The title of this painting echoes the vision that came unbidden one day in a meditative dream-state as I prepared for birth: a DNA-like ladder of evolution, appearing to me as the spine of an immense fish, climbing from fathomless depths up through the complexity of biology and consciousness, and ultimately beyond. There is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology stating, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," meaning that the development of an individual organism (ontogeny) reflects or repeats the evolutionary development of its species (phylogeny). There is something mesmerizing about this idea as an expecting mother, watching curiously on an app as the tiny illustrations of the little life inside progresses from a group of cells, to a grub with a bundle of nerves, to a tiny sea creature complete with tail and paddle-like limbs, to something familiarly human. Surely this must be what we looked like when we first crawled from the sea, so many eons ago. It is fascinating to ponder the similar parallels between the psychological development of the individual and the progression of mind over the course of our species, from early primates to philosophers.
I found these ideas rather difficult to capture in paint. So I re-imagined them here, where a bit of magical realism accompanies the bones of this prehistoric fish in his primordial sea of constellated stars and vast, evolutionary potential.