"Theory of Evolution," describes my intuitive understanding of the origin of life by illustrating the evolutionary "unfolding" of an organism. I've added a spark of supernatural light behind it.
My fascination with Evolution is fairly simple: I like watching my paintings evolve, I like "watching" thoughts evolve, and I can see a correlation between natural history and the "history" of a thought. Thoughts take time, paintings take time and Evolution takes time. All of time and everything in it can be seen as a series of interwoven ideas. No single mind possesses these ideas, no mind could encompass such an immense complexity of endless seconds and hours, then years, of countless organisms living and dying. But we would like to see one there, all-encompassing. It is necessary for us to relate to the incomprehensible in this way. God is the singularity factor.
What is the significance of a species having the collective "will"; the coherence, and efficiency to live out the eternity of days it would require for even the smallest evolutionary change to take place. How do you begin to conceptualize the endless intricacies and daily concerns had by the countless beings (human and microbe alike) that have ridden this planet around its star the billions of times it has taken to arrive at this moment?
Here's an eloquent statement by geologist John Parkes:
[A single generation of] "Microbes [still] living under the seafloor today may have survived the growth and splintering of continents, the opening and closing of oceans; they may have been buried, subducted, frozen in hydrate, and spat out of a mud volcano, only to be buried, subducted, and spat out again. While we were waiting for our evolutionary fast lane to be paved, racing through all of human prehistory and history in the time it takes one of them to divide once, they have been living in time with the planet's deepest, slowest rhythms. They have been living almost like rock, which is precisely what made them so easy to miss. They have always been there, from the deepest past, but only now have they finally penetrated into our awareness. Given their collective influence, it's about time."
In this way I can imagine Evolution as a curious byproduct of life's energy. Something intricately woven into daily existence, barely perceptible. Time itself is the mysterious "supernatural" ingredient, and unlike the microbes on the ocean floor, our own lifespans allow just a very tiny taste of it. But what we lack in our experiential relationship to time, we gain by our ability to think, and record our thoughts. Over the centuries we weave together comprehension; a thread of cognitive history that we can share before it flashes out. Scientific understanding allows me to think of the stars in the night sky as great bodies of plasma consumed with nuclear fusion. I can observe their light as history; light that's been traveling in most cases for hundreds of years, in some cases all that's left of a massive inferno long exinguished.
Art can touch all this; capturing the essence of a moment in a life; through shapes, lines, color, sound, movement -- a moment to peek at from a future perspective. So I imagine that as I continue this particular creative thread over the years, I will be participating in Evolution.