Fees: £6,700 per annum
| Course Dates | Application Deadlines 2026 | Annual Fee |
| 28 Sept 2026 to 7 July 2028 Orientation week: 28 Sept – 2 Oct 2026 | Extended deadline: 31 May Late deadline: 17 July Admissions are ongoing and will close once all places are filled. | £6,700 per annum |
What the Programme Involves
- A dedicated individual studio space — yours for the full two years, 24 hours a day
- Weekly seminars led by the core tutor team
- Regular one-to-one tutorials with dedicated tutors
- Group critiques throughout the year
- A fortnightly visiting artist programme — over 20 painters across the two years
- Gallery and artist studio visits each academic year
- A graduating group exhibition at the end of the course
- Professional practice guidance: exhibiting, navigating the art world, running a studio, building visibility
Admissions
The ESOP Advanced Painting Course is selective. Admissions are based on artistic potential, commitment to practice, openness to rigorous critical dialogue, and the energy and seriousness you will bring to the programme and the cohort around you. We are not looking for a particular style, medium or level of formal education — we are looking for painters who are genuinely ready to commit to two years of intensive work.
We welcome applications from painters with and without formal art school training, and from artists at any stage of their career. If you have questions about whether this course is right for you, please contact us directly at admin@theesop.com before applying.
| How to Apply Complete the application form using the button below. You will be asked to submit an artist statement, a description of your practice, images of recent work, and the details of two referees. |
About This Course
The ESOP Advanced Painting Course is a full-time, two-year programme for practising painters who are ready to commit fully to the development of their work. It is not a course about painting. It is a course that gives you the time, the space, the critical environment and the sustained professional support to become the painter you are capable of being.
At the centre of the programme is something simple: your own dedicated studio space, available to you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the full two years. Not a shared space. Not a hot desk. One where your work lives, where your thinking happens, where you can leave a canvas unfinished on a Monday and return to it on a Saturday without compromise. This is what most painters spend years trying to secure. It is what the ESOP Advanced Painting Course provides from the first day.
Around that studio, the programme builds a rigorous, demanding and intellectually generous structure: weekly seminars, regular one-to-one tutorials, group critiques, over twenty visiting artists across the two years, gallery and artist studio visits, and a graduating exhibition. The curriculum evolves through ongoing conversation between the tutors and the painters on the programme, it is not fixed, because the work is not fixed. What the course requires of you is seriousness, commitment and the willingness to be genuinely challenged.
Two Years. Not One.
The length of this programme is not incidental. One year is enough time to begin. Two years is enough time to transform. The difference between what a painter can produce, and understand about their own practice, in twelve months versus twenty-four is not a matter of degree. It is ontological and epistemological. The painter who emerges from two years of sustained studio practice does not simply know more. They see differently, think differently, and work from a different understanding of what they are doing and why. That cannot be taught in one year. It has to be lived through two.
The first year is about establishing the conditions: finding your working rhythm in the studio, engaging with the visiting artist programme, developing a sustained critical dialogue with your tutors and peers. The second year is about what those conditions make possible; work that is more ambitious, more coherent and more fully your own than you could have produced without them.
By the end of the course, you will have spent two years making work in a dedicated studio, supported by some of the most significant painters working in Britain today. That is what you will carry forward.
Your Studio
Each student on the Advanced Painting Course is provided with their own dedicated studio space within the school’s studio complex in Wood Green, North London. The studios are individual spaces and are available to students twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, throughout both years of the programme, including the summer of 2027.
Access to a dedicated studio at this level is rare. Most painting programmes — at any fee level — offer shared studio time within a larger space. The ESOP Advanced Painting Course is structured around the understanding that a painter’s practice requires continuity: a place where work accumulates, where ideas develop across days and weeks rather than hours, and where the decision to stay until midnight or arrive at six in the morning is yours to make.
Students are responsible for providing their own art materials. A recommended materials list is issued at the start of the programme.
Liv (2024-26) Advanced Painting student in studio
The Visiting Artist Talk Programme
Every two weeks during term time, across both years of the programme, a significant contemporary painter comes to the school. Over the course of the two years, students engage with more than twenty visiting artists, each selected for the depth, quality and challenge of their practice, and for the range of approaches to painting they represent.
