In a recent profile, The New Yorker declared Dana Schutz, formerly of Michigan but now a painter based in New York, the "most exciting painter" in the city.  Looking at her work, it's not difficult to see why.  Consider the painting, "Fight in an Elevator," below. Although at first it appears to be no more than a mish mash of shape and color, when we look at it closely, we see that amidst its seeming chaos it is presenting more than visual image; it is grounding a story.  It is offering a starting point.  Schutz says that her work represents metanarratives, stories containing many stories, stories that explain smaller stories, stories that hold disparate narratives together.  Because metanarratives explain and frame multiple stories, they help us make sense of the bigger picture of reality and truth.  They also help us develop our own stories more fully.
     Hence, when we look at this painting, we are looking at our possibilities.  We are looking at what can be.  We are touching our human potential.  Yet what I find most exciting about this painting, as chaotic as it seems to be, is that it reminds me that, as most creation stories attest, before there was order, there was chaos.  But as the Genesis (as well as the Theogony) account make clear, although "the earth was formless and void" (or "chaos reigned"), the "spirit of God hovered over the waters" ("and chaos gave way'").  "Fight in an Elevator" tells us that however uncontrollable life seems to be, because the universe has been formed with intelligence and system, sensibility will eventually prevail.
     And we enjoy its fruits ever day, the fruits of an intelligible divine.