About Lee Boynton:
The sea was the spawning ground for Lee’s art. He spent a lot of his childhood and youth “messing
around in boats” on Long Island Sound and along the coast of Maine. For fun, he would study the
works of Winslow Homer, Frederick Waugh and N.C. Wyeth, and yearned to paint the beauty and
drama of the natural world around him like his artistic heroes.
As an emerging artist, Lee spent hours sketching and painting the lobstermen and boatbuilders in
Maine. He saw these men, their boats and the sea as an intricate and colorful tapestry, just begging to
be painted. One of his first painting instructor gave him a copy of Hawthorne on Painting when he was sixteen years old. This was his first connection to the Cape School of Art in Provincetown, MA, where
he later studied with the renowned Impressionist Henry Hensche.
Henry introduced Lee to the idea that light has color and that the color of light changes hourly during the day as well as seasonally through the months of year. He impressed upon Lee the importance of painting convenient block studies in order to learn these effects.
As a student of color, Lee began to discipline himself to paint the truth of what he saw before him. This exciting approach to seeing and painting color revolutionized his artistic direction. He took what he had learned in oil at the Cape School of Art and applied it to watercolor. In2004, Watson Guptill published Painting the Impressionist Watercolor, a book Lee co-authored with Linda Gottlieb, one of his longtime students.
Lee is one of the founders of the Mid Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association. His oil and watercolor paintings have received top awards in east coats plein air painting competitions.
