Uploaded June 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
“I believe that there is real magic in life. Sometimes the experience of it can be dependent on one’s point of view. I have come to see the making of art as the search for that point of view where the magic and wonder of life appears not so much as an illusion, but as an essential truth that often gets obscured.”
Magic Realism is a style of painting where reality is mixed with magic. Rob Gonsalves’ work is categorized as Magic Realism. More specifically, his paintings have an autobiographical, symbolic narrative that invites the viewer into his beautiful mind where alternative realities exist at the same time. His work is a visual, human experience of quantum theory’s Entangled Spaces and Time.
Rob Gonsalves made paintings that spoke to the joyful and wonderous imagination of children and to us adults who can still find that inner child willing to swing so high that our shoes touch the sky.
Born in Toronto, Rob Gonsalves graduated from the Architecture program at Ryerson University and worked in the field for a few years before embarking on internationally acclaimed painting career.
His architectural studies gave him the skill sets to manipulate points of view, perspective and scale in 2-D and enabled him to bend and play with reality. His influences include Magritte, Remedios Varo, Kurerlek and the ProgRock album covers of his teens.
Rob Gonsalves drew from his own personal narrative. He was inspired by Toronto and New York architecture, the night sky and the rugged, Eastern Ontario landscape of rock, trees and lakes where he eventually settled in 2001.
Gonsalves suffered from mental illness and ended his life on June 14, 2017. His official Facebook page stated in part "Rob Gonsalves battled the dark but succumbed June 14th." He was survived by his wife and extended family.
Fellow artist and widow, Lise Carruthers organized an effort to preserve his legacy in 2018. In 2019, a 4-foot-high black granite plinth was installed on his gravesite at the Necropolis Cemetery in Toronto Canada. Each side of the pedestal featured a different porcelain reproduction of a Gonsalves paintings. Future plans are for a series of art exhibitions featuring Gonsalves original paintings.
[from:https://www.robgonsalves.live/about
https://www.robgonsalves.live/gallery
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Gonsalves]
Music: Eraldo Bernocchi, Harold Budd, Robin Guthrie "South of Heaven"
“I believe that there is real magic in life. Sometimes the experience of it can be dependent on one’s point of view. I have come to see the making of art as the search for that point of view where the magic and wonder of life appears not so much as an illusion, but as an essential truth that often gets obscured.”
Magic Realism is a style of painting where reality is mixed with magic. Rob Gonsalves’ work is categorized as Magic Realism. More specifically, his paintings have an autobiographical, symbolic narrative that invites the viewer into his beautiful mind where alternative realities exist at the same time. His work is a visual, human experience of quantum theory’s Entangled Spaces and Time.
Rob Gonsalves made paintings that spoke to the joyful and wonderous imagination of children and to us adults who can still find that inner child willing to swing so high that our shoes touch the sky.
Born in Toronto, Rob Gonsalves graduated from the Architecture program at Ryerson University and worked in the field for a few years before embarking on internationally acclaimed painting career.
His architectural studies gave him the skill sets to manipulate points of view, perspective and scale in 2-D and enabled him to bend and play with reality. His influences include Magritte, Remedios Varo, Kurerlek and the ProgRock album covers of his teens.
Rob Gonsalves drew from his own personal narrative. He was inspired by Toronto and New York architecture, the night sky and the rugged, Eastern Ontario landscape of rock, trees and lakes where he eventually settled in 2001.
Gonsalves suffered from mental illness and ended his life on June 14, 2017. His official Facebook page stated in part "Rob Gonsalves battled the dark but succumbed June 14th." He was survived by his wife and extended family.
Fellow artist and widow, Lise Carruthers organized an effort to preserve his legacy in 2018. In 2019, a 4-foot-high black granite plinth was installed on his gravesite at the Necropolis Cemetery in Toronto Canada. Each side of the pedestal featured a different porcelain reproduction of a Gonsalves paintings. Future plans are for a series of art exhibitions featuring Gonsalves original paintings.
[from:https://www.robgonsalves.live/about
https://www.robgonsalves.live/gallery
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Gonsalves]
Music: Eraldo Bernocchi, Harold Budd, Robin Guthrie "South of Heaven"
![Yana Moskaluk
Yana Moskaluk was born in 1984 in Siberia, and moved to Moscow at nineteen to work at the Art.Lebedev Studio. Yana loves to travel, and draws inspiration from medieval art, ancient sculptures, old towns, legends, and fairytales. She takes the mood and atmosphere projected by such stories and items and recreates them in her own art within a modern context.
[from: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/yana-moskaluk/]
Music: Vidna Obmana The Space In-Between Yana Moskaluk](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Yl83jLBo1W4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Erik Satie - Gymnopedie No.1 (Orchestrated by Debussy)
The Gymnopédies, published in Paris starting in 1888, are three piano compositions written by French composer and pianist, Erik Satie.
