At the age of 70, the artist Miles Richmond found himself back at Borough Polytechnic in Southwark, south London. It was 1992, and the poly was celebrating both its centenary and its elevation as South Bank University. When he was an art student there half a century earlier, Richmond had painted the view of London from a college rooftop. Now he had been invited back to do it again, as a mural.
Every morning he would arrive and shin up a vertical steel ladder to the rooftop with his easel, paints, brushes and turps strapped to his back, and a bottle of drinking water; no food. He would stay up there all day painting. He was never exactly loquacious, but the staff who encountered him took to him for his unassuming modesty, his 36ft-wide mural that seemed an accretion of the city's history, with the great river winding through like a timeline, and because he was the new university's link with the illustrious past when the great painter David Bomberg had taught there.
In the 1940s, Richmond, who has died aged 85, had been a pupil of Bomberg, an inspirational teacher and hugely innovative but neglected painter. Yet at Borough Road, where Bomberg taught because no one else would have him, he was a talisman. Among his other young pupils, moonlighting from more famous colleges, were Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Dennis Creffield. The first two have become famous, Creffield less so, but Richmond, born a decade earlier, suffered as much neglect as Bomberg, without the preliminary sunburst of fame.
He was born Peter Richmond in Isleworth, Middlesex. In the 1980s he added Miles to his given names and became Miles Peter Richmond, known as Miles. His father was an Admiralty engineer and his mother a singer. In 1940 he went to study at Kingston upon Thames school of art, and later in the second world war, as a conscientious objector, worked on the land, while his brothers served in the armed forces. His father disapproved of his actions, and his intimates felt later that the crisis of conscience this caused Richmond was at least partly responsible for the palpable emotional depth and passion of his paintings.
In 1946 he heard about Bomberg's classes and moved to London to take part. Bomberg taught the view of the 18th-century philosopher Bishop Berkeley that visual perception was a snare and a delusion. This is not a promising starting point for a painter and Richmond adapted it to the view that the imagination was the intermediary between the philosopher's view and the painter's.
Bomberg had written: "We conceive of art as the density of cosmic forces compressed into a small space." Already in the 1940s Richmond was producing uningratiating and unremittingly tough paintings and, especially, drawings of great mass, density and weight. It was an art that drew on the earliest cubist explorations of the first decade of the 20th century, and beyond that, Cézanne; Richmond's own paintings are so packed within their narrow confines that they look as though they are carved from rock.
With other Bomberg disciples, in 1947 Richmond founded the Borough Group, which held several exhibitions, some including Bomberg's own work, up until 1952, at which point Richmond left with his first wife Susanna for Aix-en-Provence. The following year they moved on to the ancient town of Ronda in Andalusia, where Bomberg was running his own art school. Richmond joined him in teaching in this place where the town and its rugged mountain setting were perfectly adapted to his way of looking.
After Bomberg's death in 1957, Richmond taught at the International School in Spain with Harry Thubron, another painter and inspirational teacher who had taken British art education out of the academy, as it were, and placed it in the workshop, giving pupils imaginative settings for life drawing but teaching them how to use lathes and carpenters' tools as well.
In these years Richmond moved frequently between Spain and England, continuing to exchange ideas with Thubron, and in the 1970s he found that his work had taken the long route through drawing to the discovery of light and colour. It is probably no coincidence that one of this new sequence of paintings is called The Red Studio, the very title Matisse used in 1911 for one of the most important breakthrough paintings of the age, in which colour gives the impression of both light and spatial depth. Richmond had moved to London and was working in a studio in Camden Town; in his telling, he painted non-stop for three days, during which he experienced a quasi-mystical experience when he seemed to travel through the sun; as he emerged, he heard a voice saying, "Now you are connected."
Back with us on planet earth, Richmond worked in the north-east of England, in Whitby, Richmond, and at Rievaulx, the haunts of the old Romantic painters of the 19th century, and some others which were not, like Hartlepool and, the town where he was based at the end of his life, Middlesbrough. He carried with him to the grave the reputation of remaining a follower of Bomberg, and for the promoters of fashion and fortune in art there is no future in being behind. That is the modern heresy, but without fame or fortune Miles Richmond's work rises above it.
His first wife Susanna and their four children, Georgina, James, Philip and Robert, survive him, as does his second wife, Miranda, and their two children, Zoe and Jerome.
Michael McNay
John Berger writes: Shortly before his death, Miles asked me to write something about the exhibition that is due to open at the Boundary Gallery, north London, on November 7.
Dear Miles,
It's good people are coming here to watch your paintings and drawings. I say watch rather than look at because they are so full of movement. Like watching a bird cross the sky, or an animal making its way to its lair.
I want to share with you a recent experience. A few weeks ago the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died. I was expecting to meet him on an already planned visit to Ramallah. As things turned out, we visited - several times - his grave.
A few days after receiving the unexpected news of his death I was seized by a desire to draw something for him. To draw ears of wheat - which feature in one of his great poems - and some flowers. As I drew the grains and the petals, they became words and phrases transported from his poems. The same pen with the same ink on the absorbent Japanese paper drew plants and wrote words at the same time.
Meanings and forms became interchangeable. They were twins born of the timeless intelligence which is inherent in every thing which is alive, and which grows and dies.
One day I'll become what I want.
One day I will become a thought
that no sword or book can dispatch to
the wasteland
A thought equal to rain on the
mountain split open by a blade of grass.
You have spent your life, Miles, looking for and recording those mountains, those rains, those blades.
Darwish's verse ends with these two lines:
where power will not triumph
and justice is not fugitive.