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Call it the age of the para-pastoral… where the familiar imagery of traditional pastoral art is reinterpreted in a contemporary context, often with a sense of irony, unease, or subversion. It’s a way for artists to explore the disconnect between the idealized vision of rural life and the realities of the modern world.The term signifies a departure from the traditional, romanticized view of the countryside, offering a more complex and nuanced perspective.
Emma Webster is one of a number of contemporary artists exploring this genre. Years ago, when studying the work of 17th-century French pastoral painter Claude Lorrain, she had a breakthrough. “It was a watershed moment,” Webster recalled. “I realized that, historically, landscape painting wasn’t from plein air but fabricated collage. It was used solely as a backdrop to imbue sentiment—usually peace, harmony, beauty—and support allegorical plot.” 
The Los Angeles-based artist has earned the art world’s attention with her haunting, even hallucinatory, oil landscapes of darkened woods. 
So what’s driving the artists engaged with the para-pastoral?
In these artists’ hands, the pastoral becomes a site of fantasy—not rooted in nostalgia, but reaching toward alternative futures. While Webster acknowledges that our ecological moment “threatens to make all pictures of nature appear as fantasy,” she remains forward-thinking. “Since landscape painting typically focuses on the way things were, it misses ideating and being part of the solution. My work comes from a place of ‘rewilding.’ I make places that cannot exist as proxies,” she said. “These avatars are less invasive and allow for strangeness, which hopefully translates into appreciation for the real. By making nature unfamiliar, we must contend with it anew.”