Selected Work
About
Studio: YOHO Artists, Yonkers, NY
Born in New York City, Emily Stedman’s family moved to France when she was in first grade. She has lived in a number of places since, including Swarthmore PA, Tenafly, NJ, and Hartford, Conn. Emily is represented at NOHO/M55 Gallery in New York City. Her oil and watercolor paintings, exploring imagined narrative memories, have been shown in group and solo shows including The Brooklyn Museum; The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Historic Northampton Museum, Northampton, MA; and numerous other galleries, publications and collections. She was Painter-in-Residence at Bryant Park in the summer of 2016 and created a street art mural for the City of Yonkers.
Emily received a B.F.A from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington and an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY where her painting teacher was Jacob Lawrence.
Artist Statement
Watercolor has always felt like the truest way for me to move through the world. The paint behaves like emotion—fluid, unpredictable, and revealing—and in that movement I find the stories I want to tell. I work quickly, letting color spill and settle into forms that feel both observed and imagined. A gesture, a blossom, a quiet figure, a distant path—any of these might spark the beginning of a painting.
I don’t follow a strict process. Instead, I follow curiosity: a shift in mood, an unexpected shape, a memory rising to the surface. My sketchbooks hold these moments until they ask for a larger space. When I paint, I’m looking for that place where observation becomes something more layered—where a flower suggests anticipation, a figure hints at longing, or a landscape becomes a dreamscape I’ve never visited but somehow know.
My aim is to create work that resonates beyond the frame: images that carry emotional charge, shift atmosphere, and invite viewers into a world that feels at once familiar and mysterious.
