John Boyd was born in Stonehaven in 1940 and studied at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen from 1958-1962. He was elected a member of the Royal Glasgow Institute in 1982 and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1989. He has had many solo exhibitions in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh and in 1997 at the Everard Read Gallery in South Africa. His work is in many private, corporate and public collections in the United Kingdom, U.S.A., Canada and Hong Kong.