In an ideal world, bad guys are easily identifiable and, thus, avoidable. Their crimes are not carried out with a pen but with heavy swords or devastating superpowers. And right before they get their way, a hero sporting flashy colors saves the day.

In that ideal world, evil and good share one thing: they are both stylish.

This is the world the Norton Museum of Art has chosen to display this summer. Running now until Sept. 11, Out of this World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television consists of original costumes from memorable films and TV shows including The Terminator, Ghostbusters, Star Trek, Tron, Star Wars and a personal favorite, Blade Runner.

The exhibit is divided into three sections, the first of which is dedicated to heroes and villains. Every single gallery room has a spacey feeling to it due, partially, to the abstract music playing in the background. Their walls alternate between orange and gray. The outfits appear inside clear capsules as if in a deep sleep, waiting to be shipped back into space at any moment.

One of the first pieces to greet us is the Obi-Wan Kenobi robe worn by Sir Alec Guinness in Star Wars (1977). Part samurai and part monk, the design could not be more simple or its color less extravagant. The piece was designed by British costume designer and Academy Award winner John Mollo, whose work includes Alien, King David and Gandhi. Though created expressively for the role of Obi-Wan, this robe is believed to have been used in other films, including The Name of the Rose (1986), starring Sean Connery.

Mollo’s known tendency for military uniforms is nowhere to be seen in the Obi-Wan piece. It is, however, in the elements he chose to complete the look of Darth Vader, standing here to the right. He lifted a monk's cloak from the ecclesiastical division, a World War II German helmet and gas mask from the military department, a leather undersuit from the motorcycle department, and a metal breastplate from the medieval section.

One look at the Darth Vader costume and you can tell this is a character who is good at being bad. The all-black ensemble suits him well and his face is concealed, as if hiding something. Bad guys, when not carrying a physical scar, carry emotional ones. In that, we are closer to them than the good guys, who always heal faster and miraculously.

Costumes as this one do not necessarily need a particular actor to come to life. The same happens with Batman’s. Whether it is George Clooney, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer or Christian Bale playing the main role, anyone wearing the pointy mask, long cape and sharp gloves can more or less pull it off. Costumes of this sort have a personality of their own.

But when an outfit looks like recycling materials taken out the garbage: black sheer top, leggings, stockings full of holes and silver painted pumps, then you need all the emotion and expression you can get from an actor, plus good makeup. That was the outfit worn by Daryl Hannah as replicant Pris in Blade Runner (1982). I wonder if Pris would have been the same had Deborah Harry, who was originally envisioned for the role, been chosen instead of Hannah.

The same question hits me when facing the pieces in the last room. Anyone can look cool wearing a black leather jacket, but only Arnold can be the Terminator. His jacket is massive, features zippers, a belt and even bullet holes. As in some cases, the description here includes a fun piece of trivia. The shooting for Terminator was pushed back two days because the custom leather jacket, designed by Hilary Wright, did not fit the star.

And did you ever think the Seven of Nine uniform worn by Jeri Ryan in Star Trek: Voyager was too form-fitting? It turns out it was. The one-piece blue leotard was so precise on her body that Ryan could not wear bras or panties to prevent the lines from showing.

By the way, if you are into jackets, the last room is definitely your spot. There is Indiana Jones’s brown leather bomber, which looks very wearable despite it being old and worn. It was designed by Deborah Nadoolman Landis, who is also responsible for Michael Jackson’s zippered red jacket in Thriller. Accompanying the jacket are Indy’s whip from Raiders of Lost Ark (1981) and the Holy Grail from The Last Crusade (1989).

It is no surprise that the loudest suit of the show belongs to the eccentric Jim Carrey’s Riddler from Batman Forever (1995). It is covered with question marks, his favorite symbol, in a green sparkling color, a pink pin resting on his green tie being the only relief from the green insanity. An unexpected sweet touch on his suit is the green butterfly outlines. See? Even bad guys have a soft spot.

Don’t head for the exit without seeing one of the highlights of the show: Connor Macleod’s costume, as worn by Christopher Lambert in Highlander (1986). Macleod is an immortal Scottish swordsman who gains more power with every immortal opponent he defeats. The armor-like outfit was conceived by British costume designer James Acheson, who is a three-time Oscar winner for his creations in The Last Emperor (1987), Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Restoration (1995). He also gave Tobey Maguire his flexible reds and blues.

