THE ESSENTIAL SCHOOL OF PAINTING
A school of painters, for painters
The Essential School of Painting is an independent school in London devoted, without dilution, to a single art. We were founded in 2004 on a conviction that has only deepened since: that painting is a living discipline, mastered through sustained practice and the company of serious artists, and that it deserves a school built wholly around it.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
Painting is a practice before it is a theory.
We cannot let the art of drawing and painting disappear into theory; it is a practice, a practice one dedicates oneself to.
alison harper, co-founder and artistic director ESOP
A painter is formed the way painters have always been formed: in a studio, over time, in the company of practising artists who have made the journey themselves. It is, in short, a place where painters teach painters.
And we hold to two things at once that lesser schools keep apart: the discipline of the hand and the seriousness of the idea. Technique without thought is decoration; thought without technique is talk. The painters we admire, and the painters we set out to form, command both.
A place where
painters teach
painters.
A painter is formed the way painters have always been formed: in a studio, over time, in the company of practising artists who have made the journey themselves. It is, in short, a place where painters teach painters.
And we hold to two things at once that lesser schools keep apart: the discipline of the hand and the seriousness of the idea. Technique without thought is decoration; thought without technique is talk. The painters we admire, and the painters we set out to form, command both.
HOW WE WORK
A conservatoire of painting.
At the summit of the School is our two-year Advanced Painting Course, a Master’s-level, studio-based programme in which every painter has their own dedicated studio. But a painter may enter ESOP at any stage of their development and rise through it. The School is a pathway: from first steps and short courses, through year-long courses in painting, narrative, figuration and abstraction, to the Advanced Painting Course itself: a conservatoire that carries a painter from first study to mastery.
Whatever the stage, the method is the same. Classes are small by design, as a master’s studio is small by design, so that each painter is known and taught as an individual. One-to-one tutorials, seminars, and a fortnightly programme of visiting artists set a rhythm of making and rigorous conversation in which work is tested, challenged and refined. We do not have a house style. The work of the School is to help each painter find, and command, their own.
THE COMPANY WE KEEP
Built around one painter’s art, and enriched by many.
The Essential School of Painting was built by its co-founders, Alison Harper and Andrew Wamae: Alison a painter formed at the Glasgow School of Art, whose art and whose convictions about painting are the heart of the School, and Andrew, the strategist who built the institution around them.
From the first, the School has drawn on two of the deepest traditions in British painting. From Glasgow comes a rigour and a lineage: our Honorary President is Alexander (Sandy) Moffat OBE RSA, for twenty-five years Head of Painting there, and we take counsel from Sam Ainsley RSA, who founded its Master of Fine Art. From the Royal Academy comes a further, equal inheritance, in the Academicians who have taught here and shaped our painters across two decades. And beyond both, our studios have been enriched by an eclectic company of serious, experienced artists from Britain and abroad, whose generosity is woven through the School; some have crossed borders, year after year, to teach with us.
For twenty years, painters of the very first rank, Academicians and artists of international standing, have taught, exhibited, spoken and launched their books in our studios. We do not list their names here. We show them, at work and in conversation within the School; a painter, looking, will recognise the company they would be keeping.
Sandy Moffat OBE RSA 
Sean Scully Artist Lecture 
Jock McFadyen RA Studio visit 
David Mach RA and ESOP Scholar Franke in the Bigger Picture Course 2019-20 
Artists Bob and Roberta Smith And Alison Harper 
(Late) Dr Leonard McComb RA Artist Workshop 
Grayson Perry ‘Why I Am Not A Painter’ ESOP Lecture RSA House 
Hughie O’Donaghue RA 
Adrian Wiszniewski RSA 
Ken Currie 
Rosemary Beaton 
Eileen Cooper OBE RA and Andrew Wamae 
The late John Myers teaching en plein air 
Lesley Burr outdoor tutoring an landscape class – The ESOP in Victoria Park London 
Doug Safranek – Egg Tempera workshop
WHAT WE ARE FOR
We do not measure ourselves by the certificate.
We are not in the business of producing competent students. We set out to form painters of consequence: artists with a body of work of their own, the technical command to realise it, and the intellectual seriousness to sustain it across a life. Our measure is not the certificate but the career.
SMALL CLASSES, GROWING GRAVITY
We measure ourselves by gravity, not size.
What is small at ESOP is the class, deliberately and permanently so, because the quality of attention a painter receives is the whole of what we offer, and it cannot be scaled without being diminished. The School itself is another matter. We are growing, and mean to; but we measure ourselves by gravity, not size: the pull a serious institution exerts on the art around it. Our ambition is to become a centre of gravity in the painting of our time: a place the art world turns toward, and turns around. That gravity is built slowly, work by work and painter by painter, and we are in no hurry to build it any other way.
Gravity of this kind is not announced; it accrues: in the artists who come to teach and to speak, in the painters who want to be here, in the standing the School quietly gathers. We build it in the only way it can honestly be built: slowly, and by the quality of the work.
What we offer, at every level, is the oldest and best model of art education (the studio, the practising master, the dedicated painter), held to a contemporary standard and open to anyone with the seriousness to meet it. Excellence, here, is a matter of dedication, not of credential.
Animus ad Creandum — the courage to create.
It is our motto because it is our demand: of ourselves, of our tutors, and of every painter who joins us.