Subsumed under the virtue of rationality are supporting virtues - honesty, independence, justice and integrity...

In order to practice rationality, there must be independence in thinking and acting - indeed, independent thinking is a redundancy.. independence is the freedom from influence, guidance and control of others... "it means one's acceptance of the responsibility for forming one's own judgments and of living by the works of one's own mind"... independence is a prerequsite for creating - and this refers not only to the artist doing the rendering itself but moreso what is shown within the rendering...... thinking for oneself involves making decisions on composing that may seem viable to the artist but 'goes against perceived wisdom' at times - but that, if properly thought out, is the act of creation, of giving a visual to an ordering of values held by the artist that may or may not have been noticed before by anyone else, thus enriching all by the enlarging of the metaphoric relationships newly discovered...... further, it recognises that while there are logical inferences about arrangings in compositions, there are always exceptions and as such the validity as consequence of acting on one's own thinking of 'breaking the rules', not in any haphazard manner but as the logical or noncontradictory identifying end result of that act of creating - and as such, a conscious decision quite able of being explained....

How, then, does the virtue of rationality pertain to the spirituality of visualizing? The first thing to note is that the spirituality is in the valuing... within the four sides pf the artist's rendering comprises the "universe" of the composition, and the first to be asked and answered is - ratiomal or irrational universe.... extending this is the issue of application of the rational to the rational universe - in what among the constituents are to be of use for the furtherence of one's wellbeing as visualized.... is the landscape, for instance, "just" there, or is it controlled, delineated to purpose, or in process thereof - the wild field vs the planned garden, for instance, or the envision of nature [as in a Japanese Garden] or the "chaos" of nature, or the confinement of nature [as in an English Garden]..... in some respects, this seems as if repeating what has been said earlier, but the emphasis here is not epistemological but ethical - spiritual, providing the actioning of a value, the value of reason, the virtue of rationality.....

Taking a step in a different, tho related direction, am now going to go over the virtues listed as applications of the values primary to the flourishing of a person.. a virtue, it should be understood, is consists of recognising facts, and acting on them.. rationality is the prime virtue, from which all the others are derived.... it is the acting on the value of reason, thereby extending the wellbeing of the individual and enlarging the sphere of influence on the world around... this is because reason is more than sensating and perceiving - it is frawing abstractions via conceptualizations and as such, instead of being as animals adapting to the enviroment around them as best as they can, alter the enviroment, shape the enviroment, to suit human needs, enhancing deliberately human flourishing beyond the mere animal level of adaptation..... when one's life then is given direction by reason, it is lived in a way that respects reality.... conversely, wickedness is seen as psychological breakdowns in reason marked by failure to respect reality....failure to think, to employ one's capacity for conceptualization, is an attempt to then act as if a different, lesser, organism....

As said, the first virtue is rationality.... in aesthetics, this is expressed thru one's "sense of life" - indeed, every artist expressed his/her philosophical view of the world thru, or rather, in a physical form... those who experience the artist's works respond so according to THEIR sense of life - the fundamental view of this is: rational or irrational..... rationality is the act of thinking, the foundational element of life, the act of using your ability to reason.... "rationality is the virtue of recognition ans acception of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values, one's only guide to action"..... "thinking is an actively sustained process of identifying one's impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one's perceptual material, and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions, and discovering new answers and expanding one's knowledge into an ever-growing sum"....

"The Birthing Tree" goes further in transition - not only are the islets of the sea now replaced by islets on tops of mounds among rock canyons, it has become a part of a series... the series in mind, tho, is not one of several variations, but as part of a continual viewing of a landscape, culminating in a 360 degree imagined landscape.... each part a work standing on its own, yet together comprising the viewing... moreover, there would/will be time-of-day differences among them, as well as seasonal differences, and as well as the issue of color - each depending on the merits of the individual works themselves.... for instance, an old and lost work, one done on canvasboard many years ago, "Cornered Stone" is to be the work to the left of "Birthing Tree", and the three parts which will comprise "Rite of Spring" may well be those to the right of "Birthing Tree".... this way, can comprise theming more easily and revive old works with new materials and updated vision......