Hillside portrait with dusts. Image courtesy of Stella Maria Baer.
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STELLA MARIA BAER
Stella Maria Baer is a painter and photographer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Building up layers of earth and 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 drawing from the colors of the land and sky at dawn and dusk.
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.
Dusts. Image courtesy of Stella Maria Baer.
Paint. Image courtesy of Stella Maria Baer.
In Studio. Image courtesy of Stella Maria Baer.