In 1956, Graham moved to the St Ives area of Cornwall where he lived the rest of his life. He had lived there before, in a caravan at Germoe between 1943 and 1947, and at Mevagissey in 1948–49. During these earlier stays, he had made contact with several artists connected to the St Ives school: Ben Nicholson, Sven Berlin and Bryan Wynter. The last of these became a close friend. When he settled in Cornwall permanently, Graham became part of a loose-knit artistic community which included (as well as Wynter) Terry Frost, Michael Snow, Karl Weschke, Alan Lowndes, Nancy Wynne-Jones and, most importantly perhaps for Graham's development, Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon. Graham's contacts in Glasgow and London during the 1940s also included many painters, including Robert Frame, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde and, most intimately, John Minton, who stayed in Germoe for six weeks in 1944.

1956 was an interesting time to be in and around St Ives. Roger Hilton, who had trained in Paris and worked in London, was himself ‘becoming drawn to Cornwall’ and spent Christmas 1956 there visiting Patrick Heron. More frequent visits followed over the next few years. Around the same time, Heron's own work shifted significantly: in 1955–56 he made a ‘decisive move into non-figurative abstraction’ in which he had ‘to do without the pretext provided by a subject’. Bryan Wynter's paintings also changed around 1956, losing their (albeit indirect) references to the Cornish landscape and becoming ‘a kind of visual flux, a surface on which the eye found it difficult to rest so that, if it were not rebuffed, it would be compelled to push deeper and come to terms with the forces underlying the painting’. For both Wynter and Heron, personal factors were involved in these changes in style. Heron had bought the house, Eagle's Nest in Zennor, he had long dreamt of and started to live there all the year round; Wynter had inherited money and could enjoy greater artistic freedom as a result. He had also started to experiment with mescalin.