About the Artist
Alexandra Bailliere
Alexandra Bailliere is a painter based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Using rich colour, layered surfaces and expressive gesture, she makes paintings that move between observation and abstraction. Inspired by the raw quality of the landscape, her work focuses on the overlooked, the incongruous and the places where unexpected beauty appears: a highway verge full of Bermuda buttercups, a field farm, a garden at twilight, the rocks at the south end of Rodeo Beach. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, she started early. At ten she took Saturday morning charcoal still-life lessons, and a year later her parents enrolled her in a figure drawing course at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She graduated cum laude from Duke University, completed a post-baccalaureate certificate in Art and Design at UC Berkeley, and earned her MFA from Mills College. Her large canvases in oil on primed canvas, such as Spring Fever, Tulipmania and Highway Bermuda Buttercup, sit beside small plein-air studies of the Marin coast painted on linen panels. Water, trees and gardens are a constant thread, and so are the beaches and seascapes close to home. Alexandra recently had her first solo exhibition with Hang Gallery in San Francisco, which represents her. She has shown in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Mills College Art Museum and Root Division, and with Hang Gallery at Art Miami (2025) and the San Francisco Art Fair (2025, 2026). She was a finalist for a Headlands Center for the Arts residency in 2016, received a parent-artist residency at the Palo Alto Art Center in 2018, and will be an artist in residence at the Burren College of Art in Ireland in summer 2027. Her paintings are in many private collections and in corporate collections including the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Brown Advisory, Citizens Bank, Freshfields and two Bay Area healthcare facilities. Alongside her studio practice she is an Adjunct Professor in the Fine Arts and Media Arts department at Contra Costa College in Richmond, California.
“Alexandra Bailliere is a Bay Area painter whose rich colour, layered surfaces and expressive gesture move between observation and abstraction. From highway wildflowers to Rodeo Beach rocks, she paints the overlooked places where unexpected beauty appears.”
The Process
Inside the Studio
The Painting Process
Alexandra's paintings begin with looking. She paints what most people pass by: a verge of wild buttercups beside a highway, a meadow in Golden Gate Park at eight in the morning, the rocks at the south end of Rodeo Beach. Many of her small works are made outdoors on linen panels, quick and direct, catching the light and weather of a single moment on the Marin coast. In the studio those observations grow into large canvases, often four or five feet across, in oil on primed canvas. Here the work moves between observation and abstraction. She builds the surface in layers, letting earlier colour show through, and uses expressive, gestural brushwork so the painting keeps the energy of the first look while turning into something more than a view. Rich, saturated colour carries the mood, whether it is the heat of Spring Fever or the quiet of Summer's Twilight Reverie. Her training runs deep. She drew from life as a child at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and later studied art and design at UC Berkeley and painting at Mills College, where she earned her MFA. As a teacher at Contra Costa College she still spends her days thinking about drawing and painting. What ties it all together is attention: to the overlooked, the incongruous and the places where unexpected beauty appears, and to letting the paint itself hold that feeling.
