There is a particular kind of abstract art that exists at a comfortable distance — paintings that gesture at feeling without committing to it, that suggest emotion the way a greeting card suggests emotion: safely, universally, with nothing genuinely at stake. Deanna Schuerbeke does not make that kind of art. She never has.
Schuerbeke is a Portland-based painter working in large-scale expressive abstraction — acrylic and oil on canvas, often at fifty or sixty inches, the kind of scale that doesn't let you stand back and observe from safety. You don't look at a Schuerbeke painting from across the room and decide how you feel about it. You step into it. And once you're inside it, something usually happens that you didn't expect: you recognize something. Not a place, not a subject, not anything you could point to. Something interior. Something you have felt and probably never said.
That is the achievement at the center of her practice. Schuerbeke paints the interior life — the real one, with all its turbulence and contradiction and hard-won peace — and she does it with a directness that is rare in any medium. Reckoning (LEFT) is the specific vulnerability of standing honestly at a crossroads you chose on purpose. Temperance is the daily, effortful practice of not letting fear and anxiety have the last word. Caught Up is the experience of watching your own peace of mind get crowded out in real time by thoughts you know are unnecessary and can't quite stop.
Finally (RIGHT) is the exhale — the specific, physical relief of having come through something big and landed on the other side intact. These are not abstract themes. They are precise emotional states, and Schuerbeke renders them in paint with the kind of accuracy that makes you stop and think: yes. That is exactly what that feels like.
She came to this with twenty years of practice behind her — built alongside a corporate career, in the margins of a life that was not yet fully her own. She painted at night, on weekends, in every available hour, for two decades, before leaving her executive career entirely to paint full-time. Since then she has attended residencies in France and New Mexico, exhibited throughout the Portland area, placed work in private collections across the country and abroad, and received Second Place at the Oregon Art Center's juried exhibition Leaning into Abstraction. She works from Studio 87 at NW Marine Artworks — a converted industrial building in Portland that houses over eighty working artists — and her studio practice shows it: the work has the confidence and density of someone who has been having this conversation for a very long time.
What makes her paintings stay with you is not the scale, though the scale helps. It is not the color, though the color is extraordinary — she works in a palette that shifts from the warm, skin-like peaches and blushes she returns to when painting well-being, to the charged dark purples and blacks of emotional weather, to the specific yellow-green of a sky about to produce lightning. What makes them stay is the honesty. Schuerbeke paints from a place of genuine emotional courage — the kind that doesn't dramatize or aestheticize difficulty but simply looks at it directly, names it in paint, and then finds the resolution. Almost every painting in her body of work moves toward something. Not away from the hard thing. Through it.
Nicart Art Agency is proud to represent Deanna Schuerbeke and to introduce her work to collectors who understand that the most meaningful art is the kind that shows you something true about your own experience that you hadn't quite found words for yet. Her collection is now available on the Nicart website — twenty pieces, individually listed with the story behind each one. We suggest starting with the title that stops you first. Then reading what she said about it. Then looking again.
Want to learn more?
Check out Deanna's Collection of Art
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