Miles Richmond was a painter in an expressionistic manner between the representational and the abstract. Early in his career he came under the influence of the painter David Bomberg and was a member of his Borough Group. Like Bomberg, he spent many years in Ronda, Andalusia, teaching and painting, before returning to the northeast of England.

Miles Peter Richmond was born in Isleworth in 1922. His father worked for the Admiralty as an engineer, and his mother had trained as a classical singer. After a conventional training at Kingston School of Art, he was introduced to Bomberg’s class at the Borough Polytechnic.

The encounter with Bomberg — and his fellow pupils — was the turning point in his artistic life. He later recalled that although at first suspicious of Bomberg’s approach to teaching, he was won over by his “deep seriousness”. Pupils and teacher exhibited seven times between 1946 and 1951, having come together as the Borough Group.

In 1999, in an act of generosity, he presented London from the South Bank, a 30ft-long mural painting, to South Bank University (formerly the Borough Polytechnic), as a celebration of the millennium and a tribute to Bomberg. It was a revision of the scene he had first painted from the same vantage point in 1946 when he arrived at the Borough Polytechnic. It shows the South Bank of the Thames as the central point, with the roads leading to the seven bridges across the river radiating from it. As he put it, “standing on the roof of South Bank’s Tower, the sense of London radiating like a fan is forceful”.

After the Borough Group disbanded, Richmond moved briefly to Aix-en-Provence, hoping to discover more about Cézanne — he often quoted Cézanne’s dictum that a true artist should be neither above nor below nature, but its equal. He then moved on to Spain, and in 1954 was invited to become Bomberg’s assistant in Ronda, where he was teaching. He spent most of the next 25 years in Ronda, staying on after Bomberg’s death in 1957, and becoming director of art at the International School there, working intensely both as an artist and teaching other artists how to see and interpret nature.

In the early 1970s his work, although still recognisibly that of the same artist, altered significantly, in particular by the use of a much brighter palette. The pivotal painting was The Red Studio of 1974, on which he worked almost non-stop for three days and nights. Alastair Boyd, writing in a recent catalogue of Richmond’s work, suggested that “Before The Red Studio Richmond was in search of a key. Having found it, he has continued working ever since, in pursuit of a revelation which he knows is within reach of his brushes.”

In 1979 he returned to England, moving to the North East, where he converted the Motor House in East Rounton, North Yorkshire, into a centre for artists and a summer school. In 1994 he moved to Middlesbrough, where the industrial landscape affected his work as the rural landscapes of Andulusia and the Cleveland Hills had done.

He particularly enjoyed looking at the Tees Valley from high ground, and in his panoramic painting Teesside from Eston Bank (2000) he showed how from that spot one looks deeply into the heavily industrialised town but also out towards the hills. His first big retrospective was at the Middlesbrough Art Gallery in 1994.

He maintained his association with Ronda until the end of his life, returning there regularly, and his exhibition Miles Richmond y Ronda was shown at the Convento de Santo Domingo in Ronda in 2006, while Obras de Miles Richmond was shown at the Unicaja Gallery, Málaga, this year. He also exhibited in London and in the North of England, and an exhibition of his works opened at the Boundary Gallery, London, on November 7.

Although tending towards abstraction, Richmond’s work was always ultimately representational, even if the representation is often highly expressionistic.

Whether painting the wild beauty of the sierras above Ronda or the petrochemical works of the Tees Valley of his later years, there is always what Bomberg called the “spirit in the mass” — where the physical properties of the paint and of light produce an effect where the essence of the subject is portrayed, not a slavish reproduction.

Or as Richmond later wrote: “A good painting is a complex intuition and the act of creation means harnessing these complexities to, as Blake said ‘cleanse the gates of perception’.”

As Frank Auerbach, his fellow pupil at the Borough Polytechnic, put it, Richmond was “a fervent, pure and educated artist”. He was still painting on the day before his death.

Richmond was married twice. He and his first wife, Susanna, had a daughter and three sons, and his second wife, Miranda, had a daughter and a son.

Miles Richmond, painter, was born on December 19, 1922. He died on October 8, 2008, aged 85