Caught Up

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 48" × 32"

Description:
"I tend to get caught up in so many unnecessary things," Deanna Schuerbeke says, "that can easily take over my peace of mind — such a constant battle to resist." Painted in Santa Fe, Caught Up maps that battle with uncomfortable precision. Orange pushes hard against tangles of teal, brown, black, and blue — the canvas a portrait of a mind that knows exactly where its peace is and watches it being crowded out in real time.

The peace is visible. At the top of the canvas, a patch of soft peach and blush — the colors Schuerbeke returns to consistently across her work when painting well-being — sits quietly above the tangle below. But look closely at how it is painted: translucent, thinly applied, the pigment so diluted it seems almost fragile, as though one more wash of color could dissolve it entirely. This is not peace as a solid thing. It is peace as something that requires constant, active tending to survive. Encroaching around it from every direction, the other strokes arrive loaded with pigment — substantial, overlapping, each one dragging traces of adjacent wet color along with it as it moves. They do not blur into each other and disappear. They hold their ground. Each one insists on its own space within the composition, the way unwanted thoughts insist on their own space within the mind — influenced by each other, tangled together, but refusing to dissolve.

Caught Up does not resolve into peace. It resolves into the honest, ongoing effort of choosing it — again, and again, against everything that is pressing in.

Want to learn more? 

Read Deanna's Introduction Blog Page
Check out her Artist Bio & Statement

Sign up to receive email notifications about Deanna's new work and where it's showing