Our Tutors

Brigid Collins is an artist and educator who is deeply committed to drawing and particularly engaged in working outdoors, 'en plein air'. She works by becoming intimately attuned to her subject by spending time closely observing with all of her senses, investigating the materiality of the natural world through the seasons by means of forging a deep connection with the possibilities offered by engaging with drawing materials. Brigid teaches regularly at Edinburgh College of Art, Leith School of Art and Paintbox Art School. (photo credit Photo: David Moss/ davidmossphoto.com)

With a particular focus on the East Coast, Evie Rose Thornton's paintings are an attempt to capture Scotland's achingly beautiful landscapes. They begin life as sketches and preparatory paintings made while out in the landscape, sitting on the beach or up on a hill, absorbing as much visual information as possible.

These are then taken back to the studio and developed into larger works, often using small elements of one sketch mixed with another, and relying heavily on memories of the day and her emotional response to that moment in time. These paintings showcase her appreciation for Scotland's big skies, specifically the bursts of light that streak through the sky after a storm, and portray her love for the environment she is surrounded by.

Jill M Boualaxai is a multi-media artist based at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop in Edinburgh. Her work revolves around the archaeological imaginary and is deeply rooted in a process-led practice. Jill is one of the founding members of the Hidden Door Festival and has been actively involved since its inception in 2010, currently serving as the Creative Lead and Visual Art Curator for the festival. In addition to her art practice, Jill has extensive experience as an educator. Following a two-year residency with George Watson's College in 2012, she established Look and Draw Workshops, a small art school that offers a year-round program of events and is based in The Heart of Newhaven Community. Jill has also led workshops at various institutions, including the Leith School of Art, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the Dovecot Studios. Recently, she completed her MA in Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College of Art in August 2022.

Matthew Storstein is a professional artist living and working in Aberfeldy, Scotland. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1992 to 1996 and is a professional member of Visual Arts Scotland (VAS). With over 20 years of teaching experience, Matthew has been an integral part of the Leith School of Art in Edinburgh, where he has taught painting, foundation courses, and led the drawing course. Additionally, he has been instrumental in establishing studio practice through his work with Look and Draw for the past 10 years.

In Aberfeldy, Matthew set up The Yellow House, an art class designed to provide challenging yet enjoyable art classes. The Yellow House encourages students to push their work further, acquire new skills, and explore fresh ways of working. The classes are built on the philosophy that taking your work seriously and enjoying yourself are not mutually exclusive; they thrive in an informal, supportive environment.

As an artist, Matthew approaches painting as a journey of discovery, rather than starting with a preconceived idea. His creative process unfolds as he works, with the paintings themselves becoming a record of their making. The language of paint, abstract forms, and the transformations they undergo are central to his work, holding equal importance to any images that emerge. He is deeply fascinated by the space within the painting—its images, forms, and suggested narratives. Throughout the progression of each piece, the images and structures undergo radical changes, striving to achieve a tension and sympathy between language and representation.

Sarah Calmus (b. 1989, Essex) is an interdisciplinary artist and producer focused on creating spaces for interaction, connection, and reflection. She graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in 2014 with a degree in Art, Philosophy, and Contemporary Practices. Working across moving image, light, sound, and sculpture, Calmus often designs site-specific, large-scale immersive installations that promote participatory interaction and explore diverse ecologies.

In addition to her personal practice, Calmus is an active force in the Scottish arts scene as a Programmer, Producer, Tutor, and Exhibition Handler. Her past collaborators include National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, Applied Arts Scotland, Royal Scottish Academy, and Hidden Door Festival.

Nominated as President of Visual Arts Scotland (2020-2023), Calmus played a key role in initiating the Emergency Art Workers Support Fund in March 2020 and managing the Visual Arts strand of the Hardship Fund for Creative Freelancers. She is committed to creating equitable spaces within the arts for underrepresented individuals.

Elaine Speirs was born in Johannesburg and moved to Scotland as a child. Her childhood experiences in and between these two places spurred an interest in the themes of fragility, contradiction and reinvention that recur throughout her work.

Speirs explores the stark contrast she observes between the rich contours of female personhood and the depersonalised portraits of women that appear in the public sphere.

Speirs studied at Edinburgh College of Art between 1989-1993 and completed her MA at Slade School of Art in 199. She lives in Edinburgh with her three daughters.

A regular exhibitor at the RSA in Scotland, Mall Galleries in London and represented by Arusha Gallery and Stratford Gallery. Her awards include Caron Keating Memorial Award, John Purcell Drawing Award. She was shortlisted for the National Open Art Competition, and exhibited in the BP Portrait Award 2019-20. In 2021 Speirs was elected as Professional Member for Visual Arts Scotland. Her works are included in private collections worldwide.

Georgie Fay is an artist based in Scotland. Participation, sharing and socially engaged practice is at the heart of her work. Her practice is primarily print based and often inspired by her noteworthy career as an art educator. At the core of her artistic vision is a search for place and connections, in landscape and history. She explores critical themes like the mounting tensions between humankind and nature, mapping our world and the importance of memory, place and our loss of imagination. These themes are derived from her own engagement with the world around us; from the city pavement to the flight pattern of migrating birds; from everyday journeys we take for granted, to global travelling and experiencing unfamiliar landscapes. Fay uses traditional intaglio methods as a means of translating participatory projects into something more representative and less ephemeral. She works with photography, digital imagery and found materials as inspiration which is then translated through printmaking to produce etchings and monoprints. She layers imagery with drawing and mark making to create imagined landscapes, in which the viewer can find their own personal connections. Her most recent body of work looks at how humankind has interacted with and changed the landscape. She specifically explores human use of the elements and industry throughout time, from Neolithic farming to power stations that dot our horizons today.

Kasturi Kiritharan (b.1998, London, based in Edinburgh) received her BA in English Literature in 2020 and in 2024 she completed the Year Long Painting Course at Leith School of Art.

Following on from this, Kasturi continues to explore her interests in poetic expression and the blurring of the imagined and the real in her artistic practice, with oil paint as her primary medium.

By building up thin washes of oil paint, scratching into the surface, sanding, staining and re-layering, Kasturi investigates what it might feel like to retrieve a memory: edges fade, colours overlap, textures transform, details sharpen or get buried. This process-led approach encourages her to stay open and speculative, allowing images to reveal themselves slowly and letting nature take its course.

Her current work reveres simple, intimate moments of ordinary life in nature, allowing memories captured in her sketchbook or camera roll to re-emerge through the material possibilities of paint and surface.

Oana Stanciu is a visual artist from Romania, living and working in Edinburgh. Her work combines performance, photography, sculpture and moving image to create subtly distorted self-portraits. She merges her body with different objects and environments, improvising scenes and transforming herself into surreal characters and creatures. Her work features black and white photographs, often accompanied by moving image pieces that help bring these characters to life.
In 2022, Oana was awarded a Knighthood by the Romanian president for her contribution to Romanian culture in the UK, and she has received several awards including a VACMA Award 2023, Stills Award 2022, RSA Morton Award 2021, Ingleby Award, Latimer Award, and the Meyer Oppenheim Award, and in 2019 she received one of the Royal Scottish Academy’s RSA Residencies for Scotland. Her work has been exhibited in various cities in the UK including Edinburgh and London as well as in Romania, Norway and Japan.

Emily Ingrey-Counter is a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art (1998). Her drawings and paintings, inspired by her observations of the natural world, are fresh, sensitive and visceral. Through the use of spontaneous marks and striking colour Emily’s work reflects the wild and untamed complexities in nature and captures for the viewer the essence of its ever changing, evolving life. Emily has exhibited both locally and nationally, including the Scottish Ornithologist’s Club, Aberlady (2023, 2020) The Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh (2023) and the Mall Galleries, London for the Society of Wildlife Artists (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020). In 2018 she won a bursary from the SWLA to attend the Seabird Drawing Course held in East Lothian. Her work also featured in a recent publication ‘The Edinburgh Art Book’, released in the Summer 2019. ( BENNETT, E.,ed. The Edinburgh Art Book, UIT/ Green Books, Cambridge, June 2019)

Ginny Elston is an artist-researcher-teacher based in Scotland, with a background in Art History, Fine Art and the Humanities. She is currently working towards her PhD from Glasgow School of Art, where she is developing a thesis based on the connections between formalism, new materialist philosophies, and painting and sculpture. Working intuitively with colour, shape and light in response to the world around her, Ginny is inspired by both artificial and natural worlds, and the myriad of forms and textures they provide.

Lorna Johnson is a Printmaker located in Edinburgh. She graduated Art School in 2010 and since then has continued to carve a path in the printing world by exploring creative and educational printmaking residencies, exhibitions and creative workshops. Processes have always played an important role in her creative development and this is reflected in her first love for traditional methods of Etching and Lithography in printmaking. Science and art have always been an influential and exciting combination for Lorna, particularly earth sciences. This particular interest has been nurtured through her experiences volunteering through farming projects such as Work Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms and expresses itself in topics of nature in her prints and illustrations.Since locating to Edinburgh she has set up her business Acorn Print Studio and also offers printmaking workshops when it is possible in the local area. Her work is playful and illustrative exploring the connections she makes when submerged in nature, at the moment predominately working with lino carvings at her home studio

Sana Obaid, born in Pakistan, completed her BFA Honors in Miniature Painting at the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh Scholarship to pursue a Master’s in Art & Design Studies at the Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. In 2022, she was honored with Scotland’s Saltire Scholarship from The Glasgow School of Art, where she graduated with distinction in the MFA program.

Sana’s formal training in miniature painting has profoundly shaped her artistic journey. The meticulous and meditative process inherent in this tradition deeply resonates with the spiritual practices of Sufism and Buddhism, highlighting the significance of the journey over the destination. Her Sufi heritage has cultivated a practice where creativity and spirituality are interwoven, reflecting in her work through themes of life's transient nature and the emphasis on process over outcome.

In 2022, Sana received the East-West Fellowship and taught at the University of Hawaii. She won the Gilbert Bayes Sculptors Award in 2023 and was shortlisted for the British Council Fellowship. Her work has been widely exhibited, including recent shows at the VAS Annual Exhibition, Woolwich Print Fair, RWA Annual Exhibition, and RSA Annual Exhibition (all 2024).