Stetson grew up in the fields and the woods of the Hudson River Valley, discovering the nurturing power of nature, and the unbounded world of imagination. Her home was a remarkable stone house that had a twelve foot Sanskrit blessing carved into the beam over the fireplace, and Eternal Life symbols carved at the intersection of all of the beams used to construct the house that was designed like an upturned hull of a large sailing ship. One of her best friends was her next-door neighbor, an 80-year-old yoga teacher who still stood on his head and described what it was like to visit the moon. He would stand out in his secret garden with her and birds would land on him as if he were Saint Francis. Beauty, magic and freedom in nature were her realities for the first ten years of life, and her work as an artist draws heavily on the unusual and entrancing childhood that she was fortunate enough to have experienced.
Reed College was the perfect school for such an enraptured young woman, and she earned a degree in biology while spending most of her time in the calligraphy studio with her first mentor, a Benedictine monk who worked intensively with her for four years and awarded her the rare Reed AA, which depicted exceptional talent and achievement. During these years, her other art mentor was her botany advisor.
On a shared scholarship, Stetson spent more than a year in Japan and Hong Kong after graduating, studying both Japanese and Chinese brushwork, and living in a remote village in the Japanese Alps learning the farming and spiritual traditions of pre-war Japan. Thus her aesthetic foundation formed during this time was deeply Japanese, and that influence has expressed itself in her work for decades. An early love for travel and adventure took her around the world during her thirties, and a strong kinship felt with Greek people took her back for many years to the same village on the island of Naxos. Stetson's years in Greece and other parts of the world show up in her work with language and fragments gathered on her journeys.
To continue her studies in drawing, painting, and the lettering arts, Stetson did her graduate work at the Roehampton Institute in London, where she completed a two-year diploma with honors in one year. The many years of rigorous study and practice with the subtlest aspects of letterform had given her excellent eye/hand coordination, so her drawing and painting skills were already developed when she began working with image as a printmaker in New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment, in 1990. For years her work juxtaposed text with image, and the successful marriage of the two was something she became known for. Most of the work Stetson has done over the past two decades has been in the well-known Santa Fe studio of Hand Graphics with Master Printer Michael Costello. Recently her passion has been the sensuous world of oil painting, and she is learning to balance her schedule working with both printmaking and painting mediums, with lively detours into oil pastels on her days off. She is also intensively engaged in working on behalf of the environment as a painter. eARTh Projects in the Portfolio section of this website explain a bit more about this work.
Stetson has received over 20 grants and awards for her work, including a grant from the French Ministry of Culture in Paris, First Place at the prestigious Saint Louis Art Fair, and the 2003 Bravo Award for Excellence in Visual Art in New Mexico. Several of the grants have resulted in public art installations in New Mexico. Her work resides in many fine collections around the world and has been included in several museum exhibitions: Le Musée en Herbe in Paris; Le Musée Marcel Sahut in Volvic, France; Portland Art Museum in Portand, Oregon; Albuquerque Art Museum; New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe.