Painting

Painting is one of the oldest and most continuously evolving art forms, ranging across traditions that span thousands of years and encompassing an extraordinary range of materials, methods, and intentions. To study painting at degree level is not simply to learn technical craft, though craft matters deeply, but to engage with the history of a medium, to develop a personal visual language, and to place your own practice in dialogue with the ideas and images that have come before and that surround you in the contemporary world. It is a discipline of looking, making, and thinking in which close material attention and conceptual ambition go hand in hand.

The Open University offers this programme in part-time distance learning mode, making it accessible to students who cannot attend a campus in person and who need to fit their studies around work, family, or other commitments. Distance learning with The Open University is a well-established and supported mode of study, and the flexibility it offers can be a genuine advantage for those who need to sustain a studio practice alongside other responsibilities. You will study the theory and history of painting alongside your practical work, engaging with critical and historical frameworks that deepen your understanding of what painting has been, is, and might become.

You will develop your observational, compositional, and technical skills across media and approaches, building a coherent body of work over the course of your studies.

Graduates of painting programmes pursue careers as practising artists, often combining studio work with teaching, residencies, and public commissions. Others move into arts education, gallery and museum work, arts administration, illustration, and the broader visual arts sector. The reflective and analytical habits the discipline develops also transfer into design, publishing, and cultural heritage roles.

Further study options include postgraduate fine art degrees, curatorial programmes, and art education qualifications.