Guy Boyd

Guy Martin à Beckett Boyd (12 June 1923 – 26 April 1988) was an Australian potter and figurative sculptor noted for his ability to represent sensuality in the female nude with fluid forms. He was also active in environmental and other causes, including protesting against the damming of the Franklin River and advocating the innocence of Lindy Chamberlain. Background and early years 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 he served in the Australian Army Reserve, however as a committed pacifist he 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 103rd Convalescent Depot, Ingleburn, where he volunteered to teach pottery to the patients. Examples of the injured combatants' work were exhibited in Sydney in 1945.