Wednesdays | 7 October 2026 – 30 June 2027
Artist-Tutors: Melissa Kime and Dan Coombs
Day and Time: Wednesdays, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Location: In Studio — Essential School of Painting, Wood Green, London N22 6TZ
Fee: £795 per term | Annual fee £2,175
Please note: course fees will increase with effect from 5 July 2026.
| Every two weeks, a significant contemporary painter visits the school. Fifteen times across the year, a painter whose work matters sits in front of the group and talks about their practice; how they work, why they make the decisions they make, what they have learned and what they are still working out. Then they look at your work and tell you what they see.This is what the Wednesday course offers that no other part-time painting course in London does at this frequency. It is not a supplement to the studio programme. It is part of the rhythm of the year. |
Wednesday fortnightly Artist’s talk
About This Course
The Painting Year II on Wednesdays is a full-year, studio-based programme for painters with existing experience who want to develop a serious personal practice. Its foundations are the same as the Tuesday course: full studio days, two experienced artist-tutors, sustained individual project development, rigorous group critique, a gallery visit, a professional practice session and an end-of-year exhibition.
What Wednesday adds is a different quality of year. Every two weeks, the studio day gives way to something else: a painter you may have followed for years, or discovered only recently, standing in front of you and speaking without a script about the work that preoccupies them. The talks are not lectures. The Q&As are not polite. The individual exchanges — in dedicated sessions in the spring and summer terms — are direct and specific to what you are making.
Over the course of a year, the effect of fifteen such encounters is cumulative and significant. Students consistently describe it as one of the most formative aspects of their practice — not because it tells them what to do, but because it fundamentally expands their sense of what is possible.
Who This Course Is For
The Painting Year II on Wednesdays is for painters who:
- Have completed The Painting Year I or The Painting Year II on Tuesdays at ESOP, or bring equivalent prior experience
- Want to develop a personal practice with genuine depth — and want that development accelerated by regular, direct contact with significant contemporary painters
- Are drawn to the Tuesday course but want more: more visiting artists, more external voices, a more intensive rhythm of challenge and response
- Are curious about what painters they admire actually think, how they actually work, and what they would say about your work specifically
- Find that hearing other serious painters talk about their practice is one of the most useful things that can happen in a studio year
Many students return to this course year after year. The visiting artist programme is entirely renewed each year — different artists, different perspectives, different provocations. The studio practice develops; the conversation around it never repeats. If you are unsure whether this course is right for you, please use the contact form at the bottom of this page.
What the Year Involves
- Three terms of ten weeks — full studio days, 10am to 5pm, every Wednesday
- Individual tutor input and group critique woven into every session
- A visiting artist every two weeks. 5 per term, 15 across the year each a significant contemporary painter
- Individual exchanges (1-2-1s) with the course tutors
- A group gallery visit to a major London exhibition in the Spring Term
- A professional practice session in the Summer Term
- An end-of-year group exhibition, your work seen publicly
The Visiting Artist Programme
Fifteen visiting artists across the year. Every two weeks, without exception, the Wednesday group meets a painter of significant professional standing — selected for the breadth, quality and challenge of their practice. The programme spans the full range of contemporary painting: figurative and abstract, material and conceptual, intimate in scale and monumental, rooted in tradition and radically departing from it.
Each visit follows a consistent structure: a full talk, a group Q&A, and — in dedicated sessions during the Spring and Summer Terms — individual twenty-minute exchanges in which each student brings their current work and receives direct, unhurried attention from that painter. These individual exchanges are among the most valued hours of the year for students who experience them.
Students keep a Visiting Artist Journal throughout the year. Not a record of what was said, but a personal working document: what this visit provoked, what question it raised, what you want to try in the studio before the next session. The journal is reviewed with tutors at the end of each term and becomes, over the year, a map of how the practice has moved.
The rhythm this creates — studio one week, visiting artist the next — is not incidental. It means that the work you make is always in dialogue with something beyond the room. You spend a week painting. Then you spend a day hearing how someone who has spent thirty years painting thinks about it. Then you go back to the studio. That alternating pulse is the Wednesday experience.
In-studio group crit
Gallery Visit and Independent Research
A structured group gallery visit is built into the Spring Term, timed and chosen by the tutors to speak directly to the work the group is making at that point in the year — and often in dialogue with the visiting artists who have come in that term. Students attend with a sketchbook, make drawn and written responses on site, and bring those responses back to the studio in the following session.
Independent gallery visiting is actively encouraged throughout the year. Tutors provide curated lists of recommended exhibitions and readings at the start of each term. The school’s close relationship with the wider London art world means these recommendations are always current and specific. What students see between sessions — and what it does to their work — is a regular and genuinely valued part of the studio conversation.
Art Materials
All art materials are provided as part of the course fee, with the exception of canvases, which can be purchased directly from the school studio.
Over the course of the year, students are also encouraged to begin building their own studio palette. We provide a recommended list of paints, mediums and brushes to source and acquire — a practical guide to assembling and stocking a working studio that serves you well beyond the course itself.
Painting materials provided in studio
Academic Year Dates at a Glance
| Term | Start Date | Half Term | End Date | Wks |
| Autumn Term 2026 | Wed 7 October 2026 | 28 October | Wed 16 December | 10 |
| Spring Term 2027 | Wed 13 January 2027 | 17 February | Wed 24 March | 10 |
| Summer Term 2027 | Wed 21 April 2027 | 2 June | Wed 30 June | 10 |
| End-of-Year Exhibition | Private View: evening TBC | |||
Total teaching Wednesdays: 30 including 15 Visiting Artist sessions and Exhibition Wednesday 30 June 2027
About the Artist-Tutors
Melissa Kime
Melissa Kime
Melissa holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2015) and a postgraduate diploma from the Royal Drawing School. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, and won the Arts Club Award at the Royal Academy Summer Show 2019. She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the ICA London.
Dan Coombs
Dan Coombs
Dan Coombs is a graduate of the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford and the Royal College of Art, and a former Rome Scholar in Painting at the British School in Rome. He has exhibited nationally and internationally throughout his career. He is also the lead tutor on ESOP’s Advanced Painting Course.
The ESOP Pathway
The Painting Year II on Wednesdays sits at the heart of ESOP’s teaching programme — substantial and complete in its own right, year after year. The visiting artist programme is shared with ESOP’s Advanced Painting Course. Some students find that proximity reason enough to choose Wednesday. Others simply come for the fifteen artists.
Students who complete the year and wish to apply to the Advanced Painting Course are encouraged to do so. Information on Open Days and the application process is available on the ESOP website.
