Abstract: When used by artists, manual interfaces for painterly rendering can yield very satisfying abstract transformations of images. Automatic techniques produce interesting paintings as well, but can only recast pictures in a different style without performing any abstraction. At best, information is removed uniformly across the image, without emphasizing the important content. We describe a new approach for the creation of painterly renderings that draws on a model of human perception and is driven by eye-tracking data. This approach can perform meaningful abstraction using this data, with the minimum interaction possible: the user need only look at the image for several seconds. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this interactive technique and compare it with a fully automatic approach.