“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 would 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.” Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit (Eye and Mind), 1961, p. 296
“It’s a difficult idea to grasp„ but that is my aesthetic problem — a painting without beginning or end.” Verheyen, interview, 1973, p. 7
World — Sensibility — Silence “The painter ‘takes his body with him’, says Valéry. Indeed, we cannot imagine how a mind can paint. It is by lending his body that the artist changes the world into works of art”. Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit (Eye and Mind), 1961, p. 294
“An artist is only a receptacle for sensations, a brain, a recording device. Damn it, a good machine, but fragile and complex, especially where others are concerned.” Conversations with Cézanne, Gasquet, “What He Told Me …”, 1912/1913, p. 111
“To abandon objectivity, to adopt a colour as your own — in other words to become a colour — is a powerful reminder of how it feels to be in a state of trance. After a while, you are enveloped by colour; then the whole thing goes into reverse, exterior space becomes interior space, and you can no longer distinguish the single dimensions. Everything becomes transparent and, in the silence that surrounds, you are ready to receive.” Verheyen, Farbsehen / Farbsinn (Seeing Colour, Sensing Colour), 1968
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