When skills alone aren’t enough

This isn’t a casual course. It’s selective, intensive, and designed for painters who are serious about their work.

Why the Contemporary Painting Programme Might Be the Year Your Work Has Been Waiting For

Every painter reaches a point where skills alone aren’t enough, and theory alone feels too thin. You’ve built up the brush mileage, you’ve read the books, but what you really need is someone to help you stitch the two together. That, in a nutshell, is why we created the Contemporary Painting Programme.

This isn’t a course you stumble into on a spare Sunday afternoon. It’s a year of serious, tailored mentoring for just eight painters who want to transform how they think, how they paint, and how they position their work in today’s art world.

What Makes It Different?

Plenty of courses will teach you a technique. Plenty more will hand you a bundle of theory. What’s rare is a programme that insists on both — and then works with you to weave them back into your practice.

One-to-one mentoring keeps the focus on your goals, your questions, and the sticking points you want to overcome.

Lectures and critiques provide the bigger frameworks, technical and conceptual, that help you see your work afresh.

Field trips ground it all in real-world contexts: galleries, collections, and commercial spaces where the art world actually happens.

And because the group is deliberately small, you won’t get lost in the shuffle.

Why Now?

Painting deserves more than compromises. Too often you get the rigour of an MA without the technical grounding, or the focus of an atelier without any connection to contemporary practice. Here, you get both.

The programme is led by Martin Kinnear — painter, mentor, and someone who works between technical skill and contemporary discourse every day. With exhibitions in major museums, regular teaching at the Royal College of Art, and two decades of mentoring behind him, he brings together clarity, experience, and practice in a way that’s rare to find.

The Rhythm of the Year

The programme runs over three terms:

Foundations of Practice — shifting from what you paint to how you use paint, so you can move your work in any direction.

Developing Style — shaping a personal language by orchestrating colour, composition, and form in ways that are distinctly yours.

Professional Practice — locating your work within contemporary dialogues and learning how to articulate it as clearly as you create it.

By the end of the year, you’ll have more than new skills. You’ll have a re-shaped practice, a clearer voice, and the confidence to position your work in dialogue with the wider art world.

Who It’s For

• Mid-career painters looking for structure and context.

• Emerging artists seeking postgraduate-level support without the full MA price tag.

• Practitioners who already sustain a regular practice and want it to grow.

If you’re already painting regularly and sense there’s more in you than the canvas currently shows, this programme is for you.

A Thoughtful Step

This isn’t a casual course. It’s selective, intensive, and designed for painters who are serious about their work. The act of applying is itself part of the process: it asks you to reflect, to articulate your direction, and to commit to the year ahead.

But that’s what makes it powerful. A year in which you’re not just learning — you’re becoming.

👉 Applications are now open for the 2026 cohort. Places are limited to eight. If you think this might be your year, you can request the full prospectus or begin your application by visiting : www.martinkinnearstudio.com/contemporarypaintingprogram

Request Prospectus