James (Jack) Wesley Boynton was born on January 12, 1928 in Fort Worth, Texas.  He received a BFA in (1949) and MFA in (1955) at the Texas Christian University. He began exhibiting his paintings in 1950 and moved to Houston to teach at the University of Houston in 1955. The same year, he won the Purchase Prize in the annual Texas exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and had a solo exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Museum.

After teaching at UH from 1955 to 1957, Boynton taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1960 to 1962, returning to Houston after his contract was completed. In 1969, he was instrumental in creating a studio art department at the University of St. Thomas, where he served as a professor until 1985. Boynton was known professionally as James until the early 1970's when he started signing as "Jack" rather than James Boynton.Boynton's work is included in many museums and exhibitions, including the "17 Americans" at the Brussels World Fair in 1957, the Whitney Annual and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Texas, the Amon Carter Museum and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.

In july and August, 1967 he worked at Tamarind in Los Angeles on a Tamarind Fellowship where he created a total of 38 color lithographs. The lithographs were published in two suites: "Packaged Horizons, or a Guided Tour to Oblivion" and a second suite titled "Pandorasville Revisited." While the 1950s and 1960s marked the height of his national fame, he exhibited in Houston and Fort Worth galleries throughout his career. In 1980, the Amarillo Art Center organized Jack Boynton: Retro/Spectrum, which traveled to museums in Tyler, Waco, Abilene and Beaumont. In 1989, TCU mounted Homecoming: A Thumbnail Retrospective, and in 2009 William Reaves Fine Art, a Houston gallery, presented Six Decades of Jack Boynton.

James (Jack) Boynton died on April 5, 2010 in Houston, Texas. Here is a link to his obituary.