These short, atmospheric pieces are written in 3/4 time, with each sharing a common theme and structure. Collectively, the Gymnopedies are regarded as the precursors to modern ambient music - gentle yet somewhat eccentric pieces which, when composed, defied the classical tradition. For instance, the first few bars feature a disjunct chordal theme in the bass - first, a G-major 7th in the bass, and then a B-minor chord, also in the lower register. Then comes the one-note theme in D major. Although the collection of chords at first seems too complex to be harmonious, the melody soon imbues the work with a soothing atmospheric quality.
Satie himself used the term furniture music to refer to some of his pieces, implying they could be used as mood-setting background music. However, Satie used this term to refer to only some of his later, 20th century compositions, without specific reference to the Gymnopédies as background music. From the second half of the 20th century on, the Gymnopédies were often erroneously described as part of Saties body of furniture music, perhaps due to John Cages interpretation of them.
By the end of 1896 Saties popularity and financial situation were ebbing. Debussy, whose popularity was rising at the time, helped draw public attention to the work of his friend.
Debussy expressed his belief that the 2nd gymnopédie did not lend itself to orchestration. (Orchestrations of this gymnopédie were only realised many decades later, by other composers, and without being frequently performed). Thus, on February 1897, Debussy orchestrated the 3rd and the 1st only, reversing the numbering:
First gymnopédie (original piano setting by Satie) → 3rd gymnopédie (orchestration by Debussy)
Third gymnopédie (original piano setting by Satie) → 1st gymnopédie (orchestration by Debussy)
The score was then published in 1898.
[from Wikipedia]
Artwork:Leonora Carrington Erik Satie - Gymnopedie No.1 (Orchestrated by Debussy)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YqKpAHvrOjw/mqdefault.jpg)
![Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre
Danse Macabre (first performed in 1875) is the name of opus 40 by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.
The composition is based upon a poem by Henri Cazalis, on an old French superstition:
Zig, zig, zig, Death in a cadence,
Striking with his heel a tomb,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zig, on his violin.
The winter wind blows and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden trees.
Through the gloom, white skeletons pass,
Running and leaping in their shrouds.
Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking,
The bones of the dancers are heard to crack—
But hist! of a sudden they quit the round,
They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed.
According to the ancient superstition, Death appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death has the power to call forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle (represented by a solo violin with its E-string tuned to an E-flat in an example of scordatura tuning). His skeletons dance for him until the first break of dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.
The piece opens with a harp playing a single note, D, twelve times to signify the clock striking midnight, accompanied by soft chords from the string section. This then leads to the eerie E flat and A chords (also known as a tritone or the Devils chord) played by a solo violin, representing death on his fiddle. After which the main theme is heard on a solo flute and is followed by a descending scale on the solo violin. The rest of the orchestra, particularly the lower instruments of the string section, then joins in on the descending scale. The main theme and the scale is then heard throughout the various sections of the orchestra until it breaks to the solo violin and the harp playing the scale. The piece becomes more energetic and climaxes at this point; the full orchestra playing with strong dynamics.Towards the end of the piece, there is another violin solo, now modulating, which is then joined by the rest of the orchestra. The final section, a pianissimo, represents the dawn breaking and the skeletons returning to their graves.
The piece makes particular use of the xylophone in a particular theme to imitate the sounds of rattling bones. Saint-Saëns uses a similar motif in the Fossils part of his Carnival of the Animals.
[from Wikipedia]
Artwork: Remedios Varo Les Feuilles Mortes.
Played by: National Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Leopold Stokowski Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YyknBTm_YyM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Jakub Schikaneder
Jakub (or Jakob) Schikaneder (February 27, 1855 in Prague – November 15, 1924 in Prague) was a Bohemian painter.
Schikaneder came from the family of a German customs office clerk. Despite the familys poor background, he was able to pursue his studies, thanks in part to his familys love of art; an ancestor was Urban Schikaneder, the elder brother of the librettist Emanuel Schikaneder. After having completed his studies in Prague and Munich (1871–1879), Schikaneder, alongside Emanuel Krescenc Liška, was involved in the furnishing of the royal box in the National Theatre in Prague; however, this work was lost in a fire in 1881. After his work in the National Theatre, Schikaneder travelled through Europe, visiting Germany, England, Scotland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and France. From 1891 until 1923 he taught in Pragues Art College. Schikaneder counted amongst those who admired the Munich School of the end of the 19th century.
He died in 1924 and was buried in Vinohrady Cemetery in Prague.
