About all in it together

In this painting I have tried express how life on our planet is interconnected, like a tapestry or a beautiful knotted carpet. Remove one element and everything else is diminished.

I wondered for ages how in a single painting I might show the richness and order of the nature, everything all tangled up together in one glorious biodiverse web of life. It wasn’t until I was reminded of the richness of native British art by Waldemar Januszczak  on his TV series about The Dark Ages, that I found an obvious way of expressing this. I would put it all together in a celtic knot. Easy!

Among those items shown you’ll find a cecropia moth, a dandelion seed, a leopard gecko, a tiger, a whale shark, a mudskipper, and the marvellous double helix of a strand of DNA. Seemingly random, but we are all connected.

In the true spirit of illuminated manuscripts from the Dark Ages, I have painted in a couple of legends in Latin. But you’ll have to work out for yourselves what they mean.