The heavy structure and barbaric character of Macleod’s outfit matches the man’s nomadic rough lifestyle perfectly.

When I think of the show overall I cannot help but admire the elegance of both good and evil here. This is definitely a better world. The bad guys in my world do not have this presence and the good ones tend to overdo it.

You should not come to the exhibit to find out the absolute truth, but to see that the work of a costume designer is serious stuff and goes beyond the superficial. Clothes can play with our emotions. If what we see pleases us, we may feel more inclined to get to know the mind. Such is the power of a good outfit: it can make us fall in love even with the bad guys, respect them while disagreeing with their intentions and maybe even forgive them. Not to mention that Evil sporting cooler clothes can make Good look silly.

For a show featuring fabrics, Extraordinary Outcomes can be quite emotional, whether you are a hardcore fan or not. By the end we realize that no matter how much we try, we will never come close to looking like heroes or adventurers, not even bad guys. It starts with the clothes, and we do not even have that.

Out of this World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television runs through Sept. 11 at the Norton Museum of Art. Admission: $12, adults; $5 ages 13-21. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays. Call 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.

Melinda Moore arrived at a monthly roundtable of photo artists in West Palm Beach and pulled from a shoulder bag four or five new travel-photo scenic prints she had quickly matted that afternoon.

They were rich, gallery-quality black-and-whites of London street life, but no biggie: Moore — who comes across as everyone’s favorite aunt who has been around the world more times than anyone else you know — had worked up the prints overnight as a show-and-tell for the Palm Beach Photographic Center’s InFocus study group in June.

Most of the Florida native’s body of photographic digital art concerns itself with the natural world, and predominantly birds. While there are plenty of people photographing wildlife and turning those images into gallery-grade digital art or photo “paintings,” not many people are producing gallery-grade painting.

The Palm Beach Gardens City Hall is showcasing some 50 of Moore’s pieces this summer as part of its GardensArt program. Creative Focus: Photography and Digital Art by Melinda Moore opened June 27 and runs through Aug. 25 in the City Hall lobby. The exhibit features Florida birds and landscapes, jungle cats and elephants, both in straight photographic renderings and through Moore’s texture montage and digital painting composites.

Last month, Moore took Best of Show (first place) at the 15th Annual InFocus juried exhibition of the Palm Beach Photographic Centre in West Palm Beach, which included a $950 cash prize. Moore’s Friends Forever, an image of two elephants embracing each other’s trunks, beat out entries from around the country and beyond. The juror was Atlanta-based commercial photographer Kevin Ames.

Growing up in and around the Everglades, Moore said nature has been her principal art teacher. After her parents settled in the Lake Ida area of western Delray Beach in the 1950s, her father designed and built some of the early housing that still surrounds the lake today. At home, Moore and her mother kept a journal of the birds and wildlife they encountered there. She kept that up for two decades in Europe, where she lived for almost two decades and raised a daughter.

Her interest in photography started as a child with her friend Julie, who had a Brownie camera and a Super 8 film camera. In her adulthood, Moore found a piece of untouched Everglades at Grassy Waters Nature Preserve and started volunteering there to reconnect with a lifelong passion for photography.

“I think it has to do with the light, weather and atmosphere and watching the animals and birds,” Moore said. “I loved (James John) Audubon and his artwork when I was young, and I felt very protective of and engaged in the Everglades – pretty much with the snakes and the alligators at the back door.”

While perhaps not an expert birdwatcher per se, Moore knows her way around birds and she said she is still learning some of the species. In Florida, birds – especially the white egret varieties, warblers and other small birds – are her favorite artistic subject. Her favorite places for photographing birds include the Green Cay Nature and Grassy Waters Preserves in Boynton Beach, the Wakodahatchee Wetlands in Delray Beach, and Merritt Island near Cape Canaveral.

“Things come along that are supposed to happen to you and it just works out that my camera likes birds. I could take a picture of a flower but it won’t be as good as a bird. I realize I enjoy subjects with soul. And I would like to do more (people) portraiture in the future.”

Another good place for birding is Clyde Butcher’s front yard on Florida’s southwest coast. Butcher is the renowned South Florida-based Everglades wildlife photographer in the Ansel Adams style. “I went there this year and saw every kind of bird you can imagine in the canal in the front yard,” she said.

