Steve Baylis is an abstract painter based in Squamish, British Columbia. He works in oil and cold wax on panel, and a single painting takes about six months to finish.
The process is slow by design. Baylis stains and bleaches the birch panel to pull the grain forward, then builds ten layers of transparent glaze with roughly a week of drying between each. Only then does the brushwork start, from the largest brushes down to the final highlights. The surface is built, then answered.
He does not paint objects or figures. The work is about energy itself, from its smallest form to the scale of the universe, and about place: place within the universe, and place within the self. That question took hold at eighteen, when Baylis was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. It has been his subject ever since.
Steve Baylis studied art, illustration and design at Capilano University under the painter Kiff Holland. He has shown at the Seymour Art Gallery in North Vancouver, where his work hung alongside Gordon Smith, and at Ian Tan Gallery in Vancouver. His paintings have been written about in CBC Arts, Galleries West and International Artist.
In 2019 he completed a public art commission for the City of Port Coquitlam, made in collaboration with the LGBTQ2+ community. His work is held in private collections internationally.
Baylis shows at the Sea to Sky Gallery in Britannia Beach, with a solo exhibition opening there in late October 2026.
