Artist Focus: Stephanie Baron
On leaving what hurts, choosing softness, and painting women as real friends.
Stephanie Baron (American)
Mixed Media on canvas board
I’ve known Stephanie Baron for a few years now, and every time I see new work from her, it feels like she’s cracked open another layer of herself. She is one of those artists who never stops evolving. Her women arrive in every shape and mood - sharp, soft, playful, quiet - and somehow always feel like they belong to the same inner universe: unapologetically her own, liberating, energetic, and deeply empowering.
You don’t just look at a Stephanie Baron painting. You feel yourself being looked back at.
Stephanie is a Vermont-based, self-taught mixed media artist whose work orbits around abstract figurative women. On paper and canvas, they twist, lean, float, and sink into themselves. There’s always a sense that we’ve walked into the middle of a story: a gesture half-finished, a thought not yet spoken. They’re imperfect, layered, gloriously human, and that’s exactly the point.
Art as a place to breathe
Stephanie Baron (American)
Mixed media on paper
When I asked Stephanie about the moment art became a kind of permission, she gently corrected me: it was never really about “permission.”
Art was simply necessary.
Growing up around anger and instability, she spent much of her teen years anywhere but home - coffee shops, walks, hitchhiking in striped overalls, often barefoot. She didn’t think of herself as soft or delicate; quite the opposite. She shaved her head, tried to disappear, tried not to attract attention. But privately, in sketchbooks and songs, she was honest.
Drawing became the one place she didn’t have to be tough, or silent, or on alert. On those pages she could say anything, draw exactly how she felt, and stop scanning the room for danger. Art wasn’t an escape in the romantic sense; it was a small, fiercely protected place where she could finally breathe.
Two art teachers in high school noticed. They let her stay in their classrooms, often skipping other subjects just to make work. They quietly handed her supplies to take home. Then, at 19, life took over: marriage, survival, and a 13-year gap where she almost stopped drawing altogether.
Painting her way back to herself
Stephanie Baron (American)
Mixed Media on Canvas Board
The women in Stephanie’s work didn’t arrive until her 30s.
Real freedom, she says, began when she decided not to keep living in what she was “used to.” She walked away from the house she’d inherited, her marriage, and what remained of family and friendships - an entire life that felt familiar but deeply unhealthy, emotionally and physically. In that in-between space, she went back to art as a way of remembering who she was before everything went sideways. She started painting “for real” in a closet, literally. No grand studio, no big reveal. Just a woman in a small space, trying to find herself again with a brush.
The women arrived almost immediately, and they surprised her. How was someone who had worked so hard not to appear soft suddenly painting figures that were tender, gentle, and feminine?
She kept going. The figures multiplied.
Stephanie describes them as part self-exploration and part mirror. They’re her way of experimenting with loving herself—really looking at posture, gesture, body language, and letting emotions show in curves and colours instead of keeping them locked up. Her women call out to other women who know the fight of leaving what’s familiar but harmful, and choosing themselves instead. They remind her, and anyone who lives with them, to stay in spaces that feel safe enough to melt.
A studio that’s always “ready”
Stephanie Baron (American)
Mixed media drawing on paper
Some artists have elaborate rituals before they work. Stephanie is not one of them.
For her, making art is an abrupt need: closer to hunger than to routine. She keeps her studio set up like she used to keep her backpack - everything ready to go so that when the feeling hits, she can walk in and get to work. Music is always around, but the real rhythm comes from life itself: love, deep conversation, humans just being human.
There’s no preciousness in her process. Just honesty, urgency, and a willingness to see what appears.
“Waiting For the World to Change”
Stephanie Baron (American)
Mixed Media on Stretched Canvas
One of the works available through Curio Atelier, “Waiting For the World to Change”, feels like a perfect entry point into Stephanie’s world.
It began, she tells me, from frustration with social media: the constant pressure to be a slightly different version of yourself every day. Be confident. Shrink. Stand out. Blend in. Colour your hair. Let it go grey. Buy this. Become that.
She hates that noise.
The woman in the painting is layered in colour, pattern, and texture because that’s what so many of us do: we stack expectations on ourselves - products, comparisons, self-criticism - until we’re not sure where we end and the performance begins. The figure feels thoughtful, almost paused mid-question:
Is this good enough?
Who am I actually doing this for?
Stephanie describes her as a woman “covered in choices,” tired of being asked to change, simply for the sake of fitting a mold.
Women as real friends
Stephanie Baron (American)
Mixed media drawing on paper
There are other works in this body of work - “Portrait of a Quiet Disappearance,” “Where Her Thoughts Go Soft,” “The Field That Held Her Name,” “She Speaks in Colors,” and more. Each one feels like a different facet of the same inner conversation: how do we live inside our own bodies, on our own terms, after a life of being told to be harder, smaller, quieter?
When I asked Stephanie what advice her paintings might give to the people who live with them, her answer felt exactly right:
She hopes you’ll treat them like real friends.
Talk to them in the morning. Tell them about your day. Let them really see you. Let them love you.
It sounds simple, maybe even a little whimsical, but underneath is something powerful: the idea that we deserve witnesses who don’t ask us to perform. We deserve to be seen in our mess, in our in-between, and still be loved.
Stephanie Baron (American)
Mixed Media on Stretched Canvas
I’ve seen Stephanie grow so much over the years. Her style is unmistakably her own—bold, liberating, and full of emotional charge—and she has this rare ability to paint women in all forms without ever flattening them into symbols. They feel alive, mid-sentence, mid-change.
Her story is one of leaving what hurts, choosing softness without apology, and building a life where art is not a side note but a lifeline. I find it deeply authentic and empowering, and I hope you feel as moved by her work as I do.
You can explore Stephanie’s available works through Curio Atelier, and maybe—if one of her women calls to you—invite her into your home as a companion on your own journey back to yourself.