Tutors
Dan Coombs and Melissa Kime
The Painting Year is a practical course for those looking to advance their practise, developing their skills and content whilst being guided by two celebrated artists Dan Coombs RCA and Melissa Kime.
THIS COURSE IN NOW FULL
Please click here to contact school for alternate courses or to discuss other options
The course, limited to 12 students, aims to provide participants with a community and mentoring whilst actively engaging with painting language and opening doors to untried possibilities.
Inject your practise with inspiration, try new approaches and materials and as part of an artist’s community participate in a discourse about contemporary painting while grounding methods and ideas in your own experience.
Dan Coombs 
Melissa Kime
The course is designed for those with prior experience of painting. You may be self-taught or you may even have been to art school. With painting these distinctions no longer hold. Many artists who have been to art school in recent years would like to paint but were not given the technical and/or intellectual support to do so and would therefore turn to other mediums. However once taken by the desire to paint it is hard to shake off. If you are in this category The Painting Year will provide you with what you need to learn about, practise and develop your painting. You will be given stimulating looking, watching and reading lists and at the end of course invited to attend and participate in the End of Year Student Exhibition.
Course Timetable
- September Term: 30 Sept to 09 Dec 2020 – Half Term 21 October
- January Term: 13 Jan to 24 Mar 2021 – Half Term 17 February
- April Term: 21 April to 30 Jun 2021 – Half Term 26 May
- Exhibition Week
ABOUT DAN COOMBS
Nude by Dan Coombs
Dan is a London based painter, a graduate of The Ruskin School, Oxford (1989-92) and the Royal College of Art (1992-94). He was Rome Scholar in painting, British school in Rome (1994-5). He has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Dan creates his compositions from studies in collage and paint, which unite his figures with entirely invented surroundings, landscape dream worlds and interior spaces. These are human encounters charged with a mysterious, symbolic power. They are explorations of guilt, beauty and fear of isolation, that draw on myth, religion and psychoanalysis in order to grasp the real within the imaginary. In his own words…
“The compositions of my paintings are developed through collage studies that I use to paint from. The figures are distorted or straight photocopies that I place, move and paint around on a smaller canvas. Collage enable me to hold the form of each figure, but to move them in relation to each other within a field space. It also brings in an element that exists outside of myself, that is found rather than invented. I can’t imagine not having a relation to photography or the empirical. Though I invent environments and relationships around the figures, and the painting intentionally blur the relation of th real and the imaginary, there has to be a tension. It seems impossible for me to work entirely from the imagination. The figures are painted from photographs that are distorted by vibrating and shaking the image of the nude on a photocopier. I have to make hundreds, and from those choose ones to paint from. This random process generates figures that are both grotesque and beautiful, alien and familiar.”
Dan Coombs – Writes about the process of making his work in his introduction to his show Unfolding Man at Aleph Contemporary Gallery
Click video title below to see the online exhibition.
ABOUT MELISSA KIME
Superman has delivered by Melissa Kime
Melissa is a london based artist, graduate of University College Falmouth (2011) and post-grad of Royal Drawing School (2013) and the Royal College of Arts (2015). A proficient figurative artist Melissa develop a love for the narrative from a young age. As a child she was often taken to the American Museum in Bath where in her own words
“… my favourite part was wandering through the museum displays of the oldest patchwork quilts in Britain. I loved the stories you could see stitched within them. It reminded me of being young and watching my mother at work reupholstering ancient tapestries and rugs. I would watch the ladies at work; crouched over the floor with backs bent meticulously stitching, sewing, fixing, and mending. Their chat and conversations weaved their way deep into the structured folds of the fabrics.”
Melissa speaking to Brit Packs for UNPOLISHED magazine
Kime has held the post of artist in residence at the Royal Drawing School (2013 & 2015) and the Hollows New York NY (2018). Her Solo shows included ‘Light as a feather, stiff as a board’ CC Gallery (2019), ‘Oh! I think I just lost my Appetite’ Gallery 286 (2016) and ‘Do you think I’m Pretty’ Chalton Gallery (2016). Group shows include Curated for Covid (Online Exhibition) @curatedforcovid (2020), Total Eclipse of the Heart Coombs Contemporary (2020), Temporary Realities Karen Huber Gallery Mexico City (2018) and RCA Secrets Royal College of Arts London (2017).
Images and Artworks used with consent of the artists. ©the ESOP and the Artists. Interactive online Exhibition Unfolding Man ©Dan Coombs & Aleph Contemporary – All rights reserved.
