When summary expressionism arrived in Britain within the Fifties, Graham Boyd, who has died on the age of 96, was one in every of few artists who embraced the libertine scale and dynamism of American portray. Over a 70-year profession, primarily based latterly in Chipperfield, Hertfordshire, he made his personal explorations of color and lightweight in non-figurative work and sculpture.
Born in Bristol to Herbert, a leather-based tradesman, and Hilda (nee Duckett), Graham’s path to abstraction was not easy. After two years of nationwide service with the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, in 1948 he revisited his postponed research in illustration at Watford Artwork Faculty, although his coronary heart was drawn to grease portray. Then in 1953 a short-lived relationship led him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), whose huge landscapes and vibrant ecology revealed to him a world in fixed flux. It was an expertise that irreversibly altered the trajectory of his portray, towards vivid color and summary kind.
Getting back from Africa in 1955, Graham secured an area on the dilapidated Meadow Studios in Bushey and started promoting via the gallerist Leslie Waddington. In 1957 he was chosen for the inaugural John Moores Exhibition on the Walker Artwork Gallery in Liverpool, which purchased his three-dimensional aid, Nation, and in 1962 he held his first solo present on the Artists Worldwide Affiliation in London. In August of that yr he married Pauline Eastall, a dancer and teacher.
A second breakthrough got here in 1973, when Graham accepted a year-long trade professorship at Plymouth State Faculty in New Hampshire. He spent the summer season driving throughout the US along with his younger household to the Grand Canyon, impressed as soon as extra by the majesty of the panorama.
A pure experimentalist – he was an early adopter of acrylic paints, blended with sand and glue or discharged via a spray-gun – Graham returned to the US in 1983 to take part within the second Triangle Workshop, based by the sculptor Anthony Caro in upstate New York. Caro turned an in depth good friend, describing Graham as having “the least ego of any artist [he’d] met”.
Within the final 30 years of Graham’s profession he loved virtually yearly solo exhibits, culminating in a retrospective on the Goldmark Gallery, in Uppingham, Rutland, in 2021. As a part of the three-man group who filmed and interviewed Graham for a significant documentary on his work, I acquired to know him properly over a number of months.
Although in poor health well being had severely compromised his mobility, his pleasure was infectious as he recounted wild events with Gwyther Irwin, a fellow artist, or when slinging a canvas to the studio wall to show what he was engaged on. Nothing might diminish Graham’s fascination along with his craft. As Pauline’s carer within the 10 years earlier than her dying in 2011, and in his final days, he continued to seek out methods to color – even when it meant asking his personal carers to fill in a nook right here or there.
Graham’s final exhibition, Risky Creatures (2022), was on the College of Hertfordshire, the place from 1976 to 1993 he had served as head of portray; in 2019 he was awarded an honorary fellowship.
He’s survived by his son, Andrew, and daughter, Sophie, and two grandchildren.
