Some places refuse to be held still. They shift, shimmer, slip through your fingers just when you think you’ve grasped them. Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti is one of those places. It rises from the Grand Canal with all the weight of history, its façade a masterpiece of Venetian Gothic grandeur. But it is never just itself. It is water, light, and movement – always changing, always just beyond reach.

Painting it was like chasing a reflection, knowing full well I could never catch it. The canal is a restless mirror, rippling golds and blues, twisting the palace’s image into something fluid, something fleeting. Gondolas slide past, vaporettos churn the water, the sun flickers off a thousand surfaces at once. I set out to paint a building, but what I truly painted was motion -the restless dance of Venice itself.

The brushwork had to follow suit, quick, instinctive. Layers of light laid down like shifting tides, smears of colour blending into one another before they could settle. The façade stands, solid and grand, but its edges breathe, dissolving into reflections, into the life that surrounds it. No single moment could contain it all, so the painting became an impression, a memory, a feeling.

You could stand before it a hundred times and never see the same scene twice. The light will change, the water will move, and something unnoticed before will come into view. Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti refuses to be fixed, refuses to be one thing. And maybe that’s the magic of Venice itself – not just a city, but an ever-changing illusion, always slipping between the past and the present, the seen and the imagined.