Why Original Painters Need Structured Learning
- Martin Kinnear Studio
- Aug 11
- 7 min read
How Would Our Diploma in Oil Painting Work For You ?
In the art world today, the idea of originality is often seen as being at odds with tradition. But in truth, every major innovation in painting — from Impressionism to the New Leipzig School — has grown from deep engagement with materials, methods, and the legacy of the past. If you're serious about becoming an original painter, then you need more than a style — you need a structure. And that’s exactly what the Martin Kinnear Studio Diploma in Oil Painting provides.
Painting Is Complex — So Is Learning It
We begin your tuition by helping you understand how the program is structured, and why. Painting is a uniquely demanding discipline: it combines high-level technical craft with deep personal creativity. This course is designed to support both dimensions.
The guiding principle? Broad, not narrow. We’ve created a curriculum that gives you space to explore painting in all its forms — from historical technique to contemporary figuration and abstraction — before encouraging you to make selective, informed choices about how you want to paint.
This structure is intentional. Rather than teaching a single ‘house style’ or pushing students down a narrow aesthetic path, our Diploma allows you to explore the widest possible field. From this range, you’ll draw out the ideas, approaches and methods that resonate most with your own vision.
A Balanced Alternative to Atelier and Art School
Most aspiring painters today face a frustrating paradox. On one hand, classical Ateliers offer thorough skills training but often strip away creative freedom in favour of rigid methods. On the other, many contemporary art schools favour concept over craft, leaving students under-equipped to execute their ideas.
Our Diploma bridges this gap. We teach both the art and craft of painting — not in opposition, but in combination. That means:
Deep, practical engagement with materials and methods
Structured development of technical skills
A broad, critical understanding of art history and visual culture
And a clear pathway to developing a personal, original style
The Structure: Breadth First, Depth Later
The course is structured into three trimesters, each with a clear role:
Trimesters 1 and 2 expose you to a wide range of techniques, genres, materials and approaches. From academic figuration to tonal landscape and painterly abstraction, you'll experience painting in its full diversity.
Trimester 3 is your opportunity to begin making reductive, strategic choices. Here, you’ll begin defining your own direction based on what you've learned.
This phased approach allows you to explore before committing. We don’t just want you to paint — we want you to paint with insight and intent.
Why Materials and Skill Always Matter
One of the most persistent myths in contemporary painting is that materials and technique are somehow less important than concept. In truth, technique empowers creativity. You can't make great work until you can make your materials do what you want them to do.
That’s why the Diploma teaches painting as a conversation between concept and material. You'll learn:
How to build a reliable painting ground
The practical difference between long and short oil mediums
The impact of pigment choice, palette structure, and brush handling
When and how to use glazing, impasto, alla prima, and more
This is the kind of critical, foundational knowledge that makes your work more powerful — not less personal.
Original Work Begins with Studied Work
We don’t expect — or want — you to simply copy. But we do ask you to learn through Active Study: painting after key works in order to understand and internalise their principles. That might include studying colour modulation in a Degas, or tonal control in a Lowry. The point isn’t to imitate — it’s to identify transferrable lessons that can feed your own development.
Copying without insight makes you a technician. Studying with intention makes you a painter.
Painting as Practice, Not Performance
Progress doesn’t come overnight. But it does come. While mastery might take years, research shows that most people can activate a new skill with just 20 hours of focused effort. Each workshop in our Diploma is designed to give you exactly that: a clearly defined set of goals and the resources to reach them through structured independent study.
This is painting as practice, not performance. Your personal progress matters more than producing “finished” pieces. Our goal is to develop habits, strategies, and critical thinking that will serve you for the rest of your career.
Beyond Technique: How Materials Connect You to Art History — and Empower Originality
At the Martin Kinnear Studio, we don’t view materials as a box of tricks or a dry checklist. We teach them as part of a living language — one that connects the innovations of Turner, Courbet, and Bacon to what you’re doing on your palette today.
Understanding materials is what allows you to locate your work within the continuum of painting history, and ultimately differentiate yourself from it.
Let’s look at some key technical areas we teach, and how they tie into seismic shifts in painting history:
1. How to Build a Reliable Painting Ground
Far from being just a practical matter, the choice of ground — your painting surface — has had enormous historical impact.
The Renaissance saw the rise of smooth gesso panels, allowing for meticulous detail and sfumato effects in tempera and oil — think Leonardo and Van Eyck.
Baroque painters like Rubens and Rembrandt shifted to coloured grounds on canvas, encouraging fluid brushwork and tonal drama.
In the Modern era, Monet’s use of bright white, highly absorbent grounds was key to the luminosity of Impressionism.
Fast-forward to 20th-century modernism, and artists like Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff deliberately painted over textured or irregular grounds to amplify the physicality of the medium.