Any place is fair game for finding birds, including aviaries, zoos and in the wild, from Florida to Canada and beyond. If she doesn’t like the bird’s environment, she changes it out or alters it with her digital texturing process, which she calls “morphography.”

Textures are digital images of colors, shapes, billows of light rays or sprays of water, scanned materials and papers, sometimes warped with digital brushes and cloning techniques, then blended underneath or around the principal photograph.

Use of textures has also given a unifying theme to Moore’s output, which is printed on fine archival papers, canvas and sometimes ceramic tiles. She prefers to print at M & M Studios Framing in Jupiter.

“I wanted to do a body of work,” Moore said. “With the whole textured feel to the birds – that can stand as a group and can blend together. You can change the tonal quality of the subject itself with the textures, and so that creates a series of a similar tone. It is a whole learning and experimenting thing and seeing what texture goes with what.”

Moore started her professional career early when she walked into Bethesda Memorial Hospital at the age of 16 and became a volunteer. She studied nursing at Florida State University, then later taking nursing positions at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Midlife burnout set in after heavy hospital work as a charge nurse, and she returned to Florida with the idea of living on a boat and sailing, which she did.

For a number of years Moore earned a living through boat rebuilding, chartering and brokering. Later, her parents moved to southern Spain on the advice of her father’s doctor who prescribed the Andalusian climate as a remedy for his severe allergies. She and their daughter joined them, and Moore opened a property management and real estate company during Spain’s 20- or 30-year land and development boom, which only abated recently.

In Spain, Moore learned the art of flower arranging and art appreciation through nine years of association with a Japanese cultural and healing society in Spain, and she traveled extensively throughout the Continent. In the rural life of Spain and elsewhere she soaked up a generous array of musical and artistic expression that was nurtured at the village level and the big cities. The Tate Museum in London and the Prado in Madrid were personal favorites, as well as a vast, little-known art world that she stumbled on in the former Yugoslavia before the country’s breakup in the civil wars of the early 1990s.

“Some of the most amazing places for artwork were Montenegro and Yugoslavia,” she said. “There was a treasure trove of artwork that was totally untouched and in strange little museums and strange little places: paintings cared for by monks on mountain tops from the periods of Titian and Rubens. People there were very into art and culture, and the artists were revered.”

Moore returned to Florida in 2001 and now lives with her husband Bill Dacamara, a computer program designer, in Palm Beach Gardens. Her daughter, Danielle Lucas, is a graphic artist living in Europe.

She returned to an active life as a photographic artist through Flickr, the online photography-sharing and educational community where photo artists from around the world congregate in various special-interest subgroups. From there, she sought out local artists’ associations online.

After winning some national recognition, Moore was invited to be featured artist at M & M Studios and Lighthouse Art Gallery in Jupiter. She is active in Photo Salon at the Armory Arts Center, the Boca Museum Artist’s Guild, the Audubon Society and many other groups. Currently, she has three pieces in the Amory’s In and Out of Focus exhibit, and this summer’s InFocus exhibit at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre.

“I saw her work in a website called Artists of Palm Beach County,” said Amy Stepper, director of GardensArt and a recreation supervisor for the city of Palm Beach Gardens. Stepper invited Moore to be the featured summer exhibit at City Hall, and on Friday, some 50 children from the Gardens Camp summer program will spend a day with Moore and her exhibit.

“Since it was summer, I was trying to find something that would appeal to all ages,” Stepper said, noting that Moore photographs things sometimes in our own backyards that we don't always notice. “She has techniques of bringing things out in nature that we take for granted. It creates almost a painterly look and although it is photography, it sometimes blurs the lines.”

Janet Heaton, a local painter and gallery owner who sits on the board for the Friends of John D. MacArthur Beach State Park on Singer Island, met Moore at an arts supply store, and became an admirer of her work.

“I like the translucent quality, the use of colors, the use of light that is like glass or the water,” Heaton said.

The two kept in touch and Heaton invited her to do an exhibit at the park earlier this year. Heaton said she is impressed with Moore’s talent but also her work ethic: She knows how to stay on top of things and handle the follow-through — a quality not always present in the arts community.

