All At Once

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: To be confirmed

Description:
"Life has a way of bunching things," Deanna Schuerbeke says of All at Once, "which can feel overwhelming if you let it." She painted this in Santa Fe, working through a canvas caught mid-shift — warm orange and gold rising out of cool teal and brown, temperatures colliding, nothing waiting its turn. The whole surface is in transition. Everything arriving together. The painting does not describe that feeling. It reproduces the pace of it.

The urgency is in the marks themselves. Brushstrokes are loaded with paint and thrown onto the canvas, each one losing pigment mid-gesture — you can see it happen, the stroke beginning full and ending in the splayed individual bristles of a brush moving faster than it can be refilled. Is that stroke finished? Is it corrected? No. The hand has already moved on. Paint applied wet-on-wet piles impression upon impression, each one barely set before the next arrives. Where the paint runs unchecked down the canvas it is left exactly as it fell — not because Schuerbeke didn't notice, but because stopping to correct it would mean slowing down, and slowing down is not what this painting is about. The layers accumulate with an impatience you can feel in your own body.

This is what it looks like when everything arrives at once — not chaos exactly, but compression. The warm and the cool, the urgent and the unfinished, the impression barely made before another one is thrown over it.

Want to learn more? 

Read Deanna's Introduction Blog Page
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