My work sits on the edge of order and chaos. I walk that line, and typically fall from it a few times, throughout a long creative process. I intentionally start with a scene that makes me feel overwhelmed: dishes piled on the kitchen counter, a tumbledown mill spilling its archeological guts over the hillside, a poor dilapidated pickup truck with trash overflowing the broken tailgate. To sort through the mess in my head, I often start with a meticulously detailed sketch. As I draw, I pick up on the basic shapes and values that create an underlying structure beneath the clutter. Ironically, even chaos has a framework. There is, after all, a flat surface sitting beneath the dishes, a point at the top of the hill that the disembodied windows and doors and machinery tumble down from, the sun shining from a specific direction that glints on the edge of the trash can. These specific, crucial details help me recreate a sense of chaos that doesn’t just sit in a lump in the middle of the canvas, but spills outward, rumbles under my feet and sends me riding on a wave of brushstrokes and snippets of photographs. My hope is that you get caught in the avalanche, too.