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, Wyeth, Whitman, and Winona. In these high mountain desert grasslands they tend two horses they rescued from kill pens, an Appaloosa named Moon and Stars, 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 pray and dream in visions.

Stella teaches workshops on how to make paint from dirt, rock, stone, tree sap, and honey to fine artists looking to stop using microplastics in their paint, as well as to those who have never picked up a paintbrush and are trying to recover 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.

Stella studied Philosophy and Religion at Dartmouth, Religion and Art at Yale Divinity School, and Iconology from Prosopon School founder Vladislav Andrejev. Before working as a painter she worked as a wrangler on her mother’s family’s sheep and guest ranch in Wyoming, helping train horses and guide guests on trail rides along the mesas.

Stella’s first solo museum exhibition, “Moon, Horse, and Sky” opened at the Taos Art Museum in June of 2024 and spanned ten years of western mystic oil paintings.

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.