Each visit involves a full talk, a group Q&A, and where possible individual exchanges between the visiting artist and students on their current work. Past visitors have included Adrian Wiszniewski RSA, Vanessa Jackson RA, Sir Christopher Le Brun RA and Eileen Cooper RA. The calibre and frequency of this visiting artist strand is one of the defining features of the course, and one that is shared with the Wednesday Painting Year 2, giving students on that course a direct connection to the programme’s culture before they arrive.
The visiting artist programme is not supplementary. It is structural. The fortnightly rhythm of studio work and visiting artist encounter is one of the engines of the course.
| This course is not accredited. That is a deliberate decision. An accredited MA provides a qualification validated by an external institution. It also provides module frameworks, assessment criteria and written submission requirements that structure, and sometimes constrain, what the work can be and where it can go. The ESOP Advanced Painting Course provides none of those constraints. The curriculum evolves through ongoing conversation between the tutors and the painters on the programme. There are no modules to satisfy. No written assessments to file. No institutional framework standing between you and the work. If you want a qualification, an MA from a university is the right choice. If you want two years in a studio painting, being challenged, developing a practice that is genuinely yours, this is the right course. |
The Core Tutor Team
The programme is delivered by a core team of painters, each with a significant professional practice and extensive teaching experience at the highest level. Throughout the course, advice and mentorship covers every aspect of painting practice: technical, conceptual, professional and strategic.
Alison Harper
Alison is ESOP’s Artistic Director and a core tutor on the Advanced Painting Course. A practising painter with a long-standing professional practice, she plays a central role in shaping the intellectual and artistic culture of the programme.
Dan Coombs
Dan is a graduate of Ruskin School of Art, the RCA and Scholar at the British School in Rome. He has exhibited widely throughout his career. He also teaches Wednesday Painting Year 2, creating a direct connection between that course and the Advanced Course.
Katherine Jones RA
Katherine is a Royal Academician whose practice works at the intersection of painting and printmaking, combining drawing, watercolour and multi-layered print techniques to build richly nuanced surfaces. Her work is held in major public collections and she has exhibited widely
Kathryn Maple
Kathryn Maple is a painter with a substantial exhibition record across the UK and internationally. Her practice brings to the programme a rigorous engagement with the possibilities of contemporary painting.
Dale Lewis
Dale’s figurative works are influenced by the artist’s personal encounters with an acute awareness and sensitivity to the environments that he finds himself in or frequents; his interpretation of the everyday lives of his subjects are filtered through the his satirical and poignant sense of humour.
Neal Tait
Neil is a contemporary British artist known for his surreal, dreamlike paintings that navigate the space between figuration and abstraction. His work often explores psychological depths through a muted palette and “eclectic sampling” of found imagery.
Read more about Neil →
Course Dates 2026–2028
| Year | Term | Dates |
| Year One | Orientation Week | 28 Sept – 2 Oct 2026 |
| Autumn Term | 28 Sept – 11 Dec 2026 | Half term: week of 26 October | |
| Spring Term | 11 January – 25 March 2027 | Half term: week of 15 February | |
| Summer Term | 19 April – 2 July 2027 | Half term: week of 31 May | |
| Year Two | Orientation Week | 27 September – 1 October 2027 |
| Autumn Term | 27 Sept – 10 Dec 2027 | Half term: week of 25 October | |
| Spring Term | 10 January – 24 March 2028 | Half term: week of 14 February | |
| Summer Term | 24 April – 7 July 2028 | Half term: week of 29 May | |
| End of Course Exhibition | Date TBC |
Studios are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week throughout both years of the programme.
Professional Practice and Life Beyond the Course
The Advanced Painting Course prepares students not just to make better work but to sustain a professional practice in the world. Throughout the two years, the programme provides specific guidance on: strategies for gaining visibility and recognition; how to approach galleries and institutions; the pragmatics of running a studio; pricing, exhibiting and building patronage; and how to communicate your work to audiences beyond the art world.
Graduates of the ESOP Advanced Painting Course have gone on to exhibit in significant venues in the UK and internationally and to establish sustainable careers as professional painters. The course does not guarantee outcomes — no course does — but it provides the skills, the contacts, the critical vocabulary and the body of work that make those outcomes possible.
Gallery visits – students and tutors
Images copyright of the ESOP and the artist. All rights reserved.
Appointments and studio visits
Whether you are considering a course and want to speak with a tutor, or would like to visit the school before making a decision, we are glad to arrange it.
