The Wave Changes Shape, The Water Remains: Remembering Cedric Egeli
A couple of days ago, I learned that one of my beloved painting teachers, Cedric Egeli, had passed away.
I've been thinking about that sentence, "Passed away". There is something so final in those words, and yet I am not certain that finality is what I feel.
Cedric was one of my teachers. That is true. But somehow, Cedric IS my teacher too.
I have felt this same mystery since losing my dear friend and longtime studio mate, Camille. I still think of her nearly every day, and her influence is deeply embedded in my life and work.
Cedric occupies a different place in my heart and history. He was my teacher during an earlier, formative chapter in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet what he gave me has endured across the years... his knowledge, his generosity, his way of seeing, and the lessons that became part of the painter I am. A true genius.
The people who profoundly shape us do not remain neatly in the past. So, when I write that Cedric was my teacher, I mean it as a factual truth. But he still IS.
I studied with Cedric and his wife, Joanette, for several years. They were both students of Henry Hensche, and through them I became part of an artistic lineage that was never simply about learning how to paint an object, a landscape, or a person. It was about learning how to see. To truly see.
To observe color relationships and to notice the temperature of light. To recognize how one color changes because of the color beside it. To become observant enough to let nature reveal what is actually there, rather than painting what the intellect assumes should be there.
Those lessons forever changed me.
I remember a month I spent studying with Cedric and Joanette in Edgewater, Maryland, in January of 2002. It was winter, and there was something wonderful about the intimacy of those days: the studio, the conversations, the rhythm of working, watching, questioning, and learning. There were ordinary moments too, the kinds of details that become unexpectedly precious with time: coffee, laughter, the quiet routines surrounding the work.
At the time, I thought I was learning to become a better painter. Only years later do we sometimes understand that our teachers were giving us something much larger. They were teaching us how to pay attention. And attention, I have come to believe, is one of the purest forms of love. Recently, I have found myself thinking a great deal about the idea of Oneness and the possibility that our separateness from one another may not be quite as absolute as it appears.
Cedric’s passing has brought that question closer to the surface for me. We tend to imagine a human life as having clear boundaries. A person is born into their human suit. They live their life. And someday that life ends. Biologically, of course, this is true. But relationally? Artistically? Spiritually? I am no longer sure where those boundaries are.
Cedric learned from those who came before him. He absorbed their teachings through his own remarkable perception and experience. He shaped new ways to express that knowledge. Then he passed some of that wisdom to Joanette, his children, his students, me, and countless others. And every time one of us carries those lessons to the easel, something continues.
Perhaps I stand one morning outdoors and notice a cool violet plane turning beneath warm sunlight because someone once taught me to look for relationships rather than objects.
Perhaps I place a note of color differently because Cedric once said something in a studio many years ago. Perhaps a student watches me paint someday and begins to see light differently because of something I learned from him. And perhaps that student will someday pass it to someone else.
Where, then, did Cedric’s influence end? I cannot find the edge of it. It reminds me of "The Butterfly Effect"— the idea that even the smallest action may travel outward through the world in ways we can never fully trace.
A kindness changes someone’s afternoon. That person goes home softer. They speak differently to someone they love. That person carries the feeling elsewhere. One moment becomes another, and another, and eventually we lose sight of the original source.
Teaching works this way too. We know love does... So, a life does.
I keep returning to an image: an ocean filled with waves. For a little while, each wave has its own shape. Its own direction. Its own height and rhythm. We name it and recognize it as something distinct. And yet it was never separate from the ocean... It was water all along.
I think human beings are like that. Individual, certainly. Precious in our individuality. And yet somehow participating in something much larger than the boundaries of a single life.
Cedric remains in the paintings he created.
He remains in Joanette.
He remains in his family and friends.
He remains in the artists he taught.
He remains in the way some of us look at a patch of sunlight falling across a face or a landscape and understand that the color is never simply what we think it is.
He remains in the discipline of looking.
In curiosity.
In generosity.
In the passing of knowledge from one human being to another.
And perhaps that is why I hesitate to write that Cedric was a wise and giving soul.
He was... But in another sense, he still IS. The form has changed. The influence has not.
Grief makes absence feel very sharp. There is an empty space where a person once stood, and no spiritual idea should ask us to pretend that absence does not hurt. But alongside grief there can sometimes be another realization. Someone can be gone and still be here.
Not in the way we would wish. Not in the way that allows another conversation or another afternoon together in the studio. But a part of us. Their words. Their gestures. Their humor. Their way of seeing. Their kindness. The things they taught us without ever realizing we would still be carrying them decades later.
Lately, I have been asking myself a simple question: Did I bring love into the world today?
I think about that now when I think about Cedric.
A teacher who freely gives what he has learned sends something forward that may travel far beyond his own lifetime. He changes people who may eventually change people he will never meet. What a beautiful form of generosity that is.
And perhaps this is one small glimpse of what Oneness means. Not necessarily something abstract or mystical. Perhaps it can be found in something as ordinary as one human being teaching another how to see.
Cedric, thank you.
Thank you for your generosity, your wisdom, your patience, and your willingness to pass along what had been given to you.
Thank you for helping me see. I will carry that forward, as will so many others you have taught.
The wave changes shape, yet the water remains.
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