“She has an eye for objects. She doesn’t just shoot a bird or animal; she captures it in very good light and good composition,” Heaton said. “I have worked with many artists and had a gallery for many years and represented some of the finest wildlife artists from the United States and Africa, and Melinda is on top of things. A lot of artists don’t think that is important, but if you are being represented in a gallery that is important.”

Creating the artwork, Moore said, is the fun part, while getting it into production and framed can be the most difficult stage of preparing to show work. A portion of the Creative Focus show will benefit GardensArt and the Audubon Society of the Everglades.

“I have been very blessed in this life with the freedom to travel and enjoy other cultures,

which I feel is a big influence on my current work,” Moore said. “Those memories and experience inspire me.”

Creative Focus can be seen from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday in the lobby of the Palm Beach Gardens City Hall, 10500 N. Military Trail, through Aug. 25. For more information, visit www.photoartbymelinda.com or call (561) 630-1116.

The contemporary art scene in Palm Beach County may not contain as much of the risqué or emergent as can be found in our flashy neighbor to the south, Miami Beach — and we really needn’t be jealous; after all, we have old money — but there is a steady undertow of the new pushing towards the surface, and slowly (and I do mean slowly) beating down the fine art-and-antique image and recasting Palm Beach as a stylish hub for new art.

We’ve seen it most recently with the success of the Art Palm Beach fair, and alternative art spaces, such as the Mordes’s Whitespace Gallery. Elsewhere, the market for contemporary art has escalated to the point of absurdity. So, you couldn’t really think Palm Beach art collectors would be left out of the fray. It’s just that things move rather slowly here under the royal palms.

Yet, whether or not there’s interest, there can’t be movement or energy in art without the presence of working artists and Saturday night’s opening reception for Contemporary Art Pop Up illustrated that there is a vital group of them here and that they’re doing work that merits attention. Unfortunately, gallery and exhibition space is still lacking. So, led by the efforts of Turkish-born artist Sibel Kocabasi, a group of 18 artists mounted a “pop-up” exhibit at an alternative space on PGA Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens.

The show is a success, and Saturday night’s reception guests felt as though they could’ve been in Miami or New York City. The exhibiting artists are Alette Simmons Jimenez, Amy Gross, Carolyn Sickles, Dan Leahy, Freddy Jouwayed, Isabel Gouveia, Jacek Gancarz, Jackie Tufford, Jacques De Beaufort, Maxine Spector, Nancy San Pedro, Nune Asatryan, Sam Perry, Sarah Knudtson, Sibel Kocabasi, Skip Measelle, Stephan Tugrul and Ryan Toth.

Kocabasi provided the impetus and the energy to transform a thrift store into a white cube gallery, though only temporarily through this coming Saturday. She also served as curator for the more than 50 works in this show, which include sculpture and mixed media, drawings, and paintings. Kocabasi herself is a painter, and one of her works stood out as a stunning example of the use of color and texture in an abstract composition to evoke a mood.

From a distance, Black Dot Com (2010) is a breathtaking work. However, another layer of interest becomes apparent when you move towards it and realize that the canvas contains thousands of tiny dots creating intriguing texture. Kocabasi remarked that she “painted each one by hand.” This makes the work not just visibly appealing, but adds a layer of complexity because of the artist’s process.

Two colorful paintings by Palm Beach born-and-raised artist, Sam Perry, stood out for their size, figuration and color. At first they seem somewhat caricature-ish with their bold, brightly colored figures. However, the subject matter for The Old Get Wiser (2011) is somber yet affirming.
Perry explained that he was inspired by the men in wheelchairs that he saw on Clematis Street in downtown West Palm Beach.

“Their nurses wheel them in. They don’t move around much anymore. They’re in that certain state, but I pay respect to them. If you look at the title — ‘The Old Get Wiser’ — he’s not moving around a lot, but that doesn’t mean he’s not still using some higher intellect in there,” Perry said. “I think that’s a positive thing.”

Local artist Ronn Jaffe, who didn’t have work in the show, commented on a work by Jacek Gancarz titled Postcard Greetings (2011).

“It’s like an old greeting postcard, but it’s wonderful to show this deconstructivist building and how dilapidated it is. It’s a tongue-in-cheek kind of thing and I really like it.”

