Allan Storer Oil Painting Classes

I have just read about Ryan Gander the Coordinator of this years RA Summer Show 2026 in my RA. magazine and am thinking many visitors may well feel a bit uneasy or a whopping bit uneasy re. its direction and may ask is Ryan Gander the right person to coordinate the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition?

Ryan Gander is a successful conceptual artist who states that important art is “cognitive first and retinal second”. This assumption is the heart of the problem I feel.

In other words, ideas are more significant than visual experience and in some ways thinking of Picasso’s maxim “ art is more than a pretty picture” I agree.

But great painting and sculpture do not always need to be worked out like a puzzle before they can move us.
Let us not forget colour, surface, atmosphere, scale and the physical handling of paint too.

Sculpture can have a presence that we feel before we begin to explain it. That first response is not shallow or less serious. It is often where the real power of art begins.

Gander’s interest in ideas, connections and chance outcomes, I like from a surrealist perspective and no doubt they will produce an interesting exhibition.
Mixing different types of work together could also bring some energy to the show.

But is there not a risk that the Summer Exhibition becomes too driven by curatorial theory, with paintings treated as parts of an intellectual argument rather than given room to breathe?

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has traditionally represented a broad, generous and visually alive works of art including the skill, judgement, imagination and the physical act of making art.

Conceptual art certainly has its place and the Summer Exhibition inviting participants of all persuasions and walks of life should not confuse cleverness with depth, or explanation with artistic value.

Allan Storer.

Artist Leonora Carrington played a central role in my own research into Surrealism and psychodynamic theory. What interested me most was not simply her imagery, but the psychological and mythic structures running beneath the work itself.

Her relationship with her wealthy industrialist father , whom she partly blamed for the loss of childhood freedom through his insistence on “proper” behaviour and social conformity became fundamental to her artistic identity.

Carrington resisted the expectations imposed upon her as a young woman within upper-class society, and much of her work can be understood as a rebellion against those structures.

Today, contemporary society might too easily attempt to categorise someone like Carrington through the language of dysfunction, diagnosis or institutional management. Yet this tension, her refusal to conform, her intensity, imagination and symbolic inner life formed the very core of her creative power.

Her journey was not about becoming socially acceptable, but about coming to terms with and ultimately accepting the deepest parts of herself.

The role of artist Max Ernst in her life was also profoundly important and something I explored closely during my studies. Ernst appears almost as a mythic “knight in shining armour” figure, the liberator and initiator into another imaginative world. Yet, as in many myths, the hero cannot remain. The masculine guide disappears, and the female must ultimately save herself.

This psychological structure feels deeply Jungian rather than Freudian: the anima and animus, myth, transformation and individuation. Carrington’s later work moves far beyond Surrealist muse imagery into something far more powerful, a symbolic world rooted in feminist mythology, mysticism and self-realisation.

Her paintings do not simply illustrate fantasy; they construct an entire inner cosmology in which the feminine becomes intellectually, spiritually and psychologically sovereign.

Allan Storer

Leonora Carrington work painted during psychiatric confinement to go on show for first time Exclusive: Villa Pilar, painted in 1940 during the surrealist artist’s stay in a Spanish sanatorium, will be displayed at London’s Freud museum

This is for those of you in different parts of the world who will have missed my Dads interview on the BBC News. Apologies for the clonky filming, but I can’t figure out how else to show the whole news bulletin😬🤷🏻‍♀️ #anthonyeyton #artist #bbc #television #103

Sunday Oil Painting Class — June 7 at Cass Art Kingston
Sunday, June 7, I’ll be running a small-group oil painting class at Cass Art Kingston for beginners, returning painters and those wanting a more structured understanding of painting with oils.
The class focuses on observation, colour, composition and the physical handling of paint through a clear and practical approach. Rather than producing identical paintings, the sessions are designed to help each person develop confidence and a stronger understanding of how painting actually works.
We will explore:
• Colour mixing and tonal control
• Brush and palette knife techniques
• Surface, texture and impasto
• Composition and structure
• Developing confidence through practice and observation
The atmosphere is calm, focused and welcoming, with plenty of individual guidance throughout the session.
My own painting practice is rooted in contemporary abstract oil painting and years of teaching across fine art, observation and creative development. The emphasis of the class is not simply on technique alone, but on learning how to look, respond and build a painting with greater clarity and confidence.
Whether you are completely new to oils or returning to painting after time away, the sessions are intended to provide a supportive and thoughtful environment in which to develop.
📍 Cass Art Kingston
📅 Sunday June 7
🎨 Beginners & Refreshers Welcome

I took advantage of this lovely backdrop when delivering my abstract painting in Richmond last week. 😊 .