Reckoning

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Canvas, Framed

Dimensions: 36" × 36"

Description:

Deanna Schuerbeke painted Reckoning during her 2025 residency in France — three weeks away from the life she had known, inside the life she had chosen. She describes it as an act of taking stock: of what she was leaving, what she was becoming, and what it felt like to stand honestly at that threshold. "Even if emotions get loud," she says, "there is still a center — one that is soft but solid." This painting is that center, and everything pressing against it.

The eye enters through the middle. A wide, luminous field of peach and white occupies the heart of the canvas — not empty, but open. It is here that Schuerbeke locates the tender vulnerability at the core of the piece: the paint softer in application, the strokes quieter, the surface almost skin-like in its warmth. It does not announce itself. It simply holds.

Around it, the edges are alive. To the upper left, broad red strokes slash diagonally — urgent, large-bodied, the mark of a full arm in motion. Beside them, tangled black lines coil and dart, smaller and more agitated, the visual equivalent of unresolved details circling back. On the right, vertical passages of yellow, teal, and burgundy stand in columns — not threatening but present, insistent, leaning in. At the lower register, a deep darkness pools, and out of it a single bright blue mark curves upward like a question not yet fully formed.

But not all of it presses with doubt. The broader strokes that move in long horizontal sweeps — some gently curving, unhurried in their passage across the canvas — carry an entirely different emotional register. Their very direction speaks of ease, of breath, of a body no longer braced against something. That these marks arrive in warm ochre, soft lavender, and open teal only deepens the feeling: vibrant and alive, but without urgency. These are the thoughts that arrive with wonder. The excitement of a future still being written.

Reckoning does not resolve. It holds the tension between vulnerability and possibility, between the noise at the edges and the quiet at the center, and asks you to sit with both. For anyone who has ever stood at the threshold of a life they chose on purpose, this painting will feel like recognition.

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