VIDEO: ABC TV SUNDAY Afternoon, Best of Boyd family exhibition Arthur, Guy, David, Jamie and Lenore Boyd filmed in Galeria Aniela

VIDEO filmed by Australian Television | the ABC TV Sunday Afternoon in Galeria Aniela

In 1979, Professor Patrick Hutchings' discussion of the sculpture in the 1979 monograph attributes Boyd's fascination with transformation and change to his inheritance of a Boyd "clan style", "a family theme, one of metamorphosis", a motif evident in a 1948 two-handled pot by his father Merric, which Guy Boyd had kept.

In 1987, Reviewing one of Guy Boyd's last shows, at Beaver Galleries in Canberra, Sasha Grishin writing in The Canberra Times, contrasts the sculptor's Boyd family inheritance of "figurative humanism" against the prevailing abstract sculpture imitative of Anthony Caro. Describing Guy Boyd as never having been a "fashionable sculptor" he praises Boyd’s avoidance of "slick" realism and his concentration on the human figure as a "vehicle for communicating ideas", his ability to convey beauty without "sentimentalism" and to represent freedom in movement through "an exciting resolution of the arrangement of volumes within graceful floating lines".

Guy Boyd Sculptor

Guy Boyd turned to a full-time career in sculpture in 1965 when he held his first solo show at Australian Galleries in Melbourne. His commissions include sculptures in both Melbourne and Sydney's international airports, Caulfield Town Hall, the Commonwealth Bank, and has pieces in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Guy Boyd had exhibitions of his work in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. In 1968 Guy Boyd won a Churchill Fellowship to study art overseas. He was recognised with a large format monograph, Guy Boyd written by gallerist Anne Von Bertouch and art historian Patrick Hutchins and published by Lansdowne Press. Later that year Guy and Phyllis migrated to Canada with their four younger children, settling in Toronto in 1976, but returned to live in Australia five years later. 

Guy Boyd's early sculptures and reliefs were mostly in terracotta and plaster.

 Guy Boyd 1923-1988, Portrait of Arthur Boyd, Bronze, Price: SOLD

James Gleeson, writing in the Sun-Herald, Sydney in June 1966 provides insight into Boyd's choice of sculptural medium during his transition from the ceramic industry, his method of working, and its influence on the forms he favoured:

Guy Boyd's technique is not merely original (for that in itself is not necessarily a virtue), it is original and entirely at one with the intention of the artist. He has perfected the ideal means for saying what he wants to say, so the originality of his technique is also artistically important. First stage in the transmutation of nature into art is a wax model. This is the creative stage when the soft wax must be thumbed into a work of art that is alive with the vibrancy of nature. The next stage is the plating of the model with silver or copper, but the usual process would smooth away the subtleties of surface modelling and destroy its vitality. So, the wax effigy sits in its acid bath for weeks on end and a very low charge of electricity gradually deposits a paper-thin layer of metal on its surface. The wax is chemically dissolved, the shell is strengthened on the inside and finally filled with a plastic stone that will neither expand nor contract to endanger the metal skin.

Guy Boyd experimented with an electrolytic deposition of silver combined with a layer of copper, but abandoned that after finding that applying heated carbon tetrachloride to dissolve the wax from the metal shell was affecting his health.

In 1966, Guy Boyd discontinued the electroplating with powdered granite compound infill and the majority of Guy Boyd mature work is fine-face bronze casts using the lost wax process, in which he innovated through the admixture of silicon with wax, with editions of usually six produced in bronze and aluminum.

Often a thin finish in silver is applied over the bronze or aluminum cast, oxidized to near-black then burnished lightly to reveal texture in relief; his 1971 Aboriginal Legend of Flight, commissioned for Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport arrivals gate, after an earlier version (1969) for Tullamarine Airport, is an example.

It is five and a half meters in width, modeled in clay, cast in plaster and then sand-cast in aluminum in 27 sections, coated in sterling silver over nickel and copper layers, then oxidized before being bolted together and the joins concealed. It is displayed against a black Swedish marble wall.

