Painter Graham Boyd is displaying his latest exhibition, Conversing in Colour, at Watersmeet in Rickmansworth next week.

“Painting to me is about paradox and enigma,“ says Graham. “It is very hard to decode what goes on between the hand, eye and brain in the creative process. One has to locate oneself just beyond logic and to remain true to your inner self.“ Graham spent his early years in Central Africa and North America, where he gained his abstract influences from music and poetry, and returned to the UK in the mid-1950s.

He lived and worked in near derelict studios in Bushey that had been built by Sir Hubert von Herkomer in the 1890s for his followers and former students.

The huge skylight leaked but gave the interior its stunning luminosity.

He has lived in Chipperfield, where he paints in his garden studio, since 1967.

He became head of painting at the Hertfordshire College of Art and Design in 1976 and led the development of the country’s first BA Hons Fine Art degree course. He retired in 1993, to paint full-time.