BIO
Cheryl Juracich (b. 1986) is an American painter whose work moves between memory, myth, and the quiet rituals of everyday life. From an early age, she was drawn to watching people—how they inhabit time, how gestures repeat across generations, how small private moments become the archival material of nostalgia. This instinct sits at the center of her practice today.
Cheryl became a mother at sixteen, an experience that marked the beginning of her deeper interior life. Painting offered both refuge and revelation: a space to understand herself, her lineage, and the patterns of resilience that shaped the last century of her family’s history. Over time, this devotion to looking closely at the body, at light, at memory has become the foundation of her work.
She earned her BFA in Painting from Arizona State University in 2014 and, in 2021, left her job to commit fully to her studio practice. She now lives and works in Prescott, Arizona.
THE WORK
Cheryl’s current body of work grew out of an early fascination with vernacular photographs—uncurated, unguarded moments captured without an awareness of their future significance. These images became a portal. In them, she recognized familiar inheritances, reminders that personal experience is never isolated but part of a larger, ongoing human rhythm.
Her paintings merge this archival sensibility with a luminous, fractured approach to light and color. Edges blur, time folds, and scenes feel suspended somewhere between lived memory and imagined recollection. Rather than pursuing exactness, she leans toward suggestion. Imperfection becomes a record of movement, a reminder that everything in respect to identity, environment, and history is in continual flux.
The visual language that has emerged is dreamlike, nostalgic, and psychologically charged. Cheryl’s work seeks to dissolve strict dualities and reveal the sacred within ordinary moments: a hand in sunlight, a quiet internal gaze, an open window.
By weaving together multiple eras and emotional terrains, her paintings invite viewers into a kind of temporal conversation; one where the past hums beneath the present, and where the future feels tethered by the traces we leave behind.
For more about my process, philosophy, and current events, follow me on instagram @_spellbreaker_
Photo credit: Morgan Leiberman. 2024.