Stella Maria Baer 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 by 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 all over the world.  

Stella lives on a little ranch south of Santa Fe with her husband Seth and their three children, Wyeth, Whitman, and Winona, appaloosa horses named Sun and Moon, and a flock of curly goats.

2016
46.5” diameter round
Watercolor on wood
$14,000

2015
8” diameter round
Watercolor on canvas
$3,000

2015
8” diameter round
Watercolor on canvas
$3,000

2015
5” diameter
Watercolor on canvas
$1,000

2015
5” diameter
Watercolor on canvas
$1,000

2022
New Mexico micaceous rock on cotton
Painting 8” x 10"
Framed 11” x 13”
$1,150

2022
Earth and mineral pigments on cotton
Painting 8” x 10"
Framed 11” x 13”
$1,150

2022
New Mexico earth and mineral pigments and piñon ash on cotton
Painting 8” x 10"
Framed 11” x 13”
$1,150

2022
New Mexico earth and mineral pigments on cotton
Painting 8” x 10"
Framed 11” x 13”
$1,150

2022
Earth and mineral pigments on cotton
Painting 8” x 10"
Framed 11” x 13”
$1,150

2022
New Mexico dirt and micaceous rock and juniper ash on cotton
Painting 8” x 10"
Framed 11” x 13”
$1,150

2022
New Mexico mineral pigments on cotton
Painting 8” x 10"
Framed 11” x 13”
$1,150

2022
New Mexico earth and mineral pigments on cotton
Painting 8” x 10"
Framed 11” x 13”
$1,150