Canal and Shadow Path

12x9 oil on mdf panel.

From The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram:  "To be sure, by disclosing the body itself as the very subject of awareness, Merleau-Ponty demolishes any hope that philosophy might eventually provide a complete picture of reality (for any such total account of 'what is' requires a mind or consciousness that stands somehow outside of existence, whether to compile the account or, finally, to receive and comprehend it).  Yet by this same move he opens, at last, the possibility of a truly authentic phenomenology, a philosophy which would strive, not to explain the world as if from outside, but to give voice to the world from our experienced situation within it, recalling us to our participation in the here-and-now, rejuvenating our sense of wonder at the fathomless things, events and powers that surround us on every hand."

Flowing Canal

Just when you thought that he can't do any more canal paintings... 9x12 on mdf panel.
You are probably right.

Canal Slice

9x12 oil on mdf panel of the canal.

Sorrento Entr'acte

A couple 9x12 oil paintings of Sorrento; top is Via Bartolomeo Capasso, and bottom is Marina della Lobra, from my visit last year.  A change of pace from the canals, though another is on the way.

Canal Sketching after Monet

The paintings I am working on are not ready, but here are two canal sketches from today's walk.   The rectangle is 8x10.

I have been reading the tome From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism (an inter-library loan).  One essay, "Monet on the Normandy Coast: Ecology and Vision" by Maria Grazia Messina, makes the case for Monet's Etretat and environs paintings reflecting his walking up and down steep paths and selecting uncommon views, in his effort to go beyond the customary depictions of the region done by earlier artists.  Monet would carry his gear for miles to paint a view, but he had earlier already made the trek with his sketchbook so he knew where he was going and what he wanted to see.

Four Canals

Here are four approaches to the canal: a 9x12 oil on panel, two 9x12 pastel drawings, and an 8x10 graphite drawing.  

Ronald Rolheiser writes in The Shattered Lantern, "G.K. Chesterton once commented that our perennial spiritual and psychological task is to learn to look at things familiar until they become unfamiliar again" [his paraphrase from The Everlasting Man, Rolheiser says].  The canal is getting stranger every day!

Beholding the Canal Eye

9x12 oil on mdf panel of the canal from the Grant Street bridge.

Brian McLaren writes about "beholding" in Naked Spirituality, "...the winter season beyond Perplexity begins with a kind of nakedness.  Naked trees. Frozen ponds.  Hibernation.  Starkness.  Long, dark, silent nights, and cold days blanketed in snow.  Autumn exhaustion leads now to winter's rest.  That chattering, hypervigilant consciousness--that first judged in Stage One, and then analyzed in Stage Two, and then deconstructed in State Three--now goes silent.  It takes a breath.  When we open our eyes in this space, we begin to see and know with the meditative mind.

What you look for determines what you see.  What you focus on determines what you miss.  The way you see determines what you are blind to and what you render invisible.  So this meditative kind of seeing accepts the limitations of earlier and noisier ways of seeing, and it practices, in their place, a new vision, a new beholding.  When we behold in this new way, we enter a second naivete."