Eye and Mind

            In Eye and Mind, Ponty focuses on the painter’s effort in perceiving the world. A painter embodies the experience of the interaction between the body and its environment through vision. I would like to share with you this clip about an artist who gives lessons in drawing realistic scenes. This painting teacher begins by saying, “learning how to draw is learning how to see.” This statement is a central point in Ponty’s chapter Eye and Mind, Ponty argues that the painter is exploring this act of ‘seeing’ when he paints. The more the painter cares for the details which Ponty defines as light, color, and shadow…etc, the more his painting succeed in its examination for the act of ‘seeing’; this idea is also pointed out by the teacher in the clip who says that measuring and sighting techniques are essential for making your drawings more professional, The teacher ends up by saying “getting what you see onto a sheet of paper feels good!”. Reflecting what the painter sees on the sheet enables him if we borrow Ponty’s words to interact with “the thing that is in itself and that is not in itself” ie, with his phenomenal body and the environment around him. The proccess that include lending the painter himself to the world and the feel of being part of it enables him to explore it more and not seperating himself from it is the true action of painting,  That’s what would make the painter ‘feels good’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHyixGBjg_E&feature=related

In addition, I was confused by reading Ponty’s example of the fire “ lighting the fire that will not stop burning until some accident of the body will undo what no accident would have sufficed to do…” 164. Throughout the chapter he was speaking logically until I reached this part, I feel that I am reading a sentence from a medieval British play that I don’t understand, I wish if we explain it using another words in the class, but what I understood from this passage in general that there is an interaction between the vision and the body.