In our Diploma, you'll learn not only how to prepare a reliable ground, but how that choice impacts colour behaviour, drying time, materiality, and the overall aesthetic of your work. From traditional oil gesso to modern acrylic priming, you’ll gain the technical and conceptual tools to choose your ground with intent.
2. Long vs. Short Mediums: Why It Matters More Than You Think
Oil paint isn’t just colour — it’s a complex physical substance. How that substance behaves depends on the length of your paint, ground, and medium.
A “long” medium (more oily or fluid) allows for blending, optical transitions, and extended open time. This was central to the flowing surfaces of artists like Titian, Ingres, and Sargent.
A “short” medium (more lean or tacky) dries quickly and holds marks with crisp definition. It underpinned the decisive facture of artists like Courbet, Lucian Freud, and Jenny Saville.
Learning to adjust medium length lets you command surface qualities: transparency, opacity, drag, and sheen. It also helps you solve problems: muddy blending, poor adhesion, lifting, and drying defects.
Most importantly, it lets you match form to content — choosing whether to speak in whispers or shout through the paint.
3. Pigment Choice, Palette Structure & Brush Handling
These aren’t preferences — they’re strategic tools that artists have used for centuries to make radical, defining shifts in painting.
The Impressionists broke with academic tradition not just through subject matter but through a radically different palette structure: fewer earth tones, more synthetic pigments, and an open, unmodulated application of colour.
The Post-Impressionists — Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh — each adapted palette structure and mark-making to support their visual ideologies.
In the 20th century, painters from Rothko to Richter built entire aesthetics around colour interaction, pigment opacity, and brushwork — often using custom-made or industrial materials to disrupt traditional processes.
In the Diploma, you’ll learn how to build a rational, selective palette suited to your goals. We’ll explore the psychological and optical properties of pigments, how to use primary and secondary colour systems, and why brush handling is about more than control — it’s a key part of your expressive language.
We’ll also explain why common online palettes like Zorn or full pre-mixed setups can be either limiting or counterproductive, especially for developing painters. Instead of copying someone else’s palette, we teach you how to build your own — strategically, economically, and with clarity of purpose.
4. When and How to Use Glazing, Impasto, Alla Prima and More
These are more than techniques — they are historical modes of painting, each associated with transformative shifts in how artists approached the canvas.
Glazing: Used to stunning effect in the Northern Renaissance, glazing techniques allow light to travel through multiple translucent layers, giving the illusion of depth and inner luminosity. Turner and Friedrich adapted glazing to Romantic ends, and Gerhard Richter retooled it for modern abstraction.
Impasto: Originally a byproduct of speed in Baroque painting, impasto became a hallmark of emotional immediacy in Van Gogh, then visceral materiality in the hands of Auerbach, Kossoff, and Saville.
Alla Prima: This direct “wet-in-wet” technique gained traction in the 19th century with Manet and Sorolla. It allows for fast, expressive execution and is often misrepresented as a style when it’s really a process — one that requires mastery of timing, tone, and consistency.
Each of these methods carries with it a set of assumptions about time, intention, and material interaction. In the Diploma, we don’t just teach you when to use them — we teach you why you’d choose one over the other, and how they relate to the visual and emotional impact of your painting.
Contemporary Figuration, Landscape and the Weight of the Past
If your aim is to create meaningful work in figuration or landscape today, you must reckon with the traditions that shaped them. Not to be held back by the past — but to use it as a scaffold.
Contemporary painters like Peter Doig, Jenny Saville, and Hurvin Anderson aren’t "modern" because they reject tradition — but because they reframe it.
Their originality comes from knowing the languages of academic drawing, painterly realism, or colour field abstraction — and speaking them with intent, not imitation.
That’s why our Diploma doesn’t push you toward trend or tradition — but equips you with the literacy to locate your work in contrast to the past. If you want to make something new, you first need to know what’s already been said.
Principles Over Instances: What Really Matters
Throughout the course, we focus on teaching principles — not just techniques or tricks. Knowing how to apply a principle (such as optical modulation or grisaille underpainting) allows you to adapt it to any style or subject. Learning a one-off trick or colour mix doesn’t.
This is the core philosophy of our Diploma: don’t just learn how to paint something — learn how painting works.
Final Word: This Is How You Build a Painting Life
At the Martin Kinnear Studio, we don’t teach art as performance. We teach it as practice — grounded in skill, knowledge, and the pursuit of visual language.
If you want to develop great habits,
If you want to build a sustainable studio practice,
And if you want your originality to be rooted in mastery, not guesswork —
Then this is the place to start.
Register Interest to apply for the Diploma, plus subscibe to news and get access to our Subscribers’ Welcome Page, for extra resources.
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