Working in acrylic and oil paint Emma Ballou captures the soft, luminescent quality of light that she is most visually attracted to in the landscape. Ballou’s ethereal and moody paintings are influenced by her poor eyesight, making her unique perspective of the world more about feeling than seeing. Her slightly-out-of-focus landscape paintings offer viewers an understanding of how light and dark shape our experience of the natural world. The work highlights the vivid, fleeting details of the golden hour, like the halos that outline blooming milkweed and queen anne’s lace and the sparkles of light that make individual blades of grass look like strands of gold.