Seeing Fantastic: Painting Venice with Bernhard Vogel

In the last few days, while slowly packing my studio, which is going to be moved again, I use the opportunity to revisit aquarelles painted in the past months. It is easy to follow the progress I have made so far, with paintings ranging from bad to probably not-so-bad. For example, I realized  that some of my early mishaps are due to use of not brand watercolor paper on which it is impossible to control the flow of pigments. For a while I was ignorant of some common tricks and tweaks in aquarelle technique, which greatly influenced the quality of my work.
I also found several early pieces in my watercolor collection that I would like to share with you here; for example, my first trial to paint Venetian street motives, as shown in this post (The Venetian Fish Market, 56×76 cm). It was painted in February 2013, during a tree-days painting seminar “Venedig im Atelier” organized by Bernhard Vogel, (mixed-) aquarelle painter from Salzburg (c.f. http://www.bernhard-vogel.at/en/works/). I learned from Bernhard how to enjoy artistic freedom, create personal color tonality by mixing pigments, and being inspired by the nature of the objects before stepping into fantasy (!). One thing that I still haven’t fully grokked is “seeing the fantastic“, which is obviously an integral part of Bernhard’s extraordinary creativity. I hope there will be further opportunities to paint together and learn more from Bernhard.