Bay Weli is a contemporary figurative painter based in San Diego, California. Her work explores the human figure as a site of memory, psychological tension, vulnerability, and transformation. Through oil painting, she creates charged spaces where light, shadow, color, and gesture shape the emotional presence of the figure.
Weli received her MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2026. During her graduate studies, she participated in a copyist residency at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle, and she has received awards for her figurative painting.
Before pursuing her MFA, Weli studied chemistry, a background that continues to inform her sensitivity to material process, transformation, and the unstable relationship between light, body, and atmosphere.
My work explores psychological states of suspension, when the self feels caught between memory and presence, stillness and realization, waking and dreaming. Through the human figure, light, shadow, and the material movement of oil paint, I create spaces where identity feels layered and time becomes uncertain.
The figures in my paintings often appear quiet, but they carry an inner pressure. They exist in moments when something is shifting but not yet fully understood. I am interested in how these private, fleeting states shape our perception of the body, memory, and self.