Gertrude Stein once asked Henri Matisse if he looked at the tomato he was eating in a special, artistic way. Replied Matisse, "No, when I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently."

At some point in the painter’s creative process, a new sort of vision comes into play. The pictorial potential of the canvas intrudes on the visual reality of the scene. Mark Strand has said, “Painters hope for lucky accidents. Good painters create accidents for themselves. The canvas takes over ... assumes its own reality. The world is changed in favor of what’s going on in the picture. What I see is merely a starting place. Making art is not reproducing nature. I’m interested in the production of visual pleasure.”

. . . from The Painter’s Eye by Dale Keiger