In preparation for the World Street Painting Festival, this week your intrepid reporter Andi Mether travelled with Australian artist Jenny McCracken, Dutch artists Leon Keer and Marije Spelbos, and Irish artist Gary Palmer to The Hague to visit Escher in het Paleis and Mauritshuis. The Escher Museum is a wonderful mind twist of magical illusions, the perfect place to play with perspective.Escher's constructions can exist within art but not in reality. Many of his works appear to make sense but on closer inspection you can see that Escher connected various details to create an impossible reality.Escher went to secondary school in Arnhem (location of the World Street Painting Festival), it's here that he began dreaming of the impossible staircase and failed his final exams. He went on to study graphic design at the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts.   Our next stop - Mauritshuis to visit the Dutch and Flemish masters, in particular Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. We were entranced by Vermeer's soft and luscious colours, enthralled by Rembrandt's brush strokes, and particularly enjoyed the humour in Avercamp's 'Ice Scene' painted in 1610, especially the 'photo bomber' (can you spot him in the image below?) To our amazement we also discovered graffiti in 'The Tomb of William the Silent in the Niewe Klerk in Delft' painted by Gerard Houckgeest in 1651. All in all an inspirational day!Next post - we'll see how the artists fared at the World Street Painting Festival.  To see the daily progress our Facebook page.