Victoria Taylor-Gore’s enthralling pastel paintings offer entry into magical realms between day and night. “The twilight is the crack between the worlds,” wrote cultural anthropologist Carlos Castaneda in his 1968 bestseller The Teachings of Don Juan. “It is the door to the unknown.” Perhaps no more apt description could sum up the pastel paintings of Taylor-Gore. Mysterious and beckoning, the artist’s work arises from pure imagination. In barely furnished but firelit rooms, doors and windows gape to reveal darkening skies still ablaze from the setting sun. Saguaros and sagebrush take on near-human character in the dying light of landscapes devoid of people. Southwestern homes and churches stylized to the point of near abstraction stream bright light into the darkness from their open windows and doors. A major influence on Taylor-Gore’s thinking has been the writings of the early 20th-century psychoanalyst Carl Jung. “Day,” says Taylor-Gore, “is a symbol of the waking conscious, and the night is a symbol for our collective unconscious. I love that transition between day and night. Colors in the sky become intense, and a little muted on the land, except where the orange light strikes a bush or tree in a beautiful golden-orange hue. I see my paintings as little worlds, places where the viewer and I can go to escape. And I think color is the magic that helps make it happen.” Taylor-Gore was born in Colorado, moving to Canyon, TX with her family in her teens. She won a scholarship to the master’s program at the University of California at Santa Barbara, graduating in 1985 and having her first exhibition in the same year at a Los Angeles art gallery. Taylor-Gore considers her years at UCSB seminal to her subsequent career and artistic success. “For me, it was two years away from the hectic pace of the world, two years during which I developed my work and found my style. That’s huge,” she says. Among the most formative experiences, she notes, was her job as a teaching assistant in color theory to internationally respected postmodern painter Ciel Bergman. Other influences on Taylor-Gore’s work include Paul Gauguin’s experimental use of color, René Magritte’s “theatrical feeling and wit,” the surreal architectural scenes and saturated early-evening tones of Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, Georgia O’Keeffe’s smooth tonal blends and simplified forms, and more. Making Texas her permanent home, Taylor-Gore was inspired by the landscapes and architecture of New Mexico, which she began visiting regularly, as well as the landscape of the Texas Panhandle. Taylor-Gore’s recent works show all the vigor, inquisitiveness, originality, power and enigma that have characterized her art since the beginning of her professional career. Her art contains the force to help the imagination of the viewer take flight. It is a journey that can become a subtly transformative experience that even Carlos Castaneda or Carl Jung might have found extraordinary.