Student Work & Testimonials

The ‘Visionary Art Course – Tempera Grassa & Mischtechnik Training’ course is mentored by painter Daniel Mirante, who has 10 years real world teaching experience and is one of the instructors at the Vienna Academy of Visionary Art as well as a regular teacher to communities in Australia and India.

---

Value Studies Practiced on the first few weeks of the training – by Artist Dima Borgazi

---

Testimonials

Please read the testimonials below to get insight into the standards and quality of these workshops.

“I had the honour of attending the Easter retreat with Daniel Mirante, it was an incredible artistic, relational and spiritual experience.
I experienced a profound immersion in the traditional principles of the knowledge that comes to us from our predecessors, an alchemical journey from tradition to the new vision, the visionary one.

Daniel has been able to guide me with a lot of respect and delicacy in my artistic exploration. what I appreciated most about his guide was the love, passion and humility he puts into artistic practice, into his work. thanks to the sharing of his artistic career, his history and his being, he helped me to better understand how to be a conscious artist, motivating me to grow in this.

It was a pleasure to receive his teachings and his profound and wide knowledge in the symbolic / artistic / technical field. and thanks to his incredible vision! so much to learn.

This experience has marked an important point in my spiritual artistic journey, thanks Daniel Mirante!”

-Dyumna

---

“From the first day Daniel was professional, friendly, warm and welcoming. Daniel knows what it means to lead by example which is part of what I believe makes him such an excellent teacher and human being. Daniel truly embodies what it means to lives an authentic and creative life. This is clearly reflected in his gentle, loving, funny and kind demeanour.

In addition to be an all around great guy, Daniel is an incredibly talented artist. An artist who possesses a vast knowledge and understanding of his craft. Daniel has a tremendous amount of patience and love for each of his students. I always felt Daniel shared his wisdom freely without holding back or keeping painting secrets just for himself. I felt that Daniel honestly wants each of his students to become the best artist they are capable of becoming.

Daniel is an extremely hard worker, to say the least. Daniel worked longer days then he should have, everyday. Daniel was the life force that carried our class through this intensive process. Incredibly, each student left the course with an absolutely incredible and meaningful piece of art.

I can say with full confidence you will leave Daniels workshop a better artist and likely a better human being. Bon’ Voyage!”

-Naomi

---

“Learning from Daniel Mirante is to learn from a true alchemist of paint, a teacher of skill and soul. My two weeks as his student over the first Easter seminar were filled with inspiration, instruction and laughter. Daniel shared his deep knowledge of pigments and mediums as well as the symbology of multiple mythological and sacred traditions.

He was very perceptive regarding the needs of each student, knowing when to push and when to encourage. He provided clear materials and explanations, and prepared us for our main pieces with some incrementally challenging exercises. I felt supported yet free to experiment, whether in shaping initial ideas or in finding an inspiration for style/colour choices.

He was present as a human being as well as as a teacher, holding a welcoming and focussed space throughout. I laughed a lot, but felt I could cry as well – and so create work that felt truly meaningful.”

-Natalie

---

Teaching Style

Online teaching presents numerous potentials and oportunities, it is a field in development. For me, it is a process of translating countless hours of teaching in person to a format which is solidified and organised into text, images, and video. And yet the most important thing is to establish rapport with the student. To this end, more than anything, I believe in the power of dialogue.

Learning a technique like mischtechnik is really not about some small ABC process, but to be initiated into a very large country, of great peaks and vallies. Because thats the depth of the study. So my main role is guide through the foothills of the country, to share and appreciate the views, to also share in the complaint and challenges of some of the terrain, and give some benefit of experience and orientation to my travelling companions on the path of the Art Pilgrim.

Biographical Statement upon life as an Artist

Ever since I can remember, I was maybe a little more absorbed in that area we call ‘imagination’ or ‘daydream’ than many people around me. It remains one of the most memorable and precious things for me to meet people who are also deeply keyed into their ‘inner world’.

The way that this inner world or subconscious started presenting to me fairly early on, around the age four or five was with drawing arabesques, mazes and fractal patterns. I remember drawing and filling many sheets of paper with a desire to map these hidden realms. This expressed itself later on in obsessively recording dreams and mapping internal geographies that were ‘keyed in’ to the natural landscape features and architectures of where I grew up, such as the legendary mountains of Snowdonia, the ancient layered city of Chester, and the technological landscapes of the oil refineries along the Rivery Mersey.

Through my teenage years I experienced a profound flooding of the archetypes and collective energies of the culture and history I was born to. This represented itself as tensions between past and future, masculine and feminine, nature and technology, matter and spirit. I was quite overwhelmed, psychologically. At times I scared myself and burnt suitcases full of drawings and writings that were too strange for my own comprehension. It took me years of conceptual organising and meditation to make sense of the forces that were often seeming to wrestle for my soul or energy. In university this took expression as an ‘underworld’ journey through the layers of cultural conditioning, using the art world as a kind of lens of understanding the evolution of consciousness through various ‘zeitgeist’ – the spirit of the ages. At this point I became aquainted with some very useful approaches such as Systems Theory, Jungian Psychology, and Gnosis.

This has lead to a lifelong concern with exploring the unconscious through symbols, and I’ve approached this in various ways, through dedicated engagement in shamanistic traditions, mystical paths, ecology, physics, history. At times the path has been very challenging and at times the balance has been lost between art, community, family, duty, external career, health and so on, but I keep improving this balance, which is the same for most people – its the alchemy of life. Teaching has been a beautiful addition. The study of Art remains a powerful way to organise the threads and engage and participate in the process of sense-making, world-building, mythology, and creating culture, or pathworking – without bypassing the difficult material – to positive visions of our future and our human potential.

Its taken me this long to begin to really see the continuity through my life, and how the earliest expressions of my soul as a child link very fundamentally to the way I express now much later. The motif of the arabesque, the labryinth, and geographies inhabited by beings that represent very potent forces, is as true to me now with my study of old masters techniques and new technologies, as it was for the child grasping his crayons.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•