Struggle always seem to precedes breakthrough. It demands a reset — the shedding of the old to embrace the new. One night early in our marriage, Lee and I had to wrestle our way out of a shell that never fit. In his case, shedding the new to make room for the old.
Lee had always had a strong pull in the direction of art. As a young boy, he would spend hours delighting in N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations in a collection of classics on his parents’ book shelves. These dramatic illustrations tickled his vivid imagination and brought the stories to life. He experienced the power of art through the pages of those books, and dreamed of being able to paint like that himself one day.
The power of art
In high school, he studied watercolor painting with Caesar Cigliano, a local professional artist in Southport, CT., his hometown. Caesar recognized Lee’s talent and urged him to pursue art seriously. On his recommendation, Lee applied to Syracuse University, known for its strong art program, and graduated with a degree in art in 1976. While his determination to pursue a career in art was more fully forged at Syracuse, he left believing that commercial art was the only viable way he could make a respectable living as an artist.
When we were married in1980, he set his sites on taking that practical, responsible road. This meant heading to the big cities in search of jobs as a freelance illustrator — Washington, Baltimore, and New York. Before technology changed the face of commerce, this meant many trips, first to show his portfolio to get the job, then a trip to show the preliminary sketches, and, finally, a trip to deliver the final art. He was under constant pressure, and very soon meeting the demands of a besuited, egotistical art director in a fancy office under an unreasonably tight deadline began to lose its luster.
“You’re an artist in the truest, most beautiful sense of the word!” I said to him that night, “You’ve got to know your heart and paint what you love!” My words said it all: Be true to yourself and to the One who created you! There’s no other way to do this thing called life!
We made a decision that night. From then on, instead of heading west on route 50 to D.C., Lee would go east to small towns on the eastern shore. He would take the road less traveled by, and that was sure to make all the difference. We made a decision that night, and never looked back.
Lee loved to paint the watermen at work on their boats. He celebrated this facet of life on the Bay with his paint brush. For 15 years Lee sought out the watermen and embraced their way of life. He would get up at 3:00am many a winter morning to drive from Annapolis to Thilgman Island to meet a Skipjack leaving the dock at 4:00. He would come home and tell me all about his day: the banter on the boat as they were getting underway, the comforting smell of coffee rising from the cabin mingling with the bracing winter air, who was on the crew and how they worked together to bring in the catch. He would often come in the door with a triumphant air, bearing a half bushel of oysters — a gift from the captain.
A Light Has Dawned, oil painting by Lee Boynton
Lee was driven by an ache in his heart, the solemn awareness that he was capturing the twilight of a passing era. He wanted to taste it all: the oyster tongers working alongside the skipjacks in the winter, the trap pound fishing out of Reedville, Virginia in the spring when the menhaden were running, and the crabbing season — “the first run of soft shells getting underway when the locust trees were blooming,” as the watermen would say, and crabbing for hard shells through the early fall. Lee saw a beautiful oneness with God’s creation in the watermen as they worked, a sweet balance and respect for the natural world, of which they were a part, passed down through the generations.
The show at the Chesapeake Yacht Club in September, Lee Boynton: Celebrating the Chesapeake will introduce a series of prints of Lee’s paintings of the watermen, and will include some of his originals as well. Lee believed in art having a purpose. The sales of the prints and 50% of the sales of the originals will go toward the restoration of the land and gardens on Lilac Hill, a six acre family property in Annapolis. Lilac Hill has been in our family for 101 years as of March, 2021. Under a strict conservation easement, this property can never be developed. We hope to demonstrate how property owners can create beautiful natural habitats and join a growing movement to restore the biodiversity needed to reverse the alarming rate of decline of birds, bees, and butterflies in the natural world. To learn more about Lilac Hill and how we are stewarding generational family legacies with a connection to the land, visit our website: www.takemebacktothegarden.com (Take Me Back To the Garden).
