First Entrance: Painting

Studio brief

This studio is aimed at art students wishing to pursue a single or hybrid form of painting as a base to explore the image, using any source or material.

Looking at the eclectic mix of painting styles in galleries around the world now, no single technique or theory dominates painting discourse. That wasn’t the case once, when medium-specific modernists pitched up against postmodernists who thought painting was dead and others who thought painting would take new directions. Since then, painting has evolved disparately, less concerned with junking modernism and more with a re-evaluation of painting’s agency in the wider world. Painting now draws inspiration from whatever sources artists like - the internet, virtual space and photography, for example. Artists choose to paint in any style, on any surface, about anything they deem appropriate. It’s an expanded field.

This studio is aimed at art students wishing to pursue a single or hybrid form of painting as a base to explore the image. Art students develop their own project proposals and decide to choose a working method by studying professional practitioners. Art students select whatever materials they think relevant - paints, pencils and chalk or photography, film, digital imagery and performance. The emphasis is on the relationship between the individual’s concerns and a framework that references painting - its theories and histories. That is painting in the expanded field.