The Painting Year II Tuesdays: 5 Oct 2021 to 28 Jun 2022

Tuesdays 10am to 5pm

Artist-tutors: Guy Allott and Vicky Wright

The Painting Year II is a practical course for those looking to advance their practice, develop their skills and content whilst being guided by experienced and celebrated painters. The intention of the course is to inject your practice with inspiration, enable you to 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.

This 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 this course will provide you with what you need to learn about, practice and develop your painting. You will be given stimulating looking, watching and reading lists and at the end of course invited to participate in the End of Year Student Exhibition.

Annual Fee £1925  Term Fee £710

We have a limited number of places available please book now to avoid disappointment.

Paintings above by Guy Allott

Course timetable dates
  • Autumn Term: 05 Oct to 14 Dec 2021 – Half Term 26 October
  • Spring Term: 11 Jan to 22 Mar 2022 – Half Term 15 February
  • Summer Term: 19 April to 28 Jun 2022 – Half Term 31st May
  • Exhibition Week – TBA

About the artist-tutors

Guy Allott

London based Artist Guy Allott was born in the market town of Hexham Northumberland  in 1972, a graduate of Central Saint Martins (1999) and the Royal College of Art (2002), Guy is a versatile artist who works across several disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture and woodcuts.

As a young painter and sculptor Guy made playful cardboard maquettes of spaceships and paintings of surrealistic landscapes, sometimes combining the two in painted depictions of what he called Landscape Spaceships. By 2009 Guy work was exploring and subverting traditional representations of landscape in relation to man’s desire to explore and control nature; his paintings and sculptures present a fantastical merging of the philosophies of science and culture, offering a critique of historic social beliefs alongside an investigation into the contemporary. Read more >>>

Vicky Wright

Bolton born (1967), Vicky makes work that is dense and iconoclastic, overpowering in its purpose and preoccupied with the apparatus of power; labour and mobilisation in the industrial British north, patriarchy and opportunity and the provisional relationship between technology and the planet. She is a graduate of the RCA (1993) and Goldsmith MFA Fine Art (2008). She has exhibited regularly having solo and group shows in the UK and internationally. Vicky’s five solo shows with the Josh Lilly Gallery London include the most recent ‘Hard-Light Hologram’ in 2020.

Group shows include the John Moores Painting Prize, the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, the Jerwood Painting Prize, Engholm Engelhorn Galerie Vienna, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven Germany and the Whitechapel Gallery London. We are delighted to have her teach with us at the ESOP.

My painting practice is mainly an investigation into Abstract Expressionism. I work very intuitively and initially with no plans or subject matter.  But more than work, I play! Initially my approach is experimental and open to any possibility. Colour and gesture are my constant search, using oils or acrylics and sometimes both. Although my work is non-representational there are recurrent themes that appear in my work without intention. Such as weather evocation, imaginary creatures, buildings or houses. And when these appear, I am finding myself handling a visual poetry contrasting these two worlds: the abstract and the figurative. Some of my work at a later can take a more conceptual turn, specially with my mixed media work with photography or my paintings on domestic fabrics.  My main interests are around the idea of home, the domestic space, motherhood and childhood, as well as womanhood, capitalism, ecology and how everything is interconnected.

Vicky Wright 2020
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About The Essential School Of Painting

The Essential School of Painting (ESOP) is an alternative art school based in Wood Green, London, specialising in painting and drawing classes taught by leading contemporary artists. The ESOP offers exciting, intellectually rigorous courses with the intention of advancing painting. Classes are available for all levels of experience.