New Growth

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 50" × 50"

Description:
"Not a quiet painting," Deanna Schuerbeke says of New Growth, "but one that is filled with the joy of life." She tends a twenty-by-twenty-foot garden through spring and fall and describes watching it grow as something close to magic — grounding, peaceful, and perpetually astonishing. This painting is not a depiction of that garden. It is the feeling of standing inside it.

What stops you first is the sky — a wide, luminous field of blue-white occupying the upper half of the canvas, breathing and open where everything below is dense and layered. From that stillness the eye is drawn downward through a curved passage of pale light, a path through the middle of the composition that parts the color on either side the way a garden path parts the planting beds. Then the garden arrives: olive and hunter green in broad overlapping strokes, crimson, magenta, yellow, and cobalt built up until passages of the canvas carry genuine visual weight. At the lower edge the marks change register entirely — shorter, more directional, more individual. These are the stems. The eye catches them and follows them upward, the way the gaze moves through an actual garden, tracing one flower back to its stalk before losing it in the abundance of everything growing alongside it.

That Schuerbeke achieves foreground, midground, and sky — the sensation of looking through a space rather than at a surface — in a painting that contains no literal representation of any of it is a measure of what expressive abstraction can do at full power.

Want to learn more? 

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