self directed excursions

Great Barrier Reef Tours

The Great Barrier Reef is big. So big, in fact, you can see it from space! Stretching 2,300 kilometres (1,430 miles) down the east coast of Australia, it’s the largest coral reef system in the world. It’s home to an incredible array of marine life (think over 1,600 species of fish, and six of the world’s seven species of marine turtles) and exquisite coral formations. Explore the Great Barrier Reef on one of many top-rated tour operators and spend the day exploring the vibrant coral reefs and marine life on snorkelling and dive cruises.

www.australia.com/en/places/cairns-and-surrounds/ great-barrier-reef-tours

Cairns And Surrounds

The region of Cairns is home to the iconic Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics World Heritage Rainforest, but the city of Cairns itself is also a must-visit. You’ll find brilliant cafés, bustling markets and plenty of beaches nearby. Relax by a resort pool or spend your days exploring this tropical oasis. Nearby places include The Daintree Rainforest, Port Douglas (pictured) and Kuranda.

www.australia.com/en/places/cairns-and-surrounds/ guide-to-cairns

Anna Massinissa

Anna is the Curator of FabrianoInAcquarello - Italy and has evolved this International Watercolour Symposium over the last 14 years to include the participation of Artists from over 80 Countries.

As a creative Artist in her own right - we are proud to invite Anna to come to join us for our Australian Watercolour Muster Biennale - 2023 to workshop with us and share her passion for developing natural dyes and the use of these as the priciple part of her artworks. Anna will be running Workshops in Cairns for us over the 6th to 11th September 2023.

In the 1990s, Anna taught techniques and software for digital illustration and publishing in European funded training projects. In the same years she experimented and created multimedia and animated scenography for the theatre and for the web, using the new upcoming information technologies. In 2006 she founded the InArte Cultural Association with the aim of sharing and growing the artistic passion she has cultivated since childhood.

For InArte, in cooperation with prestigious national and international bodies and institutions, she designed and coordinated a large number of events dedicated to contemporary visual and plastic art as well as to contemporary water-based painting on paper. Among them in 2010 the international annual conference meeting called FabrianoInAcquarello, the Marche D’Acqua biennial Prize and the Lo Spirito e La Terra (The spirit and the earth) festival.

Michael Solevyev

Michael is often called a “sunny watercolourist” – his airy, transparent artworks look as though they emit the sunlight. His traditional academic art education, extensive experience as a head theatre stage designer, and oil painter career now inform his priority as a watercolour artist – light. His main belief is that sometimes even a pile of rubbish with beautiful lighting can become an artwork.

Michael is a watercolour artist of great renown, with exhibitions and workshops all over the world, from Bolivia to France to Australia. Michael sees his work as an artist as exploration and observation of the world and its presentation in such way the others can see the things he saw. He considers being an artist as one of the most interesting jobs in the world. Since theatre is his background, it is all done through the prism of theatrical art

Nicolas Lopez Aroni

Nicolas’s watercolor paintings are full of power, showing us the charm of artistic symbols and exquisite technological innovation. His aesthetic ideas are embodied in psychology, myth, symbol and painting materials. Nicolas was born in 1984 in the city of Huancayo, in the centre of Peru. Within a family of artists, where art played an important role in their personal training, he developed not only in painting, but also in other disciplines of the arts such as music and the performing arts. Especially excelling in the speciality of Watercolour. He did his art studies in 2002 at the School of Fine Arts of Ayacucho, Peru, and after graduating in 2007 he continued his studies in the specialty of Painting at the National School of Art Calors Baca Flor de Arequipa (Institution that stands out as the only one with the speciality of watercolour technique), finishing in 2013. Since he began on this pictorial path, he has differentiated himself from other artists in the same field by staying away from the sedentary nature of the plastic arts. Adding in that way to his production a variety of scenarios that allows us to observe the different states of his life and the changes of that process. Always with the same baggage that allows him to register everything that he finds in his way that captivates and amazes him, and proof of everything is his works. With that he makes us participate in his great adventure of continuous learning that will not end with another contest, it will simply become another opportunity to follow what he is passionate about.