Frank Bowling moved to England in 1953 and there completed his high school education. After completing National Service in the Royal Air Force force, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London in 1959 and graduated in 1962. He was awarded the Silver Medal in Painting and a traveling scholarship to South America and the Caribbean. Beginning as a figurative painter, he moved into abstraction in the 1960s after visiting New York and encountering American Abstract Expressionism. He considers himself a British artist and when the Tate Gallery bought a work by him in 1987 it was the first work by a living black British artist that they had acquired. He is also the first black artist to be elected a Royal Academician.