Coming Down

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 60" × 40"

Description:
Coming Down belongs to Schuerbeke's Childhood Memories of Place series — work drawn from the most formative textures of growing up on the Canadian prairies. Her family was often flooded out of their home. She describes the aftermath as "both exciting and horrific" — and then, after everything, the particular quality of silence that follows something big. This painting lives in that aftermath. Not in the disaster. In the coming down from it.

The eye enters through two diagonal swaths of deep navy — bold, directional, descending like a staircase from upper right to lower left — and is immediately pulled downward. There is no resisting the movement. Against a warm peach ground, three passages of rust and red punctuate the vertical axis of the canvas: the events themselves, vivid and full-bodied, each one shadowed and connected by those contrasting navy sweeps that usher the eye past them and onward, always downward, always settling. The complementary tension between rust and teal is not conflict here. It is resolution in motion — two forces that have exhausted their opposition and are learning, slowly, to occupy the same space.

The warmth of this painting is its most important quality and the one that arrives before analysis. The peach ground holds everything — the excitement, the horror, the navy descent — in a light that feels like late afternoon after the water has receded. "Rust and teal settle into each other after a lot of movement," Schuerbeke says. The eye exits the canvas at the lower right, grounded, quieted, exactly as she intended. Coming down is not falling. It is arriving.

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