Vitaly Beckman prefers to be called an illusionist rather than a magician. Either way, the 29-year-old from Belarus, who came to Canada in 2008, is proud to be practising one of the oldest professions on Earth—what he regards as a healing art for the spirit.

“I try to make my imagination real,” Beckman says from his home in Burnaby. “The things I dream about, I try to create and then share with an audience as a piece of art. Any artist can be regarded as an illusionist—a painter creates an illusion on a canvas, a movie director does it on a screen. A lot of the arts really are an illusion of some kind.”

Beckman started out as a painter and still sees himself as one. “It’s just with a different medium,” he explains. “On-stage I create a 3-D painting, and me and the audience, we are all of us inside that painting. We’re actually living it, rather than looking at it on a wall. It’s like a movie, but you’re experiencing it.”

Seeing several illusionists on TV inspired Beckman at the age of 15 to shift his artistic focus. “One was David Copperfield,” he recalls. “He did a lot of grand-scale magic—making airplanes and trains disappear—but he also did a few small-scale illusions with ordinary objects like rubber bands. I was very curious. ‘It looks so beautiful; I wonder if I can find out how it happens?’ But I couldn’t. Then I asked myself how I would do such a thing if I had to perform it for someone. I tried, and it worked.”

Beckman performed for family and friends, and started coming up with more and more ideas. “I discovered that I’m good at creating original magic. That’s still how I work. Everything I do in Evening of Wonders comes from my imagination.”

It’s hard to keep inventing brilliant new tricks, but Beckman enjoys pushing himself. “I have no lack of ideas—it’s how to accomplish them,” he says. “That’s very difficult, because the idea is impossible to begin with. The second challenge is to come up with things that have never been done by other magicians—including me, because I don’t want to repeat myself. Every year it becomes more challenging.”

Among Beckman’s feats are bringing to life a drawing of a rose, causing objects to levitate and paintbrushes to paint by themselves, reading a book from 15 metres away, and making people appear and disappear in photographs. But the show isn’t just about performing tricks.

“When we grow older we start increasingly to take things for granted, and life sometimes becomes just a routine,” Beckman says. “A show and magic can make us experience childlike wonder again. I think that when we see the impossible become possible, our whole perspective about life can change.

“I’m not trying to convince the audience that what I do is real,” he continues. “As human beings we have weaknesses, but that’s a good thing. Magic celebrates our spirit—we’re not perfect, but we’re looking at the bright side. It’s a form of self-expression and a way to connect with audiences and make them feel like children. The sacrifice for me is that I know how it all works. But when I perform, people help me experience the wonder again, and I can feel it as if it’s real once more.”