Paul Klee famously said: “Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.” He seems to have meant that art does (or should) not reproduce what we see, but, rather, that it manufactures what we see. Under this interpretation, a painting is not a sort of mechanism that captures and displays existing visible data, but an engine to create a way of looking.

Thus, art does not reproduce the visible—what is commonly seen—but makes visible—what commonly is not seen, but which the artist has intuited in his or her own uncommon seeing, and makes visible to us.