On the simplest level, it was what an amazing place the world is. It is so easy to get cynical and sarcastic and ironic, and it is just an honest painting. Not to say that there aren't some pretty awful things in the world - look who is sitting in the White House - but it is still an amazing place. The flash of inspiration for the whole painting came to me at the Natural History Museum in New York in the Hall of Biodiversity. Everything is all in one space - the whole range of life. We are so used to things being spread out in museums and seeing everything together - , it was so overwhelming, the diversity of life and how it came to be. That's really what it's about. There is a spiral of time through the painting. The timeline starts where the eye is, and spirals out to one-celled microscopic organisms. Life began in water, so you have one-celled organisms slowly becoming more complex. There's a very old prehistoric underwater scenario. Then there is a little fish leaving water - which was the big thing, when life left water and moved to the land. Then it spirals around from the real early dinosaurs and