Emma Webster’s (b. 1989) landscape paintings teleport viewers into the otherworldly. The places she depicts, convincing and hallucinatory, merge spatial expectations with mystifying fantasy. The paintings come from a hybrid sketching-sculpting process within screen-space. Webster first constructs scenes in virtual reality, which she then embellishes with theatrical illumination, to create natural vistas that relish in artifice, drama, and distortion. You can see how she translated her style into a coloring book page in Between the Lines: An RxART Coloring Book by Contemporary Artists – Volume 9.
Webster is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, 2011) and Yale University, where she received an MFA in Painting in 2018. In 2021, Webster published Lonescape: Green, Painting, & Mourning Reality, a collection of musings on landscape and image-making in an increasingly digital world.