Moon Horse and Sky, an exhibition of oil paintings by Stella Maria Baer, is a collection of earth and mineral pigment oil paintings that embody the relationships between human beings and horses, the land, flora and fauna, moon and sky. Made from the dusts of earth, minerals, and stone, these Western mystic oil paintings weave together memory, dreams, longing, and visions. These paintings are prayers, long seeded dreams that seek to hold our interwoven relationships with the land, horses, moon, and sky.
Stella is a painter and photographer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. In her work, she explores her memory of growing up in the desert, tracing her origins back to the dusts of canyons where her mother took her camping when she was little. For the past nine years, she has worked to create a body of work with three veins: paintings of moons and planets, photographs of desert landscapes, and surrealist portraits of women and children riding animals under the western sky. Her practice looks at the relationship between how we see women and how we treat land, between memory and cosmology, in paintings made from dirt and rock, in photographs of nudes in desert canyons, in the earth pigment bodies of women and children riding birds and horses at sunrise. Stella's paintings and photographs have been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, Scientific American, Architectural Digest, Sunset Magazine, Westword, and ArtNews. Her pieces are in public, private, and museum collections worldwide.
Stella lives on a little ranch south of Santa Fe with her husband Seth and their three children, Wyeth, Whitman, and Winona, an appaloosa horse named Moon, and a flock of wooly goats.
Image: Stella Maria Baer, The Appaloosa, Baby Pinto, and the Bluebird, a painting of the two horses Stella, her husband Seth, and their family rescued from kill pens. Moon and Stars, the Appaloosa, and Sky, the baby pinto, stand at sunrise with a bluebird flying in the Belt of Venus. The bluebird was one of Stella's mother Eliza's favorite birds, and Eliza had both an appaloosa and a pinto when Stella was a child. Eliza's joy lives on in Stella's relationship with these two horses and in this painting made from the dusts of the earth.
Interested in submitting a proposal to exhibit in the Fechin Studio? Learn more here!