Gravity

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Board

Dimensions: 40" × 40"

Description:
Gravity is Deanna Schuerbeke's ode to Joan Mitchell — the Abstract Expressionist painter whose sweeping, color-saturated canvases defined what emotional weight could look like when translated directly into paint. Schuerbeke is quick to note that her work looks nothing like Mitchell's. But the impulse is the same: to let color carry feeling without explanation, to trust that heaviness has its own visual logic. Here, that logic is gravity itself — the deep blue and red masses that pull everything toward the bottom of the canvas, the chaos that arrives with that kind of weight, and the surprising resolution that comes from accepting it.

The eye enters at the top and is immediately anchored. A large mass of teal dominates the upper left, its edges held in place by black strokes that tether it to the canvas like ballast. That mass is then echoed in a smaller patch of navy at center — which deposits the eye directly into a field of open white and soft yellow at the lower register, equal in scale to the teal above it. Heavy on top, atmospheric below. The pull is inevitable and the word for it is already in the title. Around this central axis, every element finds its diagonal counterpart: the bold red sweep of the upper right answered by a scribbled red passage at lower right; warm coral masses migrating downward and lightening in application as they descend; a violet note in the upper left balanced by a softer echo near the lower center. The canvas is a system of tethered weights, each one pulling and being pulled in equal measure.

The feeling is not oppression. It is groundedness — something as natural, as constant, and ultimately as reassuring as gravity itself.

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