Spanning all cultures and an ever-expanding range of art styles, painting is now a vibrant part of contemporary fine art practice, which has experienced a renewed interest in recent years. Based around the development of your individual practice, the core ethos of this master’s is to enable you to harness your personal development and creative ambitions. We want to help you discover what kind of artist you want to be, so that you can flourish within the scope of contemporary painting and the broader cultural realm. Students will experience a range of assessment methods in line with the ways in which they might be expected to work. One method, the design critique, common in art and design education, provides an opportunity for formative assessment of student work individually or in groups. Assessment employs a range of methods including: verbal or written presentations, portfolio, written reports, log books and artefacts. On completion, you should be able to: describe, interpret and evaluate artworks from a range of critical perspectives, taking account of the context of their production and critical evaluation; evaluate and apply the processes involved in professional practice and practice-led research; apply analytical skills in relation to painting practice to artwork and context; and identify, master and exploit specialist painting processes within the broader contemporary discourse of fine art.