Painter and Viewer: A Shared 'Vision'

In his essay “Eye and Mind,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows us how painting exhibits a way of viewing and perceiving the world that is more representative of our existence than science is able to explain away.  An artist, as opposed to the scientist who sees each element with which we interact as an object to be examined, is open to different perceptions, becoming more immersed in his surroundings rather than sitting at a distant position of observation.  When the artist perceives, he does not simply filter in information; he is conscious of a connectivity between his observations, his perception, and the essence of his environment without the burden of having to explain what he perceives: “With no other technique than what his eyes and hands discover in seeing and painting, [the painter] persists in drawing from the world, with its din of history’s glories and scandals, canvases which will hardly add to the angers or the hopes of man—and no one complains” (161).  His "drawing of the world" produces no new knowledge or argument, only a vision, which is what makes the painting representative of experience.

If the painter is a perceiver who observes elements of this world as both subject and object, creating through painting both the real (what he sees) and the imagined (how he sees), how can his vision be illustrative of “our world(s)”?  If the painter’s way of viewing and interacting with the world is more representative of our existence than is science, how do we account for the artist’s personal, bodily, individual knowledge, his unique relation to the object/subject, in his own unveiling of his vision?  I ask this because if there is truly an “undividedness of the sensing and the sensed” (163), then a new question arises: what do we make of the viewer of paintings or art? 

One might say that the “sensing” occurs during the painting of the “sensed” and is therefore embedded within it as an inherent part of its “Being.”  If this were true, then the viewer would be able to take part in the painting and in the artist’s vision, making the painting representative of "our world."  But how often do you feel like you understand, experience, or truly “see” a painting?  Merleau-Ponty writes, “Since things and my body are made up of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility [or ability to be ‘seen’] must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility” (164, my italics).  My body is different from another’s body, and my perceptions and, as we have established, my “world” are different from others’.  Perhaps this is what Merleau-Ponty meant by “a secret visibility.” 

A painting or piece of art is perfectly representative of experience (understood as the joining of perception, Being, and action), but only of the artist’s experience.  He is privileged in his ability of represent his world since he does not have to, nor would he be able to, explain it.  The painter, Being in space and perceiving the visible, forms a vision and expresses this vision through the elements of painting – line, color, depth, form – unveiling “a secret of preexistence” (182).  It is this very perfect, unique vision, “[t]his internal animation, this radiation of the visible” that “the painter seeks under the name of depth, of space, of color” (182).  The viewer, then, may participate in the artist’s vision, perceiving it as the artist does.  What he misses out on is that moment of vision, the artist’s position or situation within his own world that gave rise to the particular vision, the very elements of the creative process that viewers and critics so often make a science of determining.  The painting is the artist’s expression of Being, and while we, as viewers, may partake in his vision, his Being is his own.