A picture book without words leaves space for the imagination, drawing readers in by soliciting their own narratives. Picturescape shows the adventures of a A schoolboy who gets drawn, literally, into the paintings he sees at the Vancouver Art Gallery. He travels on raven’s wing through an Emily Carr forest, floats by balloon across a William Kurelek prairie, and cycles past a nunnery by Jean Paul Lemieux in Quebec. He is swimming with David Blackwood’s whales in Newfoundland when the gallery’s tour guide calls him back to the world outside the canvas.

This is the first picture book by Elisa Gutiérrez, a graphic designer who moved to Vancouver from Mexico in 1998. She has used her design expertise to create a variety of dynamic page layouts. Her pictures (colour pencil drawings and paper collage) are closely based on the original paintings, and there is a website on which kids can research the artists (picturescape.ca). Like the original paintings, many of the pictures are quite dark, which makes the few bright accents in them welcome. They highlight the boy in many of the scenes, suggesting that he, the viewer, is central to the meaning of each painting, and also that he is illuminated by his experiences, so that when he appears in bed in the last scene, he has a multi-coloured aura. Even the endpapers at the back of the book are brightly coloured, in contrast to the dull grey and brown stripes at the front.

Innovative in its look and challenging in its subtlety, this book makes a great resource for social studies, art, or writing classes – probably better for eight- to 11-year-olds than for five- to seven-year-olds.