10 . 22

belt of venus : october ’22

Contributor Stella Maria Baer writes: “These rocks and dusts were collected from the side of a highway on the way to a campsite where my mother used to take me camping when I was little. The colors of the rock along this highway recall the colors of the sky at dusk and dawn. I couldn’t choose just one color from the hillside so I collected many. Together they bring to mind the Belt of Venus, the color of the sky along the horizon just before the sun rises or sets.”

contributor: Stella Maria Baer

Stella Maria Baer is an artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Building up layers of mineral pigments on cotton, linen, and wood, Stella’s paintings are a cosmology of memory, tracing her own history of growing up in the desert as a child, while moving into another space.

For the past eight years Stella has worked on a series of paintings of moons and planets and portraits of women riding horses through the desert into future eras. Her paintings are in memory of the dirt and rock that surrounded her while camping with her mother as a child in desert canyons. The surfaces of her moon paintings are built up slowly, layer by layer, and recall dry riverbeds, lunar landscapes, and the skins of fruit. Her work moves in circles around the places and materials of origin we return to as we remember where and who we come from. Stella’s paintings made from earth and mineral pigments are born from a desire to return to Mother Earth and the colors of her body, and to remember the worlds her mother created and transfigure their dusts into seeds. www.stellamariabaer.com