Schikaneder is known for his soft paintings of the outdoors, often lonely in mood. His paintings often feature poor and outcast figures. Other motifs favoured by Schikaneder were autumn and winter, corners and alleyways in the city of Prague and the banks of the Vltava – often in the early evening light, or cloaked in mist. His first well-known work was the monumental painting Repentance of the Lollards (2.5m × 4m, lost). The National Gallery in Prague held an exhibition of his paintings from May 1998 until January 1999.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: William Basinski Vivian & Ondine Jakub Schikaneder](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Zfy5co83aoE/mqdefault.jpg)

![Carolina Zambrano
“My creative processes are associated with the discovery of personal and collective symbols. For this, I apply methods that reveal the voice of the unconscious, such as active imagination – a term used in Jungian analytical psychology – as well as dreams and visions. I try to ensure that all my illustration works go through these creation processes so that the result is a translation of the author’s feelings and wishes.”
Carolina Zambrano is an award-winning Colombian illustrator, graphic designer and artist, working primarily with graphite pencil, fountain pens and acrylics.
Carolina explores topics related to the symbolic world, magic, alchemy and nature.
[from:https://theinspirationgrid.com/editorial-drawings-by-carolina-zambrano/]
Music: Steve Roach What Remains Carolina Zambrano](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_TqHvmzze-w/mqdefault.jpg)
![Natalie Wargin
I have entered a world of connectedness, where wildness survives and I can live in balance with it. I do not feel like a superior creature. Instead I feel a kinship with all of nature, especially the wild birds and animals. The Hudson Valley landscape has given this to me. This is what I paint.
Natalie Wargin is a nature and landscape painter based in Cottekill, New York. Her paintings are narratives, each telling a story of the Hudson Valley landscape, focusing especially on the birds and animals that cross her path daily and the sense of inclusiveness in wild nature that these encounters create. Following a move from Chicago to upstate New York she discovered a completely different and surprising environment. Concrete and highrises gave way to woodland and farmland and mountains. The connection Natalie feels to her new home and to all the creatures moving around her not only places her firmly in the wide world but has also taught her to open her eyes and connect.
Her work is influenced by naturalists and nature writers like Henry Beston, Richard Louv, John Muir and John Burroughs, and explores her personal encounters with nature, birds, and animals.
Natalie received a BA in Communications Design from the University of Illinois. She had a graphic design studio in Chicago for over twenty years, working with both corporate and non-profit clients, designing for product and print. She began painting in 2013 and began exhibiting her work in 2017.
[from:http://www.nataliewargin.com/about]
Music: Steve Roach A Few More Moments Natalie Wargin](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/a6Mlg-6ASNM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Kay Nielsen
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1886, Kay Rasmus Nielsen described being raised in a “tense atmosphere of art.”
The son of actors Martinius and Oda Nielsen, the artist was deeply immersed in the performing arts from a young age, a formative experience that was to influence the course of his career. With an aptitude for drawing and a passion for literature, Nielsen’s short-lived notion to pursue medicine was abandoned in favor of studying painting in Paris from 1906 to 1911. Nielsen’s formal art training began with French artist Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921) at the Académie Julian, followed by study at the Académie Colarossi under Norwegian painter and illustrator Christian Krohg (1862-1925) and French painter Lucien Simon (1861-1925), among others. In 1907 Nielsen interrupted his studies to travel to New York to accompany his mother, a celebrated actress and singer, on an extended performance tour of the United States sponsored by the Danish-American Society.
While a student of painting, Nielsen also devoted himself to illustration, creating stark black-and-white compositions in pen and ink, related to contemporary literature or inspired by personal experience. This dramatic body of work elicited an invitation in 1910 to exhibit his work at Dowdeswell & Dowdeswells Ltd. Nielsen moved to London where his first exhibition in 1912 included the notable but unpublished series The Book of Death, a sequence of ten illustrations meditating on Pierrot devastated by the death of his beloved. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Nielsen often focused on the melancholic or macabre elements of tales, and created visual sequences with themes of love, sexuality, loss and death.
Surprised by the intensity of emotion in Nielsen’s illustrations, contemporary reviewers often linked his work to that of Aubrey Beardsley or Carlos Schwabe. Today, Nielsen’s deep appreciation of illustrators active around 1890 to 1910 is evident—Carl Otto Czeschka and Edmund Sullivan come to mind—but the “originality” of his work and his “rare visionary power and imagination” was consistently noted from the start. The success of Nielsen’s first exhibition led to several gift book illustration commissions, and accompanying selling exhibitions, beginning with In Powder and Crinoline, a compilation of French fairytales, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1913. Nielsen’s Rococo-inspired vision resulted in both pastel fancies, as well as brooding, jewel-toned settings for some of the darker tales. A master of fairytale illustration described as “the only living artist who can draw a troll,” Nielsen’s work only occasionally included fairies, as he typically focused on creating dramatic settings for the stories’ protagonists.
