Confluence

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Canvas (unstretched — can be stretched to order)

Dimensions: 60" × 60"

Description:
"Sometimes everything starts to rush at you," Deanna Schuerbeke says of Confluence, "and there is not much you can do but let it happen." She painted this during her 2025 residency in France, digging deep — for what she says was not the first time — to trust that things would resolve in their own time. At sixty inches square, this painting does not ask you to observe from a safe distance. It asks you to stand inside it.

The first thing that stops you is not the color — though the color is everywhere, and it is everything. It is the drips. In the upper left, black paint was applied so fluidly that it ran, leaving long vertical trails descending the canvas, unchecked, unedited. The eye follows them down instinctively, then searches — almost anxiously — for their counterpart. The right side offers nothing. The disequilibrium holds until the gaze drops to the lower center and finds them again, balance restored in a place you did not expect. That small experience of disequilibrium followed by unexpected resolution is not accidental. It is the painting's argument made physical. Look closer still and the raw canvas reveals itself — no preparatory wash, no built-up ground. Unprepared. Unprotected. The brushstrokes tunnel directly into each other, each mark placed over the one beneath it without the safety net of accumulated layers. You feel it in your body before you can name it.

And yet the upper right holds: warm yellow, blush pink, cream pressing through the turbulence with quiet insistence. The chaos does not win. Confluence earns its resolution honestly — arriving, as Deanna says, in its own time.

Want to learn more? 

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

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