What Happens When 15 Watercolor Artists Paint the Same Country?

Watercolor always seemed mysterious and gloriously unattainable to me. Possibly that’s why I’ve been hooked on other people’s work ever since, following different artists and events. One such event took place in Armenia two weeks ago, focusing on the finished works of the artists as much as on the process itself, which was filmed, studied, and passed on through workshops.

Watercolor is unusually satisfying to watch happen. Pigment spreads into wet paper, edges soften and a blank sheet becomes a landscape quickly. Clideo’s video maker can combine phone footage, photographs and audio in one browser-based project, letting an artist or visitor trim clips, arrange them on a timeline and add text. For a festival built around live painting, video preserves not just what the masters painted, but how differently they got there.

The festival itself deserves an in-depth story.

In a rocky country in the Caucasus, fifteen artists from different countries and backgrounds painted together, dined together, taught others, and, hopefully, left the place inspired.

Armenia’s fourth International Watercolor Festival “Colors of Armenia,” held September 14-21, 2026, opened in Yerevan, took painters to locations including Garni, Geghard, Khor Virap, Noravank and the Kasakh Gorge, and continued in Gyumri with plein-air sessions, demonstrations, master classes, exhibitions and competitions. Look some of those places up, the names are most certainly unfamiliar, but the locations are truly gorgeous. The opening exhibition at the Artists’ Union of Armenia presented more than 100 works by Armenian and international watercolorists, which will definitely tickle your interest.

Fifteen artists, fifteen ways of seeing

As mentioned, the festival’s final Masters page listed 15 invited watercolorists. Their approaches range from urban and architectural painting to floral watercolor, atmospheric landscapes and figurative work. Here’s a breakdown for your convenience.

Artist	Country / background	A useful shorthand for the work
Amit Kapoor	India	Paints urban and compositional subjects including streets and railway platforms, with particular attention to perspective and the play of light and shadow.
Sergey Temerev	Russia	Particularly associated with skies, clouds, sea, fog, haze and atmospheric light, alongside cityscapes.
Roberto Andreoli	Italy	Works across landscapes, urban and architectural scenes, portraits, figures and musical subjects. Music is also central to his background as a formally trained musician and former teacher and conductor.
André Kano	Portugal; Brazilian-born	An Impressionist-influenced watercolorist whose landscapes and urban subjects emphasize light, shadow, depth and color harmony.
Igor Sava	Italy; Moldova-born	Known especially for urban landscapes and atmospheric scenes in which light, memory and the human presence within the city play important roles.
Ekaterina Sava (Ziuzina)	Italy; Belarus-born	Works with several subjects but is particularly recognized for detailed floral watercolor combining close observation with delicacy and technical control.
LaFe / Sattha Homsawat	Thailand*	Particularly known for watercolor roses, often allowing water and pigment rather than pencil outlines to establish the forms and softness of the flowers.
Vicente García Fuentes	Spain	Concentrates strongly on landscapes and especially Nordic and marine environments (glaciers, skies, ice, seas, volcanoes and boats) with landscape and light central to his approach.
Keiko Tanabe	Japan; U.S.-based	An impressionistic watercolorist of landscapes and cityscapes, often working en plein air and favoring expressive simplification and atmosphere over exhaustive detail.
Liu Yi	China	The Shanghai-born watercolorist is especially known for ballerina figures and misty Jiangnan landscapes, using wet techniques and careful moisture control to create soft atmosphere.
Jorge Corpuna	Peru	A Cusco-born watercolorist strongly associated with Andean landscapes, mountains, rivers, countryside and skies, with atmosphere, light and color central to his work.
Vahe Grigorian	Armenia; Los Angeles-based	Paints landscapes, streetscapes, seascapes and figurative subjects, using layered washes, wet-on-wet passages and dry-brush details, often with a focus on travel and changing light.
Tomáš Fišera	Czech Republic	Primarily paints landscapes and urban scenes, often en plein air, in a loose and expressive manner centered on atmosphere, mood and the character of a place.
Ilya Ibryaev	Russia	Focuses strongly on light and air, frequently working a la prima and producing luminous, atmospheric landscapes.
Frank Liao Xiaoping	China; Hong Kong-based	Particularly associated with flower painting, though his work also extends to landscapes and architectural subjects. He is president of the Hong Kong Watercolour Research Society.

Armenia gives them difficult material

The route almost seems designed to expose differences between painters. In a good way, naturally. But different landscapes call for various skills, right? Garni offers geometry, hard stone and open mountain light. Geghard is darker and enclosed. Khor Virap presents one of Armenia’s most recognizable relationships between architecture and Mount Ararat, while Noravank introduces red cliffs and another palette.

Gyumri invites the guests for another rollercoaster of changes. Tuff facades, old streets, balconies, signs and pedestrians. The most fun part about this is that the artists didn’t just paint in the studio. They were in the streets, with students, with passersby, each painting in their differing style.

A festival video can make those differences brighter and do them justice. Instead of posting fifteen finished paintings in a carousel, organizers could film the same location before a session, cut between several artists working there and end on the completed pieces. Clideo can mix video, photographs and audio, add names and countries as text, adjust speed and volume, and resize a project for different platforms. Its editor also supports automatically generated or manually added subtitles when an artist explains a technique.

The process is priceless

Watercolor is less forgiving than many opaque media. At the Yerevan opening, Artists’ Union chairman Suren Safaryan contrasted it with oil painting, where layers and extended work can make corrections easier. Watercolor, he noted, does not always give the painter that option.

That makes demonstration more important than ever. Watching Kapoor establish a strong perspective, Tanabe decide what not to paint, tells us something a finished image just won’t. “Colors of Armenia” was structured around that idea through plein-air sessions, workshops and demonstrations rather than functioning only as an exhibition.

A short process film can preserve the sequence: Armenian landscape, first wash, developing composition, artist commentary, finished work. Clideo can bring those separate recordings and photographs onto the same timeline, while subtitles make commentary from an international group of artists easier to follow.

By the time the festival reached Gyumri, there were 15 painters, arriving with different visual habits, who could stand in front of the same country and still see 15 different places.