Château Noir by Paul Cezanne

Merleau-Ponty discussing Valéry’s and Cézanne’s reflections on the activity of oil painting: 

“The painter ‘takes his body with him,' says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint.  It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings...  ‘Nature is on the inside,’ says Cézanne.  Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.  Things have an internal equivalent in me...  I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at.  For I do not look at it as I look at a thing; I do not fix it in its place.  My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being.  It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it.  Rather than looking at it, I enter into an interplay with it.  In so doing, I begin to look beyond it or through it to see other things in my world in its light; it can become, one could say, a guiding or directing agency in my looking; it gives me a new and unique way of looking.  I look at other things now with it as my guide.  This is not to say that I see other things by following its contours, but I see them in accord with the same invisible anticipations it responsively arouses in me.  Thus, as (G.) Steiner suggests, “the streets of our cities are different after Balzac and Dickens. Summer nights, notably to the south, have changed with Van Gogh...  It is no indulgent fantasy to say that cypresses are on fire since Van Gogh or that aqueducts wear-walking shoes after Paul Klee”.

this passage found in the essay titled: 

Goethe and the Refiguring of Intellectual Inquiry:

From ‘Aboutness’-Thinking to ‘Withness’-Thinking in Everyday Life

by John Shotter

Janus Head 8

http://www.janushead.org/8-1/Shotter.pdf