When asked we typically agree that clouds are clouds and trees are trees and most of us presume that we are all seeing and experiencing the same thing. The artist sees beyond that.Children make association off-the-cuff, like when it rains and the little child imagines that the sun is crying. They aren’t totally programmed like we are. When you next experience rain, imagine the sun crying, feel the melancholy. We could say that the child’s association between rain and tears is the kind of association that is fundamental to artistic expression. The associations that the great artists have made may not be comprehended until after they have become part of our culture. Look at the first performance of Rite of Spring or the reaction of the Salon to the Impressionists.

Oscar Wild and Wikipedia say it better. … Oscar Wilde … opined in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. (His) philosophy holds that art sets the aesthetic principles by which people perceive life, and does not imitate life. What is found in life and nature is not what is really there, but is that which artists have taught people to find there, through art. Wilde posited this example; although there has been fog in London for centuries, one notices the beauty and wonder of the fog because “poets and painters have taught the loveliness of such effects…They did not exist till Art had invented them.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imitating_art