Cheri Carandanis is a Portland-based abstract painter and mixed media artist whose work explores the tension between rupture and repair. A former U.S. Air Force critical care nurse, she spent 25 years in medicine before a traumatic brain injury in 2019 abruptly ended her career and redirected her life toward the studio.

Working with layered surfaces, bold mark-making, and intuitive composition, Carandanis creates paintings that balance structure and disruption, energy and stillness. Her background in high-stakes medical environments informs her sensitivity to fragility, resilience, and the unseen emotional landscapes people carry. Rather than offering resolution, her work invites reflection, holding space for complexity, contradiction, and transformation.

Carandanis lives and works in the Portland, Oregon area, where she continues to build a body of work rooted in honesty, presence, and the belief that beauty and fracture can coexist on the same surface.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Art found me when my life split open.

In 2019, a brain injury ended my 25-year nursing career overnight. The role that had defined me vanished, and the part of my brain wired for logic and clinical precision was damaged. I went from healer to patient, from certainty to disorientation. What remained was a blank space, and eventually, a brush.

Painting became a way back into my body. Back into meaning. What began as survival turned into a language. My work lives in the tension between rupture and repair, grief and gratitude, control and surrender. Each piece is a record of that collision, where structure meets instinct and something sacred breaks through.

I paint intuitively, allowing marks to build, interrupt, and resolve. The process mirrors how healing actually happens, not in straight lines, but in layers, disruptions, and unexpected moments of grace. My background in medicine still lives in the work. I am attentive to what hurts, what holds, what wants to be seen. I just use paint instead of a chart.

Viewers often describe the paintings as both alive and grounding, energetic yet contemplative. That duality is intentional. I am interested in creating spaces where contradiction can exist without being resolved too quickly. Where beauty and fracture can share the same surface.

I no longer heal in a hospital. I build places for reflection, for honesty, for quiet recognition. These paintings are not about fixing what is broken. They are about honoring what remains, and discovering what can still emerge.