Emma Webster’s landscape paintings immerse viewers in surreal, otherworldly environments where spatial expectations dissolve into mystifying fantasy. Her works are a seamless blend of convincing realism and hallucinatory distortion, constructed through a unique hybrid process that fuses sketching and sculpting in virtual reality. Webster begins by building scenes within VR, then amplifies them with theatrical lighting, creating landscapes that revel in artifice, drama, and distortion. She describes this virtual process as a reflection of how we experience the world—where there is no clear "outside" and reality is fluid. A graduate of Stanford University (BA, 2011) and Yale University (MFA in Painting, 2018), Webster’s innovative approach bridges the digital and traditional realms. In 2021, she published Lonescape: Green, Painting, & Mourning Reality, a collection of contemplative essays on the evolving relationship between landscape and image-making in a digital age.