Mountain & Prairie with Ed Roberson · Ed Roberson

Stella Maria Baer – Moons, Horses, and New Mexico Light

·1 hr 8 min·1 clip

Brain can change.

Stella Maria Baer talks about painting as a way out of her own head. She says the shift began with a prayer journal, when words started feeling like anxiety loops and images gave her a different way to hold desire and prayer. That move toward drawing changed the shape of her practice. Instead of staying inside language, she started putting the feeling into marks and then into paint. Ed Robertson stays close to that beginning. He lets her trace the path from journaling to painting to the larger body of work she has built around land, light, and place. Her materials matter as much as her subjects. She makes pigments by hand from rocks, dirt, and minerals, so the places she paints are literally part of the paint itself. The conversation keeps circling New Mexico. Stella talks about the pink sky, the desert light, horses, the moon, and birds, and how those subjects keep pulling her back even after years away. That pull is personal, not just aesthetic. She grew up in New Mexico in a family of artists and spent summers on a Wyoming ranch, both of which shaped the way she sees landscape and working life. Ed asks about the tension between leaving and returning. She says she wanted to get out of New Mexico as a child, spent many years on the East Coast making art, moved to Colorado in 2015, and came back to New Mexico in 2020. The work followed the return. Once she was back, the paintings kept coming back to the state, its light, and the relationship between land and animals. A critique from a museum show also becomes part of the story. She recalls being told that the paintings lacked a specific time of day or a specific light, and that criticism stayed with her for years before it turned into something useful. The exchange never gets flashy. It stays calm, attentive, and grounded in the kind of working conversation that lets an artist explain how a life, a place, and a medium all fit together.

As heard by us

A slow, grounded look at how place becomes paint.

Stella Maria Baer's conversation with Ed Robertson keeps returning to place before paint. She starts with journaling, then turns prayer into an image because it helps her step out of anxious loops.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want an artist story rooted in land, light, and handmade pigments.

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