Of his working technique, art historian, art critic and curator Sasha Grishin noted that Boyd worked directly with his wax or clay, rather than through preparatory drawings, accepting the modeling and subtraction of material, and revelation of the unexpected, as crucial to the creative process.

Guy Boyd activism

Guy Boyd was also active in environmental and other causes, including protesting against the damming of the Franklin River and advocating the innocence of Lindy Chamberlain.

A determined and natural leader, in 1967 Guy Boyd founded and was President of the Brighton Foreshore Protection Committee.

Guy Boyd was vocal in condemning inappropriate development and council corruption in the suburb, where he had settled after purchasing and restoring a house that was once his grandparents', and advocated for councillors to be paid in order to attract candidates less compromised than those who were real estate agents and property developers.

Goy Boyd campaigns resulted in the defeat of a proposal to build a marina at Brighton^[ and the halting of a high-pressure oil pipeline that was to be extended by Esso and BHP under Port Phillip Bay. A plaque commemorating his achievements in preservation and conservation was later erected on the beach at Brighton.

After Guy Boyd, Phyllis Boyd and daughters Lenore and Sally, were early involved in calls for a judicial inquiry into Lindy Chamberlain's trial which resulted in a charge of the murder of her baby daughter, they were active in drawing up a petition entitled 'A Plea for Mercy'.

Guy Boyd became the Australian Coordinator of the effort and, in 1984, edited the book Justice in Jeopardy in Chamberlain's defense. 

In 1983, as a member of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, Guy Boyd lobbied against the Tasmanian State Government's plan to dam the Franklin River.

In 1988, Guy Boyd was appointed the Art Advisor to Deakin University.

Guy Boyd young Life

Guy Boyd was born in Murrumbeena Victoria, he was a member of the famous Boyd artistic dynasty, and the brother of painters Arthur Boyd and David Boyd.

Born in Murrumbeena, Victoria, Guy was the third child of William Merric Boyd, potter, and his wife Doris Lucy Eleanor Bloomfield, née Gough, a painter, and thus was a member of the Boyd artist dynasty. Brother of Arthur and David, both painters, Lucy a potter, and Mary, a painter (who married first John Perceval, and then later Sidney Nolan, both artists), he grew up in his father's pottery.

The Boyd family artistic dynasty includes painters, sculptors, architects, writers and other arts professionals, and descends from Boyd's grandfather Arthur Merric Boyd, Boyd's father Merric and mother Doris, uncles Penleigh Boyd and Martin Boyd.

After the privations of the Great Depression followed by a disastrous fire at his father's pottery, where he was assistant, in 1937 Boyd found work first as a jeweller's apprentice, then in a number of jobs, including at a nuts and bolts factory and as a builder's labourer. 

In 1941-46 Guy Boyd served in the Australian Army Reserve, however as a committed pacifist Guy Boyd was deployed as a draughtsman in Melbourne and then at Fortuna mansion in Bendigo, before conflicts with his superiors resulted in his being posted interstate in 1944 to the 103^rd Convalescent Depot, Ingleburn, where Boyd volunteered to teach pottery to the patients. Examples of the injured combatants' work were exhibited in Sydney in 1945.

Guy Martin à Beckett Boyd Death (12 June 1923 – 26 April 1988)

Guy Martin à Beckett Boyd (1923-1988), sculptor and potter, was born on 12 June 1923 at Murrumbeena, Melbourne, third child of William Merric Boyd, potter, and his wife Doris Lucy Eleanor Bloomfield, née Gough, a painter.

Grandson of the painters Arthur Merric and Emma Minnie Boyd, nephew of the novelist Martin Boyd, cousin of the architect Robin Boyd, and brother of the painters and potters Arthur and David Boyd, Guy never doubted his vocation as an artist.