Nielsen received greater international attention in 1917 with an exhibition at Scott & Fowles in New York, sponsored by Martin Birnbaum who noted the “genuine pleasure to reach the oasis of a Kay Nielsen picture in a journey through the printed pages of a book.” A portrait photograph of Nielsen in the accompanying exhibition catalogue shows the artist at his desk crowded with pens and pencils, brushes and paint pots. Somewhat staged, the image never nevertheless conveys the complexity of Nielsen’s artistic practice. Technical examination of some of Nielsen’s watercolors suggests a significant effort to plan the illustrations in advance, as the clarity of the initial outline in graphite is striking in confidence. Once the outline was completed, a dense color scape was created through highly controlled use of watercolor. Finally, the drawings were finished in ink, accenting the original outlines. In an example from his Great War series, the paper is scratched extensively to create highlights, further accenting the composition. It seems likely that Nielsen employed masking as a technique to ensure crisp definition. Overall, the works appear tightly controlled, yet in places there is a surprising looseness to his handling of color, and freedom to the decoration. Less well remembered today, Nielsen also worked extensively in pen and ink, creating countless monochrome line illustrations and margin decorations for all of his projects, published or not.
An internationally celebrated artist in his youth, Nielsen found minimal commercial success in the last decades of his life, eking out an existence with Ulla, between Denmark and California, with the support of a small group of devoted friends. In the years prior to his death in 1957, although plagued by poor health, Nielsen completed a handful of public painting commissions, including the school mural The First Spring, a monumental reflection of his artistic abilities as both stage designer and illustrator.
Meghan Melvin
Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Curator of Design Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
[from:https://societyillustrators.org/award-winners/kay-nielsen/]
Music: Alio Die, Arianna Tondo Air Sustain Kay Nielsen](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aY_2JaUA6N0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Nicole Rifkin
I’ve had a different upbringing than most. My mother and her family are Slovenian Canadian citizens—with English as their second language—and my brother was diagnosed with autism when I was very young. At one point, I realized that the one thing that bridges everyone together is the understanding of an image. My brother learned how to associate words with images via flashcards. This led me to an extremely impactful realization: language is changed to accompany images. I also loved to draw and took great joy from the communicative aspect of illustration; I really wanted to tell stories and make them accessible to everyone. I knew I wanted to be an illustrator when I was 17, even though I didn’t have a strong concept of what being an illustrator meant!
[More at: https://www.commarts.com/fresh/nicole-rifkin]
Music: Numina Beyond Infinity Nicole Rifkin](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/am_hcYLCCbc/mqdefault.jpg)
![Hallie Packard
The morning sun projects the day onto waking eyelids. In an instant, you are here. A tickle in the corner of consciousness brings a faint memory of a place. The tickle becomes an itch. The mind stretches furiously, straining to retrace steps, to push back into that otherworldly yet unsettlingly familiar “place.” Just as pieces begin to rematerialize, something slips and it all vanishes completely from beneath your feet. For a split second, you hover between two worlds. For a split second, it all comes back.
Hallie Packards works depict a place nostalgic and foreign—comfortable and untouchable at once. A place through which the presence of humanity echoes, but from a source that has long since expired. Human-made relics interact with the natural world, confirming the question of previous human existence and conforming to—even mutating to become one with—the wildly organic environment surrounding them. As reminders of the wonder that abounds and the respect it deserves, these works are dedicated to rediscovering and cultivating the magic of this world.
[from:https://www.halliepackardart.com/copy-of-about]
Music: Aglaia Vernal Equinox Hallie Packard](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ccEf21kFwTY/mqdefault.jpg)
![Yuri Yakovenko
The name of Yuri Yakovenko is well known in Western Europe. Personal exhibitions of the artist were held in Spain, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Sweden and Cyprus. The artist’s works are kept in the collections of the Vatican Library, galleries in New York, Toronto, Stockholm, museum collections in Russia and Belarus, as well as in private collections of Queen Elizabeth II, the Spanish and Swedish royal houses.
Yuri Yakovenko is a member of the Belarusian Union of Artists, an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts, a member of the International Club Graphic House (Sweden). In 2010, he was awarded the title “Honorary Citizen of the City of Grodno”. The master has more than 25 international and domestic awards for participating in the print and book graphic biennale. Among the latest achievements of Yuri Yakovenko is the Grand Prix of the II International Graphic Biennale of JOSEP de RIBERA in Javit (Spain). The most valuable award for the artist (by his own admission) is Rembrandt’s self-portrait, printed from the board of the great Dutchman.
[from: https://gallerix.org/pr/yuriy-yakovenko-gravirovannye-mify-frukty-zveri-koroli-v-galeree-belyaevo/]
Music: Oophoi/Tau Ceti Valles Marineris Yuri Yakovenko](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/d4GX4a_dkXU/mqdefault.jpg)