John Boyd was born in Stonehaven in 1940, and studying at Mackie Academy, where he was encouraged by James Morrison. He attended Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen from 1958-62 where he was taught by Bobby Henderson Blyth, and briefly studied at Hospitalfield near Arbroath, where he met John Byrne and Sandy Fraser.

Following his studies, he moved to Glasgow and lived there for the rest of his life. He became an art teacher and only in the last decade he devoted himself exclusively to his work as an artist. He began a long series of oil paintings drawing strongly from his childhood experiences on the Kincardineshire coast thirty years before. "These paintings are ruminative and evocative compositions of fishermen, a...