What is a photo-painting?
Back in 2003, Andreas Altmann started an intense research on a new technique to combine photography and watercolor painting. The aim was to create a symbiosis between those two very different and independent forms of art. By this combination a new visual dimension is created, where one can explore different ‚in-between'-tones and details.
The first step is to print a highly pigmented photograph on a high-quality watercolor paper.
After that and before the print has dried completely, the immediate preparation with water and watercolors starts. By adding and subtracting colors, blurring lines and rearranging details the desired outcome of a new unique perspective is created.
As it is impossible to rearrange a Foto-Aquarell exactly the same more than once, every piece of art is a unicum.

Foreword in the catalog for the photo watercolor exhibition in Kiev:

As the director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Ukraine, I am very pleased to be able to present Ukrainian art lovers with a new facet of Austrian culture, namely the photo watercolors by the Austrian artist Andreas Altmann, who thanks to its unique technique masterfully merges two independent art forms - painting and photography.

A southern, Mediterranean flair characterizes many of his idiosyncratic pictures, of which the viewer cannot say where they belong: to photography or to flowing watercolor painting. They are a genre of their own. Its technique, which has been improved and deepened over the years, is extraordinary. The critic Willy Puchner aptly outlined it in the Wiener Zeitung as the “border area in which the flowing and the figurative combine”. Indeed, the boundaries are fluid, Altmann surprises, as he sometimes reminds us of a floating Guardi and then again of a detailed, earthy, sun-shining Canaletto.

Altmann's magical attention to detail would make the Flemish primitives dream, who rediscovered the richness of the earthly world for the first time since ancient times. With the help of the camera, the most modern technology combined with a glazing hand creates a new kind of art that looks as if William Turner, Rogier van der Weiden and Jan van Eyck have implemented a project together. It is the gentle intermingling of thousands of concrete details that make his technique fascinating.

Bernd Alexander Bayerl, Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum

Finally a little bit of “tv-nostalgia” …