Beneath

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 60" × 36"

Description:
Deanna Schuerbeke grew up in a small rural town in Canada, and the woods were her refuge. "The chaotic lines and strokes of the wild," she says, "make me feel like I am back in my safe space." Beneath is that memory translated into paint — layers of green and burgundy foliage pressing in from every edge, yellow breaking through in warm bursts where light finds a gap, blue sky glimpsed in fragments above the canopy. At sixty by thirty-six inches in portrait orientation, the canvas is tall the way a forest is tall — you are looking up through it as much as into it.

What makes this painting different from the rest of Schuerbeke's work is its surface. Where her other canvases build depth through accumulated layers, Beneath is intentionally light in application — dry-brushed passages where the canvas breathes through, pale washes laid over dried drips that were deliberately left and then gently covered, the whole surface carrying the quality of filtered light rather than concentrated color. This is not a painting about weight. It is a painting about atmosphere — the specific luminosity of being under a green canopy on a bright day, where light arrives softened and scattered rather than direct.

The cream and white center is the path through. The eye finds it naturally, drawn by the lightest value in the composition, and reads it as the opening in the trees — the place where the canopy parts and the sun comes through. Everything presses in from the edges, lush and slightly wild, exactly as a forest does. Beneath is the feeling of being held by something larger than yourself, sheltered rather than enclosed, the chaos of the wild arranged, as it always is in nature, into something that turns out to be safe.

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