John Edwards was one of that second wave of younger British painters who through the 1960s responded directly to the New York School of abstract painting, as it moderated from Expressionism into a cooler colour-field abstraction. And yet while the American influence was openly admitted, and indeed relished, that response remained entirely personal and authentic, intelligent and restrained.

It has always been easy to see those painters as mere followers, which opportunity American criticism in particular was only too happy to seize upon, and much British comment sadly to endorse. But to look back now is to see not so much a movement but rather a sympathetic association of artists, each of them highly individual, particular and undidactic, producing work oddly distinctive in its Englishness: Copnall, Fielding, Plumb, Moon, Hoyland, Huxley and Edwards. If Edwards did not achieve the broader recognition enjoyed by some of his fellows, it was more by the chances and pitfalls of the English art world and its politics than any lack of quality or distinction in his work.

Indeed, at one point he seemed well set for just such a success, having been taken on by the Rowan Gallery, which from the early 1960s well into the 1980s was one of the leading London galleries dealing in contemporary art, with a marked leaning towards abstraction. There he showed regularly from the late 1960s into the 1980s, and saw his work enter important public collections both at home and abroad.

He also took part in several representative touring exhibitions — to Europe, America and Japan. But, caught perhaps by that peculiarly English prejudice, “that those who can’t, teach”, for Edwards the moment passed, and the 1980s brought much leaner times. For, while so many artists may be constrained to teach for a while and then move on, he had always been a committed and distinguished teacher, retiring eventually as head of painting and sculpture at St Martin’s School of Art.

John Edwards was born in London in 1938, and grew up in Hornsey, North London, where in the Blitz he survived unscathed a direct hit on the family house. He studied at the old independent Hornsey School of Art in Crouch End, long since moved and transmogrified into a department of Middlesex University, and then went on to the University of Leed’s Institute of Education, followed by a British Council scholarship to the Ecole National Supérieure des Arts Visuels in Brussels.

Always prolific, no less as a sculptor than a painter, he did not slacken his pace in retirement. He spent more and more of his time in India, which he had grown to know and love deeply, and which had had a profound effect upon his later work, as much in its sheer energy and cultural richness as in more formal considerations of form and colour. In particular, he came in his later years to consider Jaipur his spiritual home.

About 30 years ago he wrote: “I want my paintings to be direct, immediate, accessible. They’re spontaneous in the way they’re painted — I like to keep the handling frank, the colour fresh, the syntax flexible and the forms open.” To those who knew him, he could almost be describing, quite unconsciously, himself.

He was married and divorced twice, and is survived by his two daughters by his first wife.

John Edwards, painter and teacher, was born on March 3, 1938. He died on August 22, 2009, aged 71