Searching

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 40" × 40"

Description:
Searching took Second Place at the Oregon Art Center's juried exhibition Leaning into Abstraction in July 2026 — and standing in front of it, you understand why immediately. Schuerbeke describes waking in the night with the feeling of having lost something, not knowing what, not knowing where to begin. "Color is pulled in every direction at once," she says, "with red scribbles cutting through." The painting does not illustrate that feeling. It reproduces it.

What stops you is the technical restlessness. This is a canvas that cannot settle on a single mark-making language — and that inability to settle is the point. Broad black strokes sweep vertically with full-arm authority. Red lines scribble across the surface in a gesture more crayon than brush, urgent and slightly frantic. Dry-brushed brown passages reveal every individual hair of the brush, delicate and searching in their own right. Bold green blocks assert themselves alongside soft gray passages that barely arrive before dissolving. No single technique dominates. The hand itself is searching — moving through method after method the way the mind moves through possibilities at 3am, trying each one, committing to none.

And yet the painting holds. The reds and blacks — scattered across the canvas in every register and scale — function as anchors, returning the eye to itself each time it begins to feel lost. The composition does not resolve, but it does not unravel either. Searching captures something precise and rarely named: the state of looking for something you cannot yet identify, fully awake but not afraid, driven but not frantic. You are searching. But you are not lost.

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