Author: Ester Liquori

Categories
Competition

Mini Castra 2026 — selected for the 11th international watercolour festival

Watercolour of the Langhe vineyards in La Morra, 38×28 cm — selected work for Mini Castra 2026 in Slovenia

A small format read in Slovenia

Mini Castra is the biennial festival devoted to small-format watercolour, organised by Lokarjeva galerija in Ajdovščina, in north-western Slovenia, together with DLUSP (Fine Artists Association of Northern Primorska), ZDSLU (Slovenian Association of Fine Arts Societies) and IWS Slovenia. It alternates with Castra, which is dedicated to large format; this is the 11th edition of the festival as a whole. Small format means works between 10.5×14.8 cm and 29.7×42 cm — a dimensional constraint that changes the whole approach. You work by subtraction.

For Mini Castra 2026, an expert jury admitted 161 watercolourists from 27 countries — Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia. The open call worked across four themes: landscape, people, urban motifs, abstraction.

I’ve received the news on the 27 May when the gallery published the official list of selected artists on its website.

The work in the exhibition

The work I submitted is The Colours of the Vineyards in La Morra. It is a 2026 watercolour, 38×28 cm, on cotton paper. Looking for the light of one specific season, the slant of a row of vines, the colour the leaves take on when the sun starts to drop.

Moreover, seen from above, La Morra is the place where vineyards become geometry — a drawing that already exists in the land, where it’s worth letting the water decide how to lay it down on the paper.

It needs to consider that a small format imposes an upstream choice: a few decisive gestures, no corrections, no layers refined for days. A 38×28 cm watercolour is taken in at a glance, and whatever is not working shows up immediately.

Practical information

  • Competition: 11th Mednarodni festival akvarela — Mini Castra 2026
  • Edition: 11th
  • Organiser: Lokarjeva galerija, Ajdovščina (Slovenia), with DLUSP, ZDSLU and IWS Slovenia
  • Venue: Lokar Gallery, Vilharjeva ulica 38, 5270 Ajdovščina
  • Exhibition period: 29 August – 3 October 2026
  • Opening and awards ceremony: Saturday, 29 August 2026
  • Prizes: Municipality of Ajdovščina Award (€600) and three sponsor awards (€300 each)
  • Direction: Vladimir Bačič (head of Lokar Gallery, vice-president of ZDSLU, president of DLUSP, IWS Slovenia representative)

A first time in Slovenia

It’s the first time I take part in a Slovenian competition, and doing it in a gallery linked to an international association like IWS Slovenia has a weight of its own: watercolour, in Slovenia, has a school tradition that you only catch glimpses of from outside. I’m interested in testing the work against a context different from the ones I’ve already walked through — Fabriano All Around, Watercolor Golden Brush — and seeing how a 38×28 cm sheet is read in a place where small formats have their own lineage. I won’t be in Ajdovščina for the opening: the work will travel alone, as often happens with painted things.

The exhibition runs until 3 October, and anyone passing through Slovenia in those weeks would do well to stop by.

Categories
Competition

Watercolor Golden Brush 2026 — “The Sailorman” at the international watercolour competition

"The Sailorman", watercolour 56×38 cm by Ester Liquori — fisherman in his boat, selected work at Watercolor Golden Brush 2026

An old fisherman, two boats and the salty mist of a harbour: “The Sailorman” is the watercolour selected by the jury of Watercolor Golden Brush for its third edition.

Watercolor Golden Brush is an international virtual watercolour competition-exhibition based in France, founded by Narcisse Rafati. Once a year an open call gathers watercolourists from around the world; an international jury selects the works that will be part of the annual virtual exhibition and compete for the awards. This is the third edition, with partners that any watercolourist will recognise: Canson, Daler-Rowney, M. Graham, Michael Harding, QoR, Phoenix and Meeden.

Being selected, in concrete terms, means one thing: your piece is placed in dialogue with works by other watercolourists chosen by people who look at this medium every day. For anyone working with water and pigment, that is a form of study.

The selected work

“The Sailorman” — watercolour, 56×38 cm, 2026.

An old fisherman standing on his beached boat, between two vessels of different scale that build the depth of the scene. In the background, a line of dock posts fading into a salty mist. The challenge of this painting was holding together two things that don’t always speak to each other: the figurative portrait — the face, the posture, the weight of the man’s body on the boat — and the water itself, the moving sea below, with paper-white reserves left to mark the crests of the waves.

I worked in successive layers, leaving wide drying zones to keep the boats transparent and the body of the man denser. Cotton paper, slow management of absorption times, and a few controlled accidents — because in the end it’s always the water that decides where it goes.

Practical information
A note on the path

Measuring oneself against an international jury is, above all, an exercise in listening. The selected works come from very different countries, and each watercolourist works the same material — water and pigment on cotton paper — in figurative languages that are often very far apart. Seeing your piece next to the others, in a virtual room hosting watercolourists from three continents, is the most honest way to understand where you are and where you could go.

“The Sailorman” belongs to a research on portraits and figures that I will continue to develop over the coming months.

Here my certificate.