Vision is an active process, through which we, on the one hand, visually characterise and acquire information about our environment and, on the other hand, visually guide our actions. There are two strong arguments that urge us to consider vision as an active process: (i) the neural background of the process of vision is not a passive, “photographic” reflection of a visual scene in our brain, but instead an active processing of this incoming visual information that takes place in specialised neural circuits of the visual system; (ii) it is only a fraction of the stimulation that is present in a given moment in our field of view that is fully processed in our brain. The selection of the stimuli, which are to be processed in detail, is also an active process, served by the movement of our eyes as well as the movement of our mind’s eye, i.e., visual attention. Visual attention is an essential component of the theories of active vision. In this talk, the different types and neural mechanisms of visual attention will be examined, with a special emphasis on the task specific, volitional and stimulus driven mechanisms of attentional selection, as well as the interactions between them. During our analysis, we will point out those characteristics of visual attention that can be related to specific techniques and forms of expression used in the visual arts.