Temperance

Artist: Deanna Schuerbeke

Format: Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 56" × 40"

Description:
Painted in Santa Fe, Temperance is one of Deanna Schuerbeke's most personally revealing works. She describes thinking about the difficulty of managing emotion — the active, ongoing effort of restraint, of choosing not to follow anxiety and fear into the dark. "The warm peach and blush hold steady," she says, "against a dark line of green, blue, and maroon at the top — doing your best to hold fast." Temperance, by definition, is moderation in action, thought, and feeling. This painting is what that looks like from the inside.

The canvas is top-heavy with darkness — a dense band of teal, black, and deep maroon pressing down from above. But the burgundy at its lower edge softens as it descends, bleeding gradually into the warm peach and blush that hold the center and lower register of the composition. These are the colors Schuerbeke returns to across her body of work when she is painting well-being — and here they are not passive. They hold. In the middle of that warm field, a dark circular rush of marks interrupts — contained, brief, self-enclosed. The darkness makes a second appearance, but it does not expand. It is acknowledged and then surrounded by the warmth on every side. At the bottom of the canvas, small passages of bright sky blue appear — not announced, not emphasized, simply present. Hope that has been allowed to exist.

Temperance asks something of the person standing in front of it. Schuerbeke has exposed her own practice of choosing light over darkness — not by denying the darkness exists, but by refusing to let it define the composition. The question the painting poses is a simple and searching one: when the darkness presses in on you, which color do you choose to hold?

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