Rob Gonsalves is fascinated with the twilight zone between worlds.

The Canadian artist creates crisp, detailed acrylic paintings that walk that boundary by simultaneously representing both worlds, and the seemingly impossible connection between them, in the same image.

In pursuing this he walks a shifting path himself, between the hauntingly connected juxtapositions of Magritte and the inverted logical constructs of M.C. Escher.

You will see people casually refer to his work as surreal, but I think it would be more correct to use the term “Magic Realism”, simply because Surrealism relies on images from the subconscious and Gonsalves works are much closer in intention to Escher’s carefully constructed excursions into the nature of perception and thought.

As you explore his work, you’ll see several themes that Gonsalves likes to return to and investigate repeatedly, much like Monet painting the same haystack multiple times.

The largest group consists of the merging of worlds of differing scale, a series of elaborate variations on a theme first explored by Escher in a woodcut that is one of my favorites of his, Still Life snd Street.

The other large theme is that of the blending of two worlds by similarities of repeated shape, again a favorite theme of Escher, but explored by Gonsalves in paintings that allow for the effects of color and atmosphere to carry some of the transition between the perceived realities.

Gonsalves’ ability to carry off these transitions is so effective that it’s often difficult to pin down exactly where in the image your mind makes the mental shift from one point of view to the other.

He explores other, smaller themes that lean more toward Magritte’s colorful collisions of realities. Among my favorites are Gonsalves’ wonderful images of what appear to be bodies of water in the distance that are revealed to be mirrored tiles in the foreground.

There are two volumes of Gonsalves’ work, accompanied by lyrical text and aimed at children. One is night-themed, Imagine A Night, the other, Imagine a Day, features daylight images and has text by Sarah L. Thompson.

Take some time and let Rob Gonsalves walk you along that shifting path where the boundaries of “here” and “there” shimmer and change with the merest movement of an eye.

Link via Kottke.org.

Frederick Lord Leighton (not to be confused with Edmund Blair Leighton, who I profiled last week), was one of the most influential of all Victorian Academic painters.

He was very much within the academic neoclassical tradition, in contrast to the painters of that time who were favored in retrospect by the 20th century art establishment, and were remembered primarily for their rejection of that tradition. For much of the 20th Century, art historians and critics considered rejection of 19th Century Academic art a badge of honor, because Academic art was the “bad”, “repressive” art from which the modern art movements “liberated” us.

I’ll resist going into a big rant about what a poisonous attitude this overt rejection of tradition by the modernist establishment was. I like a lot of modern painting, but I have nothing good to say about the concerted campaign the modernists waged to discredit figurative art when they came to dominate the art establishment. I’ll just say that I enjoy Academic art and, in spite of the formality and absence of emotion in much neoclassical painting, I would rather spend my time in front of one of Leighton’s beautifully executed canvasses than a museum full of late 20th Century “isms”, which were bred from another kind of formality and dearth of emotion. (OK, so I did rant, but it wasn’t a big rant.)

Leighton was closely tied to the Royal Academy, exhibited most of his major works there and was elected its president in 1878. He painted with the emphasis on draughtsmanship and elegant rendering that was fundamental to the neoclassical style, and his subject matter was mostly scenes from ancient history, mythology or the Bible. Unlike some of the weaker Academic painters who got caught up in the mere visual reconstruction of those times or subjects, Leighton was faithful to the original vision of neo-classical art and the pursuit of timeless beauty.

Leighton’s early work was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and he shared their literary subject matter, painting scenes from Shakespeare and Dante, but he moved into more classical subjects as he travelled and was exposed to contemporary French and Italian Classical art.

As a mature artist, Leighton was so influential among Victorian Classical painters that Edward Burne-Jones, himself one of the great figures of Victorian art, nicknamed him “Jupiter Olympus”.