Stella Maria Baer
artist
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Stella Maria Baer is an earth pigment painter, photographer, horsewoman, mother, shepherdess, gardener, and rancher. Stella grew up in New Mexico and lives on a little ranch south of Santa Fe with her husband Seth and their three children. In these high mountain desert grasslands they tend two horses they rescued from kill pens: an Appaloosa named Moon and Stars and a baby pinto named Sky, a flock of wooly goats, and two sheepdogs.
Baer’s paintings and photographs are western mystic naturalist prayers, physical manifestations of spiritual realities. Her practice embodies our relationships with horses and birds, moon and sky, how we see women and how we treat land, and moves through memory, mythology, and cosmology.
In paintings made from dirt and rock, in earth pigment bodies of women and children riding birds and horses at sunrise, her paintings invite us to dream in visions.
Stella teaches workshops to folks from all over the world on how to make paint from dirt, rock, stone, tree sap, and honey. She teaches fine artists looking to stop using microplastics in their paint, as well as to those who have never picked up a paintbrush and are want to find a creative practice that honors the earth. Earth pigment paint making traces the origins of paint and grounds painting in relationship with the land who so tenderly holds us.