Boynton was a contemporary American painter and printmaker. He has been recognized as a surrealist artist. He used "shape and form to both contradict the senses and to disrupt our relationship to space and time" (taken from Annex Galleries website 10⁄25⁄2010).

Boynton was born January 12, 1928 in Fort Worth, Texas. He received a BFA (1949) and an MFA (1955) from Texas Christian University.

Boynton began exhibiting his art in the 1950s. He won a Purchase Prize in the annual Texas exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and had a solo exhibit at the Ft. Worth Art Museum. He was one of seventeen artists to represent the United States in the Brussels World Fair in 1957/58.

He taught at the University of Houston (1955–1957), at the San Francisco Art Institute (1960–1962), and the University of St. Thomas (1969–1985). He also taught at the Northwood Institute in Dallas, Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado, and the University of New Mexico.

There were three exhibits of his work: 1980 at the Amarillo Art Center – James Boynton: Retro/Spectrum; 1989 at Texas Christian University – Homecoming: A Thumbnail Retrospective; 2009 at William Reaves Fine Art – Six Decades of Jack Boynton.

His work is owned by several prestigious museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum, the Museum of New Orleans, and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Albuquerque.

Ambiguous Answers was a set of 4 prints created from aluminum plates. The paper is Dutch Etching 20 x 22 inches. Each bears the wet stamp of Little Egypt Enterprise and the stamp of Master Printer David E. Folkman. The prints were YES, NO, MAYBE, and OK. Each has graphics of the earth within the art (an eroded river bed, a seashore, a river).

The University of Texas at Dallas owns Ambiguous Answers copy 21.

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