THE ESSENTIAL SCHOOL OF PAINTING
An Art-school of painters, for painters
The Essential School of Painting is an independent school in London devoted to painting. We were founded in 2004 on the belief that painting is a living discipline, progressing through sustained practice and the company of dedicated artists, and that it deserves a school built wholly around it.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
We cannot let the art of drawing and painting disappear into theory; it is a practice, a practice one dedicates oneself to.
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.
HOW WE WORK
A place where painters teach painters
At the heart of the School is our two-year Advanced Painting Course, a post-grad 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 school that carries a painter from first study to running their own professional studio.
Whatever the stage, the method is the same. Our class sizes are 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
An Art school
The Essential School of Painting was built by its co-founders, Alison Harper and Andrew Wamae: Alison, a Glasgow School of Art alumna who also taught there, whose art and convictions about painting and its teaching are at the heart of the School; and Andrew, the strategist, who believes in the power of art to change lives, communities and culture. Together they built the institution around her art and those convictions.
From the first, the School has drawn on two of the deepest lineages in British art education. From Glasgow comes a rigour and heritage: 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 RA 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 RA 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 
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 
Anne Desmet RA 
Moyna Flannigan 
WHAT WE ARE FOR
We do not measure ourselves by the certificate.
We set out to form artists who develop a body of work of their own, have the technical skill to realise it, and the intellectual seriousness and curiosity 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 size, that’s deliberate, so that the quality of attention a painter receives is of the highest standard. The School itself is another matter. We are growing, and mean to; but we measure ourselves by gravity, not size: the pull a serious art institution exerts on the art world around it. Our ambition is to become a centre of gravity: a place the art world turns toward, and turns around. That ‘gravity’ is built slowly, work by work, painter by painter, and it’s organic; we are in no hurry to build it any other way.
What we offer, at every level, is the oldest and best model of art education (the studio, the practising masters, the dedicated painters), 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.