Sierra Montoya Barela’s paintings are a tribute to interior design, plants and birthday cakes

The scenes of the everyday home can become monotonous – house plants ever still, pancakes with a knob of butter, a slice of cake from the birthday party that happened long ago. But the Colorado born painter Sierra Montoya Barela makes good use of mundanity as a canvas to create new life.

Sierra also worked as a product designer of homeware for Urban Outfitters Home, and more recently at West Elm Kids, a furniture store in Dumbo, New York, which all comes through in her passion for painting mirrors, shelves, vases, chairs, tables and so on. There’s a curatorial eye for composition, exaggerated colours and complicated patterns that aren’t scared of clashing. Sometimes, everything is so heightened that it’s difficult to tell if a blue sky, adorned with fluffy clouds, is a painting hanging on a wall or in fact a window.

“How we create our home spaces is endlessly interesting and there’s a million different ways to create comfort,” says Sierra. “I like to give importance to the simple everyday objects that we live with.” As well as that, Sierra sometimes disrupts the calmness of our interior lives by offering a pause through flattened perspectives or windows into different worlds.

Plants play the main character in these paintings – symbolising life as much as a human figure would – sometimes her pieces feel like portraits in this sense. “We care for plants, we put them in our homes to make us feel good, we get them nice vessels to live in,” says Sierra. “Depending on the type of plant they can be purely decorative or they could be references to my Mexican heritage and culture. Much of the ornate tile work or clay objects or interiors in my paintings are odes to my Mexican Catholic upbringing as well.”

In a way, Sierra doesn’t just depict where plants and humans live, but also creates a new place for them to live through paint – what begins as visually satisfying artworks turn into an avalanche of tributes to how we decorate our lives and the essential need to represent life.