Our Story

CHAOS IN COLOR, where the cats are alive and the people are not.

Our passion is to inspire joy in a world filled with chaos.  We do this by designing darkly uplifting decor for your personal space.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Chaos in Color is the work of one person, contemporary artist AV Dunn.

Being a night owl who grew up across the street from an old small-town cemetery, Annie's paintings reflect the dark from a cheerfully macabre point of view. She has, in a way, become reacquainted with her childhood love of writing spooky stories, except this time with images instead of words.

While stumbling through a number of other careers, the urge to draw was always there.  Like a cat who is ready to receive pets, it respected no boundaries.

Somewhere around 1985, well before personal computers were an everyday thing, Annie fell in love with the combination of art and technology.  It was an uphill battle at the time, but this early influence made digital painting a natural choice for her medium.  She took it up formally in 2003.

Most of her paintings feature skeletons who don't know they're dead, and cats just being themselves.  Cats and skeletons are, she says, her two favorite kinds of people, and that's why they are her primary characters.  With no existing genre to accurately categorize her work, she describes it as gleefully existential.

Annie was born vision impaired, and her bold style reflects this. She also puts an emphasis on the eyes of her subjects and even includes eyeballs as subjects in their own right.

Although public sightings are rare, Annie is rumored to live with her partner and a clowder of cats in the suburbs of Phoenix Arizona.  In her down time she enjoys spending time with cats, listening to post-apocalyptic audio books, grandiose music, and a steady feed of science.

ARTIST STATEMENT 

Finding Joy in Chaos

As an artist I want to depict joy under chaotic circumstances. To me that's an accurate description of reality, the coexistence of these two things.  Our biases though can make us see only one side.  We have to make an effort to see the whole.

Beauty, humor, color, and nature are all experiences that inspire our endorphins, and my paintings rely heavily on these elements.  To create something even more meaningful I'll add a dose of mortality.  This is like vanitas or memento mori but without all the doom and gloom.  In most cases the cats represent joy and the skeletons represent chaos, but sometimes they switch roles.  Life is funny like that.

In the spirit of impermanence, I give my artwork a chance to make a ripple in our collective culture, and then I retire it to the archive.  If it manages to make an impact on my fellow mortals, then maybe those ripples will continue for a little while longer.  Either way the artwork will have served its purpose in giving me a fleeting sense of accomplishment.

I'm no expert on happiness, I've searched for it as much as anyone else.  But I think my artwork can remind people to seek out joy amid the chaos, and when it does, I hope that they will in turn want to help me create more of it.

ART PROCESS

While many of my designs start as ball-point pen gestures, I am at heart a digital painter.  After drawing an initial sketch I paint freehand using a Wacom tablet and pressure sensitive stylus connected to a computer workstation.  My primary software tool is Corel Painter, with some additional adjustments made in Photoshop.  Some of my paintings take only a few days to create, but the more complex pieces can take more than a month.  Prints are produced in limited editions using high quality archival materials.

AVAILABILITY 

New artwork is published in digital format on Patreon, with selected pieces being offered in print at ChaosInColor.com.  We also make appearances at a limited number of live events.  Subscribe to our newsletter for announcements about upcoming events. 

You can support the making of more Chaos by purchasing prints or by subscribing for digital content. 

GIVING BACK  

Chaos in Color is a sponsor of the Cow Cats Pet Adoption Center.