Guy Worsdell was born in York to a Quaker railway family. During the 1930s, while living in Hampstead, he studied at London's Central School of Art. During World War II he moved to Highgate, next door to his father's friend Heath Robinson, who encouraged Guy's art career and probably got him his first book-illustrating job on The Motorist's Companion. He volunteered for the RAF but was rejected because of his short sight. He spent the war as a special constable and glass factory worker.

After the war and his parents' death, Guy acquired Wastrel Studio, overlooking Porthgwidden beach in St Ives. Here he became part of an artistic community which included Barbara Hepworth and Bernard Leach, both of whom became close friends. He also had a studio in his London house at 17 Bedford Gardens, Kensington, where his neighbours included the portrait photographer Madame Yevonde. His career flourished, with regular exhibitions in St Ives as a member of the Penwith Society, and in London and internationally as a significant figure in Free Painters and Sculptors.

Both in oils and wood engravings, Guy specialised in still lifes of contemporary studio ceramics. He was also a landscape painter in a lyrical Romantic Modern style, and his works often included steam-trains or their delineating plumes of smoke, as a nod to his family background of railway locomotive design.

With his partner Sybil Hanson (who worked at the V&A) in the 1950s and 1960s, Guy built up a remarkable collection of twentieth-century studio ceramics. He was an accomplished musician, playing early music on the harpsichord. He died from a heart attack shortly after his 70th birthday.

A painting, The Glacier's Lances (1964) an abstract oil on board, is part of the permanent collection of Cornwall Council.