Deanna Schuerbeke is a contemporary painter whose work translates emotional experience into large-scale expressive abstraction. Born and raised on the Canadian prairies of Manitoba, she now lives and works in Portland, Oregon — and the landscapes she has moved through, from the vast plains of her childhood to the lush forests of the Pacific Northwest, are the emotional raw material of everything she makes. Her paintings do not depict these places. They translate the feelings those places carry: refuge and threat occupying the same ground, nature as both powerful and beautiful, weather as a language the body understands before the mind catches up.
Schuerbeke holds a Bachelor of Arts and an MBA and is a self-taught painter who spent more than twenty years building her practice alongside a career as an HR executive — painting at night, on weekends, and in every margin available — before leaving that career entirely to paint full-time. Since then she has attended artist residencies in France and New Mexico, exhibited throughout the Portland area — including a Second Place award at the Oregon Art Center's juried exhibition Leaning into Abstraction — and placed work in private collections across the country and abroad. She works from Studio 87 at NW Marine Artworks, a converted industrial building in Portland shared with a community of working artists.
Artist Statement
There is something that happens in my studio that I can never quite plan for — the moment when a painting stops being what I intended and starts becoming what it needs to be. My work begins with memory and emotion: the prairies of Manitoba where I grew up, the moody drama of the Pacific Northwest, the weather events and landscapes that lodge themselves in the body long after the eye has moved on. I work in large-scale acrylic and oil, building up layers until the surface carries the same complexity as the feeling I started with.
What I am always trying to capture is the connection between nature and emotion — the way a color can hold both warmth and threat simultaneously, the way a brushstroke can feel like weather. I work intuitively and I trust the process, even when — especially when — it takes me somewhere I didn't expect. The paintings that mean the most to me are the ones where I had to let go of my original idea to let something more alive emerge. I think that's true of most things worth making.
Want to learn more?
Check out Deanna's Art
Read Deanna's Nicart Introduction Blog
Sign up to receive email notifications about Deanna's new work and where it's showing
