| Cynthia was born in Hartford in 1966. A few years later her family moved to Massachusetts. Interested in art from an early age, her parents enrolled her in private painting study at the Jean Lee Gallery in Stowe, MA, where she studied through high school, until she went on to advanced study at Rochester Institute of Technology. In 1986 she received an AAS in painting and graphic design from RIT. In spite of having thrived in the traditional foundation program at RIT, she became attracted to the near polar opposite, both in terms of weather and temperment, and moved to Oakland, California to study at California College of Arts and Crafts. There she found an expansive and inspiring faculty exposing her numerous styles and points of departure in art. She received her BFA in 1988, exhibiting a body of work that alternated between abstract expressionism and contemporary realism.
Always alternating between extremes, and having had enough of the big city, Stoetzer setup a studio in Teton Valley, Idaho, in the town of Victor, with a population 175 at that time. The downtown buildings were literally boarded up in those days, so rent was cheap, and she was able to spend that first winter focused on painting, and working out all the competing influences of the previous years. Her first series after college focused on the famous Yellowstone fires of 1988. When the money ran out, she moved just over the mountains, to Jackson Wyoming where there were more jobs, and a developing local art association. Interested in both painted and built landscapes, she became a professional garden designer, and in 1990, formed Garden Designs, Inc. Having found another inexpensive place to live in Jackson, she traveled extensively during the off seasons, to distant lands such as Alaska, Greece, Turkey, Ireland, and Morrocco, and closer by, to the deserts of southern Utah, painting all the while.
Around the same time, Stoetzer also began taking some extension courses in ceramics, and got interestd in three dimensional art forms. This ultimately lead to an MFA in sculpture from Utah State University, in Logan, Utah, a school known for its ceramics, but as she discovered, also with strong programs in sculpture, painting and landscape architecture. The resulting multi-discipline MFA thesis project, "Center Ground", was part garden, part sculptural installation, part historical survey, and part documentation of the process through drawing and painting.
While at Utah State, Stoetzer had been commuting to run her Garden Designs business in Jackson. Upon obtaining her MFA she moved back to the Teton area full time. She has been living in Driggs, Idaho, in Teton Valley, in the house she designed and built, with her husband John, ever since. In the last three yeas, Cynthia has scaled the Garden Designs business back in order to focus close to full time on painting. Today, her studio work consists primarily of large scale oil paintings, contrasted with very small pastels on paper, of uniquely western american landscapes. Most of the pastels are done on location, while the oils are done in the studio. Her work has been likened to color field painting, and follows in the tradition of american painters such as Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keefe, Wolf Kahn and Russell Chatham.
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