This work, which appeared to be one large postcard, was actually composed of numerous 4-inch-by-6-inch prints pasted to the wall and assembled like a puzzle. Together, they depicted a photograph of a partially bulldozed strip mall and the words “Greetings from Lake Worth.” What made the work more interesting was that the individual postcard kept falling off the wall and onto the floor.

“I call it an interactive piece because the glue’s not holding and I’ve seen people coming and picking them up and putting them back on,” Jaffe said.

Artist and teacher Sarah Knudtson contributed some beautifully delicate works on paper that had an uplifting and ethereal quality. Her grayscale color choices bleed into one another in a manner that infuses a sense of solemnity, causing one to realize that they’re beautiful in a quiet manner, like a slowly, lightly dripping stream of water.

Dorotha Lemeh, an associate professor of visual art at Florida Atlantic University, who was on hand for Saturday night’s opening reception, was drawn to Rhinoceros Horn-Bill (2010), a work by Ryan Toth that was comprised of a small sculpture of a bird jutting out of the painted wall.

“There’s an odd sense of humor going on here with the wings falling off of a skeleton bird that’s flying off into the unknown. It’s almost a comment on what’s happening with the situation with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico,” Lemeh said. “With that kind of decay and us not taking care of our environment, it’s almost a wake up call.”

Jackie Tufford’s whimsical series, She Wore Wire Dresses (2011), stood out for both its beauty and pro-feminist stance. She creates intricate petticoat-type sculptures, which she wears when doing her performance work, which she didn’t do for the opening. When you look closely at these assemblages, you realize that they’re actually made from both ribbon and telephone wire, a melding of technology and femininity.

In her artist’s statement, she combines her wire sculptures and mixed-media canvases “to question what it means to be a girl, a woman or a lady…” engaged in various activities. She also points out that, though the assemblages appear quite delicate, they’re actually quite heavy and cumbersome when she dons them during her performance work.

Overall, the exhibit was a refreshing display of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking that encouraged contemplation and inquiry.

“The work that I’ve seen is very vivid, alive, and innovative,” Lemeh said. “There are some pieces here that really take chances.”

Palm Beach Pop Up is on view only until next Saturday, July 2, at the temporary Déjà New Gallery, which is located at 2602 PGA Blvd, Palm Beach Gardens, in a plaza on the southwest corner of Prosperity Farms and PGA Boulevard. Viewing hours are Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. For more information, please contact Sibel Kocabasi at 561-667-3187.

Jenifer Mangione Vogt is a marketing communications professional. She’s been enamored with painting for most of her life. She studied art history and received her B.A. from Purchase College. Visit her art blog at www.fineartnotebook.com

When Nicholas Whipple was looking for a venue to showcase his light sculptures, he put out feelers to galleries in the Wynwood section of Miami.

Luckily for Whipple, 28, of Hobe Sound, a set designer and master carpenter at the Maltz Theatre in Jupiter, he found a space closer to home.

In an exhibit opening Friday, Next Wave: Emerging Young Artists, the Lighthouse ArtCenter reaches out to Whipple’s generation – the next wave of young artists – featuring a juried exhibit of edgy and provocative art by the under-40 crowd.

“We expect to display lots of exciting visual art forms, from wild installation art to experimental film, to form a collective of post-grads, young parents, grassroots activists and original thinkers,” said exhibition curator Robyn Deits Eckersley.

Whipple, who works with light, projection and illumination, is one of those emerging artists.

Fascinated by lights, shadows, patterns and pulsating light frequencies that can stimulate human emotions, Whipple’s influences come in part from his experience on stage working with “gobos” – physical templates placed in front of, or inside of, lights to control the shape of the projected light.

Whipple’s installation for the Next Wave show is what he calls Visions of a Past Persona. It’s part of a series titled Sculptor’s Painting, a self-portrait of “who I used to be,” he says.

He works with 35mm slides that he paints, sculpts and etches and stacks together to create a multi-layered dimensional look that is then projected onto the wall as a painting.

“I think this exhibit is a great opportunity for young artists,” Whipple says. “Sometimes I get distracted by my day job and my life, but I know creating art full-time is what I want to do. This is a chance for me to refocus my energies, pursue my art and hopefully exhibit at more galleries.”

A takeoff on the museum’s popular First Friday event, in which young emerging artists are invited to show their works, highlights of Next Wave include the opening night reception and awards ceremony, with live music, hors d’oeuvres and beer-tasting from the Tequesta Brewing Company, an artist talk and demonstration, and an open mic night and coffeehouse.

“We created this concept as a forum for young, emerging artists to show their work and get exposure,” said Megan Bell, the assistant director of education at the Lighthouse School of Art. “Unlike more established artists, who may have access to museums and gallery spaces, younger artists at the launch of their career need a supportive environment and opportunity to showcase their work, network and make connections.”

AJ Brockman, 23, of Palm Beach Gardens, is another of the Next Wave’s emerging artists. A recent graduate of the Digital Media Arts College in Boca Raton, Brockman, who was born with a form of muscular dystrophy and has limited use of his hands, is able to use his left hand and two fingers to create digital art with a computer mouse.

His painting, Nozridr, which depicts a 1946 Ford Super Deluxe “Woodie” station wagon on the sand at the beach, with a surfer and a pier in the distance, won third place in last year’s show.

This year Brockman will exhibit a series of posters he designed entitled, I’m… The first poster shows a woman smoking a cigarette, dressed in dark sunglasses and wrap-around head scarf like a 1920s movie star, emblazoned with the words, It’s a Fad.

The second is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, titled Honestly, and the third shows an image of Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair, titled, No, Seriously.

“These posters are contemporary and design-oriented. I attempt to bring humor and stimulate thought,” Brockman said. “As all art, it means different things to every viewer and is therefore difficult to define.

“Thanks to computer art technology, I can make a living doing what I love. I’m hoping to share my work with more people, and seeing people’s reactions to my work is always rewarding,” he says.

Another artist whose work will be in the show is Jorge Marquez, 28, of West Palm Beach. Marquez has a bachelor’s degree in graphic arts and works as an art director for a lifestyle magazine. He primarily creates large abstract canvases with acrylics and a spatula, and says he is heavily influenced by his former teacher in Colombia, Adriana Gomez.

“I like to work with different mediums and be versatile,” Marquez said. “For many of us young artists who don’t live in Miami, this show is a way for us to connect with each other and create a community of like-minded artists.”

Next Wave: Emerging Young Artists opens Friday and runs through Sept. 1 at the Lighthouse ArtCenter, Gallery Square North, 373 Tequesta Drive, Tequesta. Museum hours are Monday through Friday 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; 10 a.m.-2 p.m., with free admission. For more information, visit www.lighthousearts.org or call (561) 746-3101.

Whimsy and wonder dominate in the world that Robert Vickrey creates in his painting. On first glance, there’s not much that is dark or foreboding. In fact, within moments of entering the exhibit, Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism, now on view at the Boca Raton Museum of Art until June 19, one feels, well, comforted.

And that’s because the symbolic images are reassuringly familiar. Look around. There are nuns and children and balloons and bubbles and sparklers and bicycles and lions and tigers and bears. Oh my, scratch that last part. There are no lions or bears, but there is, actually, a tiger (Tiger, Tiger, 2009). And, overall, what there is, resoundingly, in Vickrey’s work, is a sense of safety associated with childhood. That quality makes this exhibit remarkably soothing to the soul — at the surface.

It makes it remarkably good, too, as a family-friendly exhibit. The subject matter, symbolism, and references to great artists serve as a good launching pad for talking to children about art. Yet as quickly as one decides that these paintings are simply beautiful, something might seem equally off.

Vickrey works in a style, as the show’s title suggests, known as magic realism. It’s a style with roots in pre-World War II Germany and is built around the idea that beautiful things are not always what they seem. Another artist known for this style is Andrew Wyeth, and his seminal work, Christina’s World, is the quintessential example of something that appears beautiful at first glance, yet has disturbingly melancholic undertones.

The same can be said of many of Vickrey’s works, though the sadness is not quite as deep. Both also chose egg tempera as their signature medium and this explains the striking similarity in many works.

One such example is Bubbles (1976), which seems an allusion to Wyeth in its color palette, lighting, and the partial inclusion of a window. In it a girl concentrates on blowing a bubble. She holds the type of bubble dispenser we’ve all used, so the emotional connotation with that object is pleasurable familiarity. The room is already filled with bubbles and this gives the impression she’s been at it for a while. As if the girl and the bubbles weren’t charming enough, there’s a kitten staring down at her from the windowsill. The girl is lit from above, like an angel, common throughout Vickrey’s painting. For him, children are angelic.

