What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object.
Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.
People think of art and science as being fundamentally opposed to each other, because art is about celebrating individual human creativity, and science is about discovering general principles, not about individual people. But in fact, the two have a lot in common, and the creative spirit is similar in both.
You cant just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.
