Taking Flight

Taking Flight

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke
Format: Acrylic on Canvas
Dimensions: 60" × 50"

Description:
Deanna Schuerbeke was looking out over the summer sky from her studio in France when this painting arrived. "I just felt so light," she says, "and felt like my life as an artist was really starting to take off." The painting glows in response — a warm ground of peach, cream, and blush fills the canvas with the quality of late afternoon light, and against it curved strokes of coral, orange, and red lift and arc in short upward gestures: the visual rhythm of a flock rising, wings catching air, the collective decision to go.

But look closer at what is woven among those warm strokes: pure white. Not blended, not softened — applied boldly in the same curved horizontal gesture as the colors surrounding it, yet entirely itself. It is the lightest note in the palette and paradoxically the most grounded one. Where the corals and pinks suggest feeling, the white declares it. It does not float. It asserts.

This is what separates Taking Flight from a painting merely about lightness. Those white strokes are confidence — the steady note beneath the exhilaration, the quiet knowledge that what is happening is real. This is not the giddy feeling of a wish. This is the specific, grounded joy of something actually coming true.

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