He chose sculpture, he said, because in painting he could not compete with Arthur, the brother he always revered. The à Beckett family fortunes, on which his father depended, dwindled to nothing in the Depression years. Guy and his brothers, for whom a Murrumbeena state primary school education had to suffice, took labouring jobs.

In 1941-46 he served in the Militia. A committed pacifist, he refused to bear arms and worked at first as a draughtsman. Conflicts with his superiors were resolved when he was posted in 1944 to the 103rd Convalescent Depot, Ingleburn, New South Wales, to teach pottery to the patients.

Taking up a Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme grant, Boyd enrolled in 1945 at the East Sydney Technical College, where he studied sculpture under Lyndon Dadswell. In 1946 at Neutral Bay he founded a commercial pottery which, confusingly, he called the Martin Boyd Pottery. With moderate prices, functional designs and Australian decorative motifs, his products were popular with postwar homemakers.

On 22 April 1950 at St John’s Church of England, Darlinghurst, Boyd married 18-year-old Barbara Dawn Cooper, a secretary; they separated within a year.

Divorced in 1952 and having sold his Sydney business, he moved back to Melbourne and on 1 December at the office of the government statist, married Phyllis Nairn, an Adelaide-born graduate in social work.

He moved into a disused pottery at his father’s property in Murrumbeena. After twenty months of communal living with his parents, and with Arthur and his sister Mary Perceval and their families, Guy bought his first home, at nearby Oakleigh.

While his second commercial venture, the Guy Boyd Pottery, flourished, with Phyllis as an active business partner, Guy began to sculpt part time.

In 1964 he was confident enough to sell the pottery, move to Brighton, and start his career in sculpture.

At a time when abstract sculpture prevailed, he was committed to figurative art, but he soon won high praise for his finely textured work in bronze and in aluminium overlaid with silver, and for the strength and delicacy of his female nudes.

Guy Boyd first big commissions included wall sculptures for Tullamarine (1970) and Sydney (1971) airports.

Study in Europe and Asia, on a Churchill fellowship in 1969, persuaded Boyd to test his work internationally. In 1976 he moved to Toronto, Canada; his wife and their youngest four children accompanied him. With access to the big galleries of Chicago and New York, his sculpture flourished.

It was a bonus that `being a Boyd’ was not an issue, as it was in Australia. However, it was family feeling that brought him home. On a visit in 1980 he could not resist buying his grandfather’s house in Edward Street, Sandringham, because it held happy memories of childhood.

The Boyds returned to Melbourne in 1981 to restore the house and live in it. Continuing his career as a sculptor, with major works that expressed his Christian faith, Guy had also become a public figure who did not shirk controversy.

A former president (1973-76) of the Port Phillip Bay Conservation Council, he remained active in environmental matters: he was arrested in 1983 while protesting against the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania.

With his wife and elder daughters he campaigned tirelessly to reverse Lindy Chamberlain’s conviction for murdering her baby daughter, Azaria, at Ayers Rock (Uluru).

Conservative in his views on religion and family life, but ready to defy the law for his pacifist beliefs; ambitious to make his name in art, but selflessly dedicated to causes that depleted his energies, Boyd was a man of great charm, good looks and gentleness, with an inflexible will.

In his remarkable family, he was never just `another Boyd’. He died on 26 April 1988 from coronary artherosclerosis and was buried with Anglican rites in Brighton cemetery.

His wife, and their five daughters and two sons, survived him. Guy Boyd had held one-man exhibitions in all Australian capital cities and in London, Montreal, Chicago and New York. His work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia and in the State galleries of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

The grey and white effects of silver can be rinse off, wearing rubber gloves (to keep the residue off hands) when the surface is first cooled. Once it is rinsed and completely dry, it can be waxed. Once the wax is dry, the surface can be buffed to produce a shiny silver or silver-grey colour, sometimes dramatically different from the un-buffed look. When the patina dries it is mostly a dull, variegated grey-white, with hits of green and occasional shiny silver flecks.