Venice - The First 2 Days

What a great time we had in the A Team: a great apartment (thanks to Haidee), plenty of variable weather for painting, lovely meals in (thanks to Valerie and David), plenty of socialising with the 9 other plein air painters spread around the city (thanks to you guys who provided us with a slap-up dinner twice), some nicely weird experiences with tourists, an aqua alta (no trip to Venice should be without one) and 75 paintings done between the four of us in 6 days, plus some dashed off sketches. Others were even more prolific (nocturnes being a favourite form of self-flagellation) so among the 13 of us the total number of once blank panels now covered in paint must be around the 300 mark.

I coughed my way around but the warmer weather helped to keep the chest infection quiet and my obviously diseased state may have saved me from some of those Chinese tourists who just love to get too close.

I did 20 panels in all so I thought I would put up the first 2 days worth on this post and follow with two more posts.  I have 'tidied' some of them but (for all you purists out there) I still regard them as 'plein air'.  If you had seen me drenched and wind-battered on the Molo on our final day, fighting one-handed to get paint mixed and applied while the other hand kept everything from being blown away, you would understand why. Anyway I am with the famous French painter ( I am still trying to remember who it was - can anyone help?) who said 'nothing counts but the painting'.

Here goes then: Day 1 - 22 November 2012.

San Giorgio from the Straw Bridge 12x8ins

San Marco Facade 12x10ins

The next day we had our only fine day:

Salute, Early Morning 10x8ins

Palazzo Contarini Fazan 10x8ins

Palazzo Barbaro from Campo San Vio 10x12ins

Now we enter the misty period folks!............