Yet, just as you’re about to lapse into a Hallmark-moment trance, something strikes you as odd and it’s not simply this painting, in and of itself. It’s this painting juxtaposed against an exhibit full of similar paintings of similar children engaged in similar activities. Suddenly, you may feel trapped in a world that’s comforting and safe because there’s no place else to go. And that’s when you realize you’re viewing transitory innocence, a dream that fades with age.

Perhaps that’s why there are brick walls throughout Vickrey’s work, to represent a barrier through which naïve fascination can’t pass. In Midwinter Dream (1984), a toddler stands near a brick wall while balloons float about him. Nearby a dog jumps up and tries to grasp one. This child, like the girl in Bubbles, seems trancelike. The image of Henri Rousseau’s final painting, The Dream, is painted on the wall. The Dream is a work that juxtaposes symbolic objects against those that are out of place. What does it mean to have one dream juxtaposed against another?

In Lacy’s Sparkler (2008), a young girl holds a sparkler – the kind given to children on the Fourth of July. She also stands in front of a brick wall on which images of angels floating heavenwards appear. This time the light seems to come from below and casts an interesting tri-shadow on the wall behind her. Like all the children here, she is expressionless, but appears engrossed in watching the sparkler.

Vickrey discovered, and adopted the egg tempera painting technique while getting his MFA at Yale. Egg tempera paint doesn’t yellow like oils, so it retains clarity of color and it also lends itself to being slightly easier to use than oil for painting fine details. There’s translucence because you can’t build layers as you can with oils or acrylics.

He worked, primarily, as an illustrator for Time magazine where he painted over 70 covers of influential people, including a 1961 portrait of author J.D. Salinger that was hung last year in the National Portrait Gallery.

Clearly, in his fine art, he was compelled to make a statement about childhood as a symbolic time in life and to pay homage to other artists. There are references throughout his work to specific classic works, such as in Clam’s Eye View (1990) and Homage to Chardin (2011) where he recreates Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Jean Siméon Chardin's Soap Bubbles. In both, children are, again, engrossed in activities that children do – drawing, blowing bubbles.

Not all of Vickrey’s works deal with children, however. He was equally fascinated by an order of nuns that originated in Paris in 1935 know as the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. They are the subject matter of the most beautiful and interesting works in this exhibit, including Sea Breeze (1985). The colors, perspective and lighting evoke images by Giorgio DeChirico, and it appears that Vickrey was influenced by De Chirico who originated a realistic style with sinister undertones.

One of the nice aspects of the Boca Raton Museum of Art is that the layout provides an opportunity to stand in the center of an exhibit and do a 360-degree scan of the entire gallery. It’s really helpful to view Vickrey’s work comprehensively because, overall, while there are allusions to De Chirico and Wyeth, Vickrey’s work is not quite as dark or disturbing as either of those artists. Rather it presents a transitory world that has an inherent sadness because childhood is ephemeral. And while the end of childhood represents the end of innocence, it’s not as much tragic as disappointing.

In commenting on the nuns as subject matter, Vickrey revealed a fascination for what is delicate.

“I was interested in the abstract shapes of the cornettes (their headdresses). These figures were becoming a symbol of something too beautiful and fragile to exist in our modern world.”

Throughout this exhibit, symbols of “fragility” are what binds each of Vickrey’s works to the other and tells the visual story of an artist enamored with respite, with creating a world shielded from the irredeemable, brute facts of life. A world where children are engrossed in play and nothing bad will happen, but where it’s clear that danger is lurking.

Robert Vickrey died just a few days before this exhibit began, at his home in Naples, on April 17. He was 84.

Jenifer Mangione Vogt is a marketing communications professional and resident of Boca Raton. She’s been enamored with painting for most of her life. She studied art history and received her B.A. from Purchase College.

Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism is on view at the Boca Raton Museum of Art until June 19. Hours for this exhibition are Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday from 12 p.m. until 5 p.m. On the first Wednesday of the month, the museum remains open until 9 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for seniors, and $4 for students. For more information call 561-392-2500, or visit www.bocamuseum.org.