Art Teachers
All art teachers at Fitzroy Painting are qualified, professional practicing artists with teaching experience who love to share their knowledge. Exhibiting regularly nationally and internationally, our teachers work in a variety of mediums, each bringing their own unique perspective, knowledge and skills to the studio. You are in good hands!
We also invite visiting artists to the studio as guest tutors to run fun, one-day specialised workshops covering a range of materials and techniques where students can try new techniques and materials, and take home finished work. We offer courses and workshops in watercolours, drawing, oil painting, materials and techniques, abstraction and portraiture.
You can find out more about all of our teachers, their current work and upcoming exhibitions by following the links under each artist bio on this page.
Fitzroy Painting and teachers are also on Instagram, for a sneak peek at what we are up to outside of the teaching studio you can follow us here:
Fitzroy Painting | Adriane Strampp | Kez Hughes | Judith Van Heeren | Lucy Roleff | Julian Aubrey Smith | Troy Argyros | Rachael Robb | Yvette Coppersmith | Narelle Desmond | John Waller | Eleanor Louise Butt
Fitzroy Painting Teachers
Julian Aubrey Smith
Drawing Studio 1, 2 & 3
Julian Aubrey Smith is an artist based in Melbourne. His practice is propelled by mining the conventions of traditional realist painting for new permutations. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from RMIT University in 2003 and completed a Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2014.
He is the recipient of the 2014 Nino Sanciolo Prize, an Australian Postgraduate Award and an Australia Council for the Arts New Work Grant. He has taught at Latrobe College, RMIT University, The University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts.
Rachael Robb
Beginners Painting Level 1,2 & 3 Classes | Open Studio Sundays (Intermediate to Advanced)
Rachael Robb graduated from RMIT with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1990 and recently returned to Australia (Feb 2020) after 28 years living and working in London. Painting small scale on wood panel, her works draw upon old master techniques and are held in private collections both here and internationally.
Rachael has exhibited in the USA, England, Czech Republic and Australia. Rachael is a 2022 finalist in the Darling Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
Lucy Roleff
Intermediate to Advanced Painting Classes
Lucy Roleff is a Melbourne-based artist with a Masters of Teaching (Visual Arts) from the University of Melbourne. Her practice explores notions of beauty, purpose and the nature of desire. Her paintings are about the act of looking – the internal processes that begin when we look at something we aspire to, or in which we recognise ourselves.
Lucy’s work is held in a number of private collections across Australia and overseas, and she has been a finalist for multiple art prizes including The Blake Prize, the A.M.E. Bale Art Prize and the Len Fox Painting Prize. Lucy also created an activity sheet and workshop on composition which toured Victorian regional galleries for the NGV Teens summer program.
Judith Van Heeren
Watercolour & Beginners Painting Classes
Judith Van Heeren is a professional artist who has been painting images from the natural world for the past 30 years. She exhibits in private and public galleries, and her work is held in many public and private collections nationally and internationally. Judith has been finalist in prizes including the Geelong contemporary art prize and Waterhouse natural history art prize.
Kez Hughes
Beginners Painting, Atelier Classes & Materials Workshops
Kez Hughes graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts and Music in 2015 with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Hons) Painting. Kez has gone on to lecture at the Ian Potter Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation at Melbourne University and the Victorian College of Arts and Music.
In 2015 along with artist Storm Gold, Kez opened CAVES, a curated, not for profit gallery located at the Nicholas Building in Melbourne, Australia, and runs private art classes in her city studio.
Adriane Strampp
Intermediate to Advanced Painting & Drawing Classes
Adriane Strampp is a professional artist who has held over 35 solo exhibitions around Australia, as well as participating in numerous group shows and art awards regularly.
Adriane has a Master of Fine Arts (by Research) from Monash University, taught on a sessional basis for 15 years at diploma and degree levels and is represented by King St Gallery in Sydney, Gallerysmith in Melbourne and Jan Manton Gallery in Brisbane. She has been a finalist multiple times in the Sulman, Geelong Contemporary and Len Fox prizes.
Sessional Teachers
Eleanor Louise Butt
Abstraction Workshops
Eleanor Louise Butt is a Melbourne-based contemporary artist whose practice is grounded in studio experimentation. Taking painting as her primary medium, she employs colour, texture, line, and form as strategies through which surfaces are charged with gestural energy. Expanding these techniques into bronze sculpture and drawing, Eleanor’s work adopts the potentialities of paint to create visual dialogues across a range of media, where action, experience, perception, and memory are interwoven and folded back into one another.
John Waller
Abstraction Workshops
John Waller is an Australian artist and educator, his paintings are derived from the landscape he has an emotional empathy with. He practices a mode of landscape-based abstraction which was inaugurated by Paul Cézanne in the 1880s, and has dominated contemporary painting ever since.
Anna Steele
Beginners Painting
Anna Steele‘s painting practice is based around abstracting landscapes. Her work reflects the built environment but also envisions spaces beyond that to present a duality of the human-made with the natural. The concurrence of these two themes allows the space within the picture plane to become as much about the materiality of paint as it is about the spaces we inhabit.
Anna holds a Bachelor of Arts in Painting from RMIT University (2009) and a Master of Contemporary Art from the VCA (2020). Her work is held in collections locally and internationally.
Troy Argyros
Classical Atelier
Troy Argyros is a classical realism painter specialising in still life, portraiture and landscape painting, and runs ten-week courses at Fitzroy Painting in portrait drawing and painting, landscape and still life.
He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art Painting and a Graduate Diploma of Visual Art Education from Monash University, and is a recent graduate of The Florence Academy of Art.
Troy’s work is featured in private collections internationally, and has been selected for exhibitions such as The AME Bale Travelling Scholarship and the Art Renewal Centre International Salon. In 2017 Troy was awarded The Graeme Hildebrand Prize For Emerging Artists in the oil painting category.