Call it the age of the para-pastoral. At a time when popular culture is steeped in romanticized visions of a rural past—from the rise of cottagecore and “tradwife” influencers to obsessions with so-called ancestral diets—motifs of pastoral art, a centuries-old genre of idyllic scenes of country life, have found their way back into contemporary art.
But these works aren’t just escapist landscapes, lovely knee-jerk pastorals meant to soothe news-addled minds and designed to shift units at an art fair, but a quietly subversive reclamation of visual culture. Here, the woods are much darker than they appear.
Buzzy emerging artists like Sholto Blissett, Georg Wilson, and Samantha Joy Groff are working within this realm, offering their own varied uncanny twists on idealized country scenes. With a keen eye toward pastoral traditions, they reframe the genre through a contemporary lens—layering in themes of the Anthropocene, eroticism, and female agency. The result is a vision of the countryside that feels neither nostalgic nor safe, but charged with ambiguity and intent.
Emma Webster is one of a number of contemporary artists who are taking hold of the tropes of the 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.”
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Artist Vera Iliatova, too, engages with the pastoral as a space for complex representations of young womanhood, as a mental landscape of both memory and potential. In her paintings, young women, lost in thought, wander through green pastures. At times, scenes of Soviet architecture tower up in the backgrounds, incongruously. In other works, flowers bloom on a massive, fantastic scale.
These pastorals become planes where youthful fantasy, lived reality, past and present collide. They are also deeply personal. liatova was born in St. Petersburg, where she lived with her mother and her brother. Their family was separated for a time during a difficult immigration period.
“I dreamed about joining my mother and moving to New York,” Iliatova said. “When we were finally able to join her, I was shocked at how different and difficult our life was from what I was imagining from movies and books. At the same time, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and many of my contemporaries were slipping through the cracks of the new system there.”
In these pastorals, girls wander beside one another, consumed by their internal worlds, in a cinematic layering of narratives. The pastorals become the visualization of their innocence, their youth, and their imaginations. “These composite landscapes are the place where I fuse my memories of growing up in Russia with reflections on my American life,” she said. “I think of these landscapes as a ‘terrain vague’ (an indefinite, unorganized place that’s neither urban nor rural).”
Both Groff and Iliatova are, in some sense, haunted by the women from their homelands, by the complexity of them who have previously been mischaracterized by cultural shorthand.
“On my first visit to Russia in 2001, ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I was struck—and often charmed— by the young women: women who were often more ambitious than their Western peers but also more vulnerable,” Iliatova said. She recalls their carefully assembled ensembles, outdated despite best efforts, and the painful sense of coming-of-age. “I have been dreaming about these heroines that populate the disconnected landscapes in my paintings,” said Iliatova.
Rather than idealized shepherdesses or mythical nymphs, in the landscapes of the parapastoral, the land becomes a conduit to complex female inner worlds.
