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Mathematics is an Art

Abstraction. Modern Mathematics is all about abstraction. Abstraction, at its heart, is selective ignorance. That is, faced with something, whether a problem to be solved, or something else, we want to know:

1. What we need to pay attention to; and importantly
2. What we can ignore. By ignoring everything that we can ignore, we simplify the problem. The more we ignore, the simpler the problem becomes. When learning to draw, we are often taught about negative space. This is similar in some senses. By trying to draw everything but what you intend to draw, you can more easily focus on only the shape, whereas if you try to focus on drawing, say a person, if you focus on the person, then you are distracted by their face, by their clothes, by the expression on their face.