A Tangled Bank is an ongoing series inspired by the work of Charles Darwin, specifically this (edited) last paragraph of his great work, On the Origin of Species (1860 edition). The five paintings below are the first in the series.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us… Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

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A Tangled Bank: Duet, 2015
Gouache on paper, 8″ x 8″

 

A Tangled Bank: The Bramble, 2015
Gouache on paper

 

A Tangled Bank: Waterlily, 2015
Gouache on paper

 

• A Tangled Bank: Kingfisher, 2015
Gouache on paper, 8″ x 8″

 

A Tangled Bank: Monkey, 2015
Gouache on paper, 8″ x 8″