clifton Pugh, David showed his Truganini series in Melbourne in 1959 before departing once more for London. Like others of his generation, David made his name in London, where he had his first one-man show in 1963. It was notable for his Trial series in which racism and capital punishment were ”on trial” in the faces of unfeeling or befuddled judges.
In 1971, after more than a decade of success in London, David, Hermia and their three daughters returned to Sydney, where he continued to create passionate paintings as well as works of lyrical delicacy. A buoyant, witty man, known for his informality, friendliness and generosity, David Boyd maintained his quiet but strenuous daily routine in the studio where he worked in ”controlled chaos”. After breaking a hip in 2005 David decided to stop painting, not just because of his reduced mobility but because, so he said, ”the fire in the belly is not what it used to be”.
In June 2008 he was awarded an OAM for his services to art as a painter and an innovator of design and technique in pottery and ceramic sculpture.
David Boyd died peacefully on 20 November 2011 at the age of 87.
David Boyd Gallery >