Artist brings works to Wesson Public Library

By Bob Arnold

            Through Wesson Public Library, which has been displaying her paintings in recent weeks, locals are becoming acquainted with the art of recent Miami transplant Joan Ritchie Boyd.

            Boyd and her husband Ralph settled in Ruth three years ago where her cousin, Wesson Library director Marilyn Britt, discovered her realist and impressionist paintings, and thought they should be shared with the community.

            “I started painting when I was 14 years old in high school in South Carolina,” she relates. 

            Her first work was a large mural painted for a Boy Scout troop, and then she started doing set designs for plays, including backdrops for a Guys & Dolls production at AC Flora High School in Columbia, SC, and Bye, Bye Birdie for a Fort Jackson, SC, theater.

            A self-taught artist, Boyd makes jewelry with beads and stained glass, paints in acrylics and oils, draws with pen and ink, creates pastels with chalk and uses silk screen for prints.

            While art has been her ongoing hobby, Boyd has pursued a varied career since graduating from high school when she was 16 years old, starting in data processing and working as a executive secretary in the early 1970s.  After working in Greensboro, NC, Columbia, SC, and Charleston, SC, she moved to Florida in 1978 – “a year after a landmark snowfall in Miami,” she recalls.  For 10 years, she worked on ambulances as a paramedic after studying Emergency Medical Technology a Broward Community College.  In 1987, Boyd earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration at Nova Southeast University at Davis, Florida,  and went to work for the Center for Disease Control, and then joined the U.S. Postal Inspection Service as an administrative specialist before retiring.

            Boyd and her husband, a retired New York Institute of Technology physicist, who she married in 1990, came to Ruth where she had inherited a property from her father, who had lived in McComb.  They are living in a underground house there while building a two-story house.  Boyd has one son, David, a technical mechanic, and four grandchildren

What are your hobbies?

I guess is art is my career now, since a even sell some of my works.  So my hobbies are genealogy, sewing on a machine and hand embroidery.

Are you a reader?

I do a lot of research related to building a house, genealogy and other interest.

How about music?

In South Carolina, I played the violin – first chair in competition, and solo at special events.  I also attempt to play piano.

Movies, theater, television?

I follow news and current events, enjoy sci-fi and shows and documentaries focused on nature and animals.

If you won a lot of money in the lottery, how would you spend it?

I’d help my family, buy a boat and invest in property locally and in Florida.

How would you change the world?

I would work for peace through common sense political non-partisanship, art and religion and